Data may be pouring into enterprises but IT professionals still find most of it stuck in siloed departments and weeks away from being able to drive any valued action. Coupled with the ongoing concerns over security responsiveness, IT teams have to push aside other important performance-oriented data in order to ensure security data, at least, gets prominent attention. A new survey by Ivanti shows the disconnect between enterprise departments struggling to improve operations like automation while being challenged with a siloed structure and a data onslaught.

Survey findings from over 400 IT professionals showed that security remains the top priority (70%) in obtaining real-time actionable data. Other key priorities get secondary consideration as they suffer from siloed departments. Automation (46%), user productivity and troubleshooting (42%) and customer experience (41%) have to take a back seat as IT focuses attention on data that may indicate a critical risk. Additionally the survey found that application deployment takes IT teams the most time to perform, followed by backup and data protection.

Conversely, the survey found that onboarding/offboarding suffers the least (20%) due to siloes, an indication IT and HR have found a way to work far more closely with integrated goals.

Key findings of the report were:

■ Only 10% of respondents said the data they receive is actionable within minutes.

■ More than half of IT professionals (51%) report they have to work with their data for days, weeks or more, before it's actionable.

■ One in three respondents said they have the resources to act on their data but more than half (52%) said they only sometimes have the resources.

■ 15% of IT professionals say they have too many data sources to count.

■ 37% of professionals said they have about 11-25 different sources for data.

Siloed Organizations Slow Down Data Action and Performance

To improve performance, notably application deployment, automation and troubleshooting user productivity issues, IT professionals need a more unified approach when working across organizational departments and existing silos. Security remains a major data insights requirement, but it's also important to note that IT organizations need to find better ways to work with their data or it will continue to impact other critical IT priorities.

Organizations need to start erasing siloes and enabling IT teams to have more insight into departments. Better access to application data, for example, will help IT to use the data resources enterprises are paying for, and realize value from the investment.