Government Agencies' Top IT Concern is Protecting Confidential Information

The Government IT Challenges Survey results -- conducted by Lightspeed Systems at the Government Technology Conference in Albany, N.Y., and at the Government, Business, Education, and Technology Conference (GBET) in Los Angeles -- were released yesterday. Of the nearly 200 IT professionals who were asked which technology challenges were most critical to their agencies, nearly 80 percent said their toughest challenge is protecting confidential information.

While privacy, viruses, worms and offensive e-mail were identified as the main issues that threaten government agencies, the majority of respondents said they do not have a solution for these problems, indicating a critical need for sophisticated software management systems at government agencies.

When asked which technology challenges are most critical at their agency, the percentages of respondents who considered the following technology challenges to be critical, or somewhat critical are:

• 79 percent of respondents said they considered "Protecting Confidential/Sensitive Information" to be critical or somewhat critical to their organization.
• 76 percent of respondents said they considered "Viruses, Worms and Intrusion" to be critical or somewhat critical to their organization.
• 77 percent of respondents said they felt "Offensive E-mail and Spam" to be critical or somewhat critical to their organization.

"When gone unrecognized, IT issues such as privacy protection, system intrusion, offensive e-mail and spam considerably drain IT resources at government agencies, costing these institutions a tremendous amount of time and money," said Rob McCarthy, Lightspeed Systems' president. "And the survey indicates not many agencies have solutions in place."