We Know What You're Thinking! Early Results from the NWC Annual Survey

We're less than a week from closing out our annual Network Computing reader survey, and the responses have been fascinating so far. If you haven't answered our survey, you have until Aug. 10 to make your voice heard: just go to the survey page and cast your votes.

We've received input from a wide range of users: In fact, while 20 percent of the respondents come from companies with more than 10,000 employees, another 30 percent of the participants are from companies with fewer than 100 employees. A real cross-section of the industry.

So far, security seems to be the common theme in our reader feedback. Thirty-eight percent of readers have told us that "ensuring security of systems and data" is their top challenge for the coming year, making it the number one concern. "Controlling IT costs" is a close second, getting the vote from 37 percent of readers.

Some 44 percent of readers expect to experience at least some downtime in the coming year as a result of viruses and worms. And a significant number of users are in the midst of security-related technology projects, including security policy enforcement, authentication, application security, intrusion detection systems, encryption and security information management suites.

A complete recap and analysis of our annual survey results will appear in our Sept. 22 print edition. In the meantime, we'll provide occasional glimpses of the survey results in this blog section, so keep an eye out for further reports.