More than half of IT administrators at small businesses would not bet their own money that all of the computers their business owns and employees use are free of malware (51%) or that all are operating at peak efficiency and will not fail (59%), according to GFI Software.

Survey results also reveal that 51% of IT professionals spend at least 10 hours per month manually updating antivirus software on or removing malware from users’ PCs.

Key highlights from the survey include:

• 27% of IT admins say they are not running the same antivirus solution with the same license renewal date on all company PCs.
• One third (33%) do not have a centrally managed antivirus solution.
• Nearly half (48%) of IT admins report that they do not have the capability to see which PCs or servers on their network are about to fail. This number increases to 55% or more in organisations with fewer than 25 employees.
• 78% of respondents say they would be interested in a Web-based service that enables them to manage antivirus protection on company PCs.
• Nearly one third (28%) of respondents report that none of their IT applications are delivered via the cloud yet. An additional 28% say less than 25% of their total applications are cloud-based.
• According to respondents, top concerns about moving to cloud applications include: complexity and lack of in-house skills to implement (31%), third-party control over company solutions (28%), expense to implement (24%) and cloud security (24%).

According to survey respondents, if they no longer had to spend time manually managing antivirus software and identifying and repairing server and workstation failures, the most important IT tasks they would pursue include backing up data, files and systems; cleaning up database files, disks and servers; upgrading programs, software and hardware; developing, designing and maintaining company websites; and converting to cloud-based services.