UK CIOs & CISOs Trade Security for Business Continuity

The Great British CommUnication Conundrum

In a brand‑new study from Tanium, it turns out that UK CIOs and CISOs are becoming the phantoms of cybersecurity – they’ve gone and left the big, shiny armor back at home.

Patch Panic Parade

84 % of the tech leads were skipping essential security updates because they feared it’d mess up business operations.
41 % have done this more than once— so basically, “I’ll wait until the coffee’s cold.”

Visibility: The Fog That Keeps Them Guessing

The research gathered 500 IT leaders from the UK, US, Germany, France, and Japan— all running 1,000+ employees. What did they find?

28 % of UK respondents report that departments work in silos, and you can’t see the whole network. Look, what’s on my server, and what’s on your laptop? Same question.
And because of this, a staggering 83 % have discovered that a “critical patch” didn’t actually hit every device. Oops! The business is still vulnerable.

Trade‑offs: IT vs. Business – An Ongoing Love Triangle

When asked about why they cut corners, 95 % of UK leaders admitted, “We’re forced to gamble.” The main reasons? Classic Venn‑diagram overlap.

35 % be pressured to keep the lights on (and the cake delivery system running).
31 % feel legacy commitments are holding their security ship in a rusted wreck.
30 % prioritize new systems, forgetting the old ones are still sunny.
28 % say incomplete data sets give them a “this is the corner we can’t fix” mindset.

The Internal Silos that Keep Shocks Miles Away

Half of the surveyed leaders (56 %) say their problem is other business units not caring about tech resilience. Yet almost half (47 %) simply lock their plans because they don’t factor in resilience. Sounds like a school project where only the maths teacher cares.

46 % worried about customer trust slipping due to those security compromises.
34 % fear data loss—because you never know when your cloud will decide to leave.
24 % admit that misrepresenting resilience could ruin stakeholder confidence.

Matt Ellard’s Take

“Tech leaders need to keep up with regulatory churn, secure sensitive data, track everything from laptops to the cloud, and make tech a growth accelerator,” says Matt Ellard, managing director, EMEA.

“But when environments are split up with point products, compromises happen all the time. We need a new way to gain real‑time visibility across distributed assets—so you can prevent, adapt, and react faster than a latte rush at a café.”