About one in three public sector IT professions have serious concerns about the impact of AI on security, new research from SolarWinds says.

Professionals in the public sector are especially concerned about data privacy and regulatory compliance.

Despite these concerns, about one in four are leveraging AI for automation, either for IT operational tasks or for IT observability, with this number only expected to increase.

Grievances about security risk and regulatory compliance, however, is hampering AI adoption across the public sector, the research said, which risks leaving the industry behind its private sector competitors.

Coupling this hesitancy with AI skills shortages and the difficulty of attracting AI talent to often lower-paid roles, the public sector could risk falling even further behind as AI advances.

The issue compounded the fact that only 6% described their digital transformation journey as fully complete, meaning that most public sector organisations still have a long way to go.

Less than half (40%) said they were beginning their implementation journeys, while the same amount said they were progressing in their efforts.

IT professionals noted budget constraints as one of the biggest barriers to improving their cybersecurity strategies, cited by a quarter of those in the survey.

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Internal environment complexity, competing priorities, and too few technical solutions were also cited as major struggles in the sector.

Common themes of concern and constraint were privacy and security, as well as systems integration complexity.

When it comes to security, about half (56%) of IT professionals were most concerned about untrained insiders, aka their fellow workers, while 55% were more concerned about external threats and cyber-criminals. About the same amount were more concerned about nation state threats.

This shows a lack of confidence in the sector’s own skills set, and the need for better security awareness.