Planning your next IT budget

5 min read

 Get IT Spend Right

Well, we’re a quarter of the way through 2017 and it’s usually around this time that many business owners and CIO’s are looking at what’s happening in the tech world and planning for the future. So what’s on the horizon for IT and what areas will get a share of next year’s budget?

Firstly, the good news is that overall budgets are expected to remain stable with many businesses indicating a slight increase both within and outside the IT organisation. This reflects the need to modernise many existing IT services, from OS systems to hardware.


Modernise existing IT systems

 

Overall, it appears that IT budgets will continue to be impacted by the ongoing migration from traditional on premise legacy systems to cloud-based solutions.

 

It seems to be one the key drivers that’s seeing more and more businesses realigning their budgets from capital expenditure on IT to a more OpEx based model.

 

With greater predictability of spend, it will see more downward pressure on data centre spending as enterprises build and run hybrid cloud environments. Pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into refreshing end-of-life servers just doesn’t make sense any longer, especially when Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications and cloud infrastructure offer a great deal more for substantially lower costs.

 


While many viewed cloud solutions with a great deal of scepticism in the late ‘Noughties’, those concerns have disappeared as they’ve been proven to be both secure and effective. This has seen less and less investment of late on physical data centre hardware and infrastructure.

 

And it seems businesses, large and small, are embracing the cloud. However, they’re also very conscious of the need to protect not just their own data, but their customers’ data as well. These concerns will see a greater share of IT spending going towards security.

 

In fact, many IT managers consider their organisations at some kind of risk, whether it be from technology, IT security, natural or man-made disasters and other incidents. A number of high-profile cyber attacks and IT outages has heightened these fears and will no doubt see many companies invest even more heavily in security measures, ranging from encryption and malware detection to disaster recovery.

For larger and more mature companies, there will be further consolidation and rationalisation of IT spend, particularly in areas such as external spend (outsourcing, service providers, etc.), as well as infrastructure and storage. That translates to increased funding for not only infrastructure-as-a-service, but also cloud security and disaster-recovery-as-a-service.

 

Multi-cloud adoption 

 

We think this year could be the breakthrough year of multi-cloud adoption and multi-cloud application management. As-a-Service providers have proven themselves in many areas, including cost saving, mobility, security and elasticity of cloud computing. This investment in SaaS products and cloud platforms will be also supported by additional spending on IT training and hiring new staff savvy with cloud integration.

 

Crystal-balling the future is never easy, especially with the rate of technological advancements happening at the moment. What’s your outlook and where do you think your IT budget should be spent?

 

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