In this article, Unleashed has looked at the recent Spiceworks report on the State of IT for 2016 and picked out the highlights for your perusal, to hopefully inform your IT strategy solutions for the coming year.

What do we think IT departments will be spending their money on in the next financial year?

  1. Despite most companies doing well in 2015 the IT Spend for 2016 will be pretty static.
  2. The move to reduce IT staff over the last few years will continue, this means you will need to more with less.
  3. Security attacks are on the rise, but your security budget will stay the same, meaning companies are not prone to invest in IT Security.
  4. EOL (End of life) technology will strongly influence what companies spend in 2016.

What hardware will you be spending your money on?

  1. 20% of your budget will be spend on Desktops making this the top for the second year running.
  2. 19% – Servers
  3. 16% – Laptops
  4. 10% – Networking
  5. 6% – External Storage
  6. 6% – Tablets and mobiles.

What software will you be buying?

  1. 15% – Virtualisation
  2. 15% – Operating Systems (i.e. Windows 2012)
  3. 15% – productivity software (i.e. Office 2016)
  4. 10% – CRM/ERP products
  5. 10% – Backup and DR
  6. 10% – Database software (i.e. SQL)
  7. 9% – Security

For those of you that outsource your IT services…

  1. 19% – IT Managed Services
  2. 14% – Connectivity (i.e. Internet)
  3. 13% – Hosting
  4. 13% – IT Consultancy
  5. 13% – Storage/Backup and Archiving
  6. 10% – Email and Collaboration
  7. 5% – Communications
  8. 4% – Mobile phones

Conclusions

Unleashed believe there are some interesting conclusions to be had from this report and if it’s is true to form then businesses are neglecting two very important factors. The first one is security; you ignore this at your peril. If you fail to invest then you will have problems. The second is on storage and backup. Data is growing at an alarming rate; you have to be prepared and budget accordingly or it will come back to bite you.

But one thing we do agree on in this report that the standard phrase throughout IT appears to be “if it aint broke, don’t fix it.”