As CIOs emerge into the new post-pandemic normal, they have a lot more money to spend. Here's what they're buying.
CIOs in 2022 are finally getting the budget increases they've long wanted. According to Gartner, average IT budgets will increase by 3.6% in 2022. Worldwide IT spending will be $4.4 trillion in 2022, a 4% increase from 2021. This it's the highest year-over-year growth rate most CIOs have seen in a decade, the company said.
“Contrary to what we saw in early 2020, CIOs are accelerating IT investments as they recognize the importance of flexibility and agility in responding to disruption. As a result, purchasing and investment preference will be focused on areas including analytics, cloud computing, seamless customer experiences and security,” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner.
To protect against future business disruptions like those that have occurred over the past two years, most CIOs are also investing in technologies that will make their organizations more agile, resilient and flexible.
Technologies that support digital transformation, such as AI/ML, secure access service edge (SASE) or Zero Trust, and edge computing are high priorities for CIOs in 2022, Gartner said. These preferences reflect long-term trends that have been in the making for many years. For many CIOs, the pandemic has simply accelerated cloud adoption, for example.
But hardware in the form of PCs, tablets, smartphones, monitors, WiFi routers, headphones, and other productivity tools are also popular items these days. The rush to send everyone home during the early days of the pandemic exposed a serious weakness in most business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plans.
No one predicted an event where all employees and contractors would need portable hardware and connectivity – all at the same time. Most CIOs were caught off guard, with many raiding their local Best Buys in search of the hardware they needed.
Spending on virtual private network (VPN) licenses soared during the early days of the pandemic — and these solutions are still in use. By some estimates, more than 60% of organizations have begun moving away from large CAPEX expenditures and toward OPEX spending in order to scale capabilities horizontally in support of remote workers.
Enabling hybrid workforce
Many CIOs are dedicating more budget to technologies that will ensure smooth continuity of operations if their workforces face another major disruption. They are also using this hardware to support hybrid work, where employees work from home at least part of the week.
According to InfoTech's 2022 CIO Priorities Report , only 15% of organizations will have all of their employees return to the office full-time this year, while 10% will remain fully remote and the remainder will manage some form of hybrid workforce.
Ninety-seven percent of respondents plan to invest in technology to facilitate better collaboration between employees by the end of 2022, the InfoTech survey found. Web conferencing tools, instant messaging and document collaboration are all on the CIO's top priority list.
PCs are back
The Ziff Davis-Spiceworks report, Hardware Trends in 2022 and Beyond found that laptops now rival PCs as employees' primary computing device. Forty percent of employees use laptops and 40% use desktops.
“On-premises and cloud infrastructure will coexist and become increasingly interoperable, enabling greater portability and flexibility that will benefit organizations in a hybrid world,” the study states.
Everything as a service
Another trend gaining traction is renting hardware as a service, rather than owning or renting it like you used to. Like other as-a-service purchases, hardware-as-a-service offers CIOs maximum flexibility with their spending.
In a recent Lenovo survey of 525 global CIOs, 63% said they are using more devices as a service in their technology stack. This model differs from traditional leasing because DaaS often comes with software, services and support, where leasing cannot.
Compared to CapEx expenses, OpEx is still growing as everything as a service continues to take up a larger portion of the overall IT budget. While CapEx is still the preferred method for purchasing new equipment, when organizations are introduced to the as-a-service model, even CapEx-conscious CIOs are turning to not owning and managing on-premises infrastructure.
Safety is still a priority
The purchase is heavily focused on security solutions. There is a strong appetite for managed services in general and especially for patching as organizations face compliance, network security and business continuity challenges. CapEx is still heavily favored for traditional buildings for disaster recovery and business continuity.
Many investments are still focused on upgrading and securing remote workers' home networks through Zero Trust network access or SASE solutions that integrate technologies such as cloud access security broker (CASB), firewall as a service (FWaaS), and antivirus protection. data loss (DLP). ) in a single solution.
“2022 is the year the future returns to the CIO,” Lovelock said in a press release about IT spending forecasts for 2022. “They are now in a position to move beyond the critical short-term projects of the last two years and focus on the long term. At the same time, employee skills gaps, wage inflation and the war for talent will lead CIOs to rely more on consultancies and managed services companies to pursue their digital strategies.”
Source: BairesDev
