The state of the I.T. budget union

Spiceworks just released their annual “2015 I.T. Budget Report” and some of the numbers and priorities mirror my own experience. Some highlights that spoke to me…

• Although organizations are earning more revenue than in years past, I.T. budgets are not seeing significant increases.

  I think a number of factors play into this – most notably, I.T.’s resourcefulness when faced with limited budgets. We’ve gotten really good at keep the ship afloat by “making do with what we’ve got.” The downside to this is that organizations have come to expect this to be the norm and aren’t seeing a need to increase budgets.Frankly, that’s I.T.’s fault – we need to be better at clearly articulating the need to review, upgrade and replace. To make our superiors buy in to the need to prevention instead of reaction is a key skill to develop.

• The biggest slice of the budget pie is planned for hardware upgrades, mostly due to EOL systems.

  Again: with I.T. having learned to do more with less, it’s not surprising to hear that there’s now a greater need to replace EOL systems.Breaking down those hardware purchases, I was surprised to see that desktops are top of the list, followed by servers and then laptops. Isn’t everybody on laptops, at this point?! I’m somewhat surprised to hear that desktop system are still so predominant that their purchases outweigh laptops, at this point.

• Cloud-based backup and recovery is a high priority in the “Cloud Services” category.

  I’d love to see some further detail on this one, specifically what services are under consideration and whether they’re focusing on desktop/laptop or server backup.

I’ll leave you with an actual pullquote from the report:

“… we still have about 50 XP machines out of 120. …we’re putting together another request for desktops that should push us fully into Win7.”

Yeesh.

See the full report here: Spiceworks’ 2015 I.T. Budget Report.