COVID-19 Triggers Emphasis on Remote Work, Highlights IT Budget Inefficiencies As expected, the biggest area of concern among decision-makers had to do with supporting the unprecedented and unanticipated shift to remote work, across all global regions and industry sectors. When asked to identify critical drivers of COVID-19 investment, respondents cited remote workforce productivity (51%), remote workforce cybersecurity (50%) and remote workforce collaboration (48%). The next highest priorities were budget reductions and cost containment, accelerated software development through containers and Kubernetes, and mobile device proliferation.
COVID-19 has had a significant impact on IT budgets and priorities. While most organizations remain laser-focused on digital transformation and IT modernization, they are also adapting to changes in remote work, digital supply chain management, business resiliency and other challenges that have been brought to the forefront by the global pandemic.
One possible surprise in the statistics: Despite the changes caused by COVID-19, cloud computing and digital transformation, most companies are still spending more of their IT budgets on projects related to maintenance as opposed to initiatives focused on innovation. When asked to reflect on how the mix between maintenance and innovation projects in IT budgets has shifted, respondents indicated very little change, with more than half saying they spend 60% or more of their IT budgets on maintenance-a watermark that has not changed significantly in the past two years.
One of the changes triggered by COVID-19 has been an acceleration to the cloud focused on increasing the scale and scope of remote work, specifically adding capabilities for remote workforce productivity, security and collaboration, according to a study fielded in August 2020 by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).
Clearly, many organizations are viewing IT investment to help navigate uncertain and changing market conditions caused by COVID-19. However, addressing the balance between maintaining an IT estate and innovating across it has never been more important, especially given rapidly changing market conditions and the need to support a remote workforce during the global pandemic.
The study was focused on uncovering evolving attitudes toward the cloud, including several questions specific to COVID-19 and IT spending patterns. It captured responses from nearly 5,000 IT decision-makers, line-of-business managers, developers and data scientists across North America, Europe, India, Japan and Asia-Pacific regions.
The HPE research found that IT organizations need only look inward, at improving IT efficiencies, to begin to tip the budgetary scales in favor of ongoing innovation projects. Respondents reported that, on any given day, slightly more than a third of their provisioned infrastructure capacity is going unused across both their public cloud and on-prem
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February 2021 - www.visionmediahitech.com
