The Swiss company’s survey of 600 IT decision-makers in the U.K. and U.S. finds that IT leaders are focused on improving cloud cost management and reducing their organizations’ technical debt, with 72% of CIOs admitting that they are behind in their digital transformation because of that technical debt.

According to the company’s research, this is concerning, as 92% of CIOs are expected to deliver digital transformation initiatives that act as revenue generators this year.

As they are being pressured to essentially do more with less, CIOs are still dealing with technical debt due to rushed cloud migrations as a result of a transition to distributed work during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 38% of IT leaders agreeing to that sentiment.

In addition, 31% say their cloud workloads were not optimized before they began their cloud migrations, and 38% said they miscalculated their cloud budgets when providing SaaS apps, resulting in significant overspending on the cloud.

Organizations are also still struggling with their on-premises legacy systems, with 51% of CIOs saying the growing complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud IT systems is one of the their top three challenges.

Nearly half of CIOs say they need improved transparency and control of cloud costs to help them maximize value of cloud investments and improve buy-in from business executives, and 80% plan to increase their investment in FinOps to achieve this, SoftwareOne says in its report.

Despite budget pressures, 82% will increase their investment in application modernization, and 912 will continue increasing security investments.

Craig Thomson, senior vice president of cloud and application services at SoftwareOne, says in a statement that businesses are struggling to complete IT transformations as they deal with budget pressures.

“Yet organizations need to move to the cloud and modernize legacy applications to remain competitive,” Thomson says.  “We’re seeing a real need for a combination of innovation with optimization. Our clients are looking for pragmatic step-by-step transformation initiatives, rather than wholesale megalithic projects that can be hard to get approved when budgets are under pressure.”

The post CIOs Face Tight Budgets, Continued Cloud Push in 2023 appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Consumer purchasing power is taking the biggest hit, but overall IT spending is expected to remain strong as those two groups face different immediate economic futures, says John-David Lovelock, a distinguished vice president analyst at the firm.

Along with declines in consumer markets are layoffs at tech firms serving those markets, but CIOs are weathering the storm and keeping their budgets and planned investments intact

“A turbulent economy has changed the context of business decisions and can cause CIOs to become more hesitant, delay decisions or reorder priorities. We’ve seen this in action with the reshuffling taking place among some B2B companies, especially those that overinvested in growth. However, IT budgets are not driving these shifts, and IT spending remains recession-proof.”

According to Gartner, software and IT services are projected for the largest growth at 9.3% and 5.5%, respectively, while the devices segment is projected to take a 5.1% hit as both consumers and enterprises lengthen their device refresh cycles.

Lovelock says the pandemic forced both consumers and businesses to accelerate device refreshes and buy new devices due to remote work and education needs. Now, the lifespan of those devices will be extended, resulting in a declining device segment.

When Gartner previously issued its prediction in October 2022, devices were only forecast to decline 0.6%.

In addition to the technology market, the IT labor market is also being impacted by economic factors, as job vacancy rates have been increasing every quarter. The high competition for skilled IT staff is limiting growth for companies who rely on tech innovation to scale.

However, that is leading to growth in IT services as organizations are outsourcing their IT support. For example, Gartner forecasts spending on consulting to increase 6.7% in 2023.

“CIOs are losing the competition for talent,” Lovelock says. “IT services spending is growing more quickly than internal services in every industry. Skilled IT workers are migrating away from the enterprise CIO towards technology and service providers (TSPs) who can keep up with increased wage requirements, development opportunities and career prospects.”

The post IT Spending Growth Will Take a Hit in 2023. Here’s why. appeared first on My TechDecisions.

The distributed work experiment continues

Although some organizations made news by ordering employees back to the office, many organizations are still offering hybrid working arrangements to employees. There have been countless surveys and studies on this issue, and virtually all of them show that employees are demanding some level of flexible working arrangements, so mandating a return to the office will likely lead to turnover.

With organizations now forced to accept hybrid work, IT leaders are turning to technology and new innovations to help keep employees connected. The year saw many new features in videoconferencing platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex, as well as new AI-driven hardware to support those platforms.

However, some challenges remain, including mental and physical health, transportation, housing, and a persistent disconnect between the flexible work demands of employees and what executives are willing to offer.

We should continue to see new innovations in technology to support hybrid work models this year as we head into year three of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cloud computing soars

Of course cloud computing is on our list of top IT stories in 2022. Despite a projected IT spending growth of just 0.8% for 2022, IT analyst firm Gartner says public cloud spending is projected to rise by nearly 19% in 2022 and is poised for another big leap in 2023 of nearly 21%. This comes as organizations are looking to the cloud to help support growth amid economic uncertainties as a recession is likely.

Other Gartner research of the thoughts of IT leaders finds that 42% say cloud migration is a top area of investment, and 34% say infrastructure compute and storage are top tech priorities.

However, as organizations navigate a complicated process, they are left with some legacy on-premises systems that can make security and management difficult. To solve those issues, tech companies have been releasing new solutions designed to give IT professionals visibility into their entire infrastructure, including cloud and on-premises.

UC&C interoperability

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced employees to work out of their homes, many organizations quickly deployed videoconferencing services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Webex to communicate and collaborate with their remote colleagues. However, interoperability between those platforms and other major services was staggered, meaning that joining meetings on another platform not supported within the organization was challenging.

However, all of those companies made some efforts to move that needle forward this year. Google recently launched support for embedded bi-directional interoperability on Zoom Rooms and Google Meet devices after it already did the same for Webex devices.

Cisco also announced an integration with Microsoft Teams that enables the Teams Rooms experience on Webex devices.

Also announced this year by Microsoft was Direct Guest Join, a one-touch experience that enables users to join a third-party online meeting from Teams Rooms. Currently, the feature works on Teams Rooms for Zoom and Webex.

Cybersecurity implications from the Russia-Ukraine conflict

For security-minded IT professionals–and especially the ones handling sensitive information about the U.S. government–the ongoing crisis between Ukraine and Russia should give cause for concern. Before the boots-on-the-ground invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces, destructive cyberattacks were launched to weaken the government’s response and cripple its infrastructure.

Some of these cyberattacks have since spread to neighboring countries, such as Poland. Moldova, Germany, Romania and other nations that are sympathetic to Ukraine’s cause.

John Fokker, principal engineer and head of cyber investigations for Trellix Threat Labs, says organizations that could be targets of advanced persistent threat actors or nation-states should be paying very close attention.

“Make no mistake—if you have an (advanced persistent threat actor) as a potential threat to your organization, you should take very close notice of what is going on right now,” Fokker says. “From a threat intelligence perspective, I think we’re at a very pivotal moment.”

The conflict is now nearing its one year mark, and the cybersecurity landscape is only more dangerous.

Cybersecurity remains front-page news

Ransomware, phishing, data breaches and other cybersecurity stories have grabbed headlines in recent years, and 2022 was no different, which is why cybersecurity has a heavy presence on our list of top IT stories in 2022.

According to Palo Alto Networks, 96% of all respondents to a recent survey were the victims of a cyber incident or data breach during that time, and 57% saw three or more incidents or breaches. The study also found that a third of all organizations surveyed experienced an operational disruption as a result of a breach in the past year.

Hybrid work is largely to blame, as 84% of executives say hybrid work has played a key role in the increase in cyber incidents over the year.

Zero trust has emerged as a key priority, and identity and access management is now critical to any zero trust initiative. However, attacks are paying attention and have begun targeting identity provides such as Okta, and recent incidents at password management companies continue to put identity security at the forefront.

Log4Shell persists 

It’s been about a year since the critical vulnerability in Log4j was discovered, but the bug is still among the most actively exploited.

Despite constant news coverage of the bug, 30% of Log4j instances remained vulnerable to exploitation three months after the bug was discovered, and cybercriminals and ransomware operators everywhere began leveraging the vulnerability, known as Log4Shell.

Even after a year, the Log4Shell story is not over, as nearly three-quarters of organizations remain vulnerable to Log4Shell, Tenable reported last month.

In fact, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board says Log4Shell will be an “endemic vulnerability” that could remain in systems for a decade or longer.

A busy year for Patch Tuesday

In keeping with the security theme on our list of top IT stories in 2022, Microsoft and its customers had another busy year of patching critical vulnerabilities and zero days, with 917 total vulnerabilities addressed. This is up from last year’s count of 848, but not near the high in 2020, which saw an incredible 1,235 security bugs patched. By our count, Microsoft patched 26 zero-day bugs in 2022.

However, Microsoft did release Windows Autopatch, a new service that automates the process of managing and rolling out updates for Windows and Microsoft 365 apps. Free for customers with Windows Enterprise E3 and E5 licenses, Autopatch essentially automates Patch Tuesday for IT administrators with the goal of improving the customer’s security and productivity.

However, many smaller organizations not on those advanced licenses are still left to apply patches manually.

Windows 11 adoption rises

While we’re on Microsoft, 2022 was the first full year of a campaign to encourage users to update from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and that appears to be paying off somewhat, as the Windows 11 market share has grown to more than 16% after a relatively slow adoption for the first few months.

That slow adoption could be due to the operating system’s hardware requirements, as fewer than 39% of devices were eligible for a Windows 11 upgrade as of May 2022. With the holiday season past us and new Windows 11 devices hitting the market, we expect that number to increase quickly in 2023.

In addition, Microsoft will end support for Windows 10 by October 2025, so organizations have less than three years to make the move to Windows 11 by either upgrading eligible devices or planning a full device refresh.

Microsoft also says Windows 11 will have an annual feature update cadence, with feature updates being released in the second half of the year.

Recession and budgeting

The global economy is on the brink of recession, but IT budgets are still expected to grow as digital business initiatives can help companies survive an economic downturn.

According to Gartner, economic turbulence will impact technology investments, but spending in some areas will increase while others will decrease. Next year’s spending on software is projected to grow by more than 11%, and IT services will grow by nearly 8%. The research firm also found that almost 70% of finance chiefs plan to increase spending on technology to reshape revenue streams, add new products and services and change the value proposition of existing products and services.

“Enterprise IT spending is recession-proof as CEOs and CFOs, rather than cutting IT budgets, are increasing spending on digital business initiatives,” says John-David Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner.

Burnout and turnover

The last three years have been very busy for technology professionals as IT professionals had to figure out how to support a remote workforce overnight and new software and services were developed at a rapid pace in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, cyberattacks and ransomware are running rampant, forcing IT and security professionals to work long hours and risk burning themselves out.

One report from email security company Tessian finds that security leaders are working an average of 16.5 hours over their contractual obligations, and about 1 in 5 are working at least 25 extra hours a week.

Another report from Mimecast, also an email security company, finds that 33% of security decision-makers are thinking of leaving their role, and the same percentage say their team sees an increased number of absences due to stress and burnout following a cybersecurity incident.

In IT, especially cybersecurity, finding and retaining talent is one of the biggest issues facing the industry, so getting a handle on this problem is paramount in 2023.

The post Our Top IT Stories From 2022 appeared first on My TechDecisions.

A few years ago, real estate and office space were key resources necessary for a successful enterprise to be taken seriously. Today, real estate is sometimes a burden, weighing down budgets with high cost and upkeep while offering very little ROI. Remote work has been a boon for employee retention and satisfaction as well as profitability, but it also means cubicles and shiny corner offices sit vacant.

It is imperative that, in the face of these massive, accelerated workplace changes, chief financial officers (CFOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) take an honest look at where their money is going, and then work together to wield it in a way that will reap the greatest benefits.

This new budget landscape will likely mean a dramatic boost in IT spending for most leaders. In fact, 40% of CFOs say they plan to increase their IT spending in 2023. Even so, it’s no longer wise to simply continue to invest in the latest software that leads to tedious training sessions with employees who often loathe being forced to make the switch. As we look to the horizon of the new year, these increased investments in IT could mean the horizon is lined with digital transformations, but only if we choose to partner with the right solutions.

A Worthy Investment

Real estate investments are not the only budget line being slashed, but as a recession continues to loom, IT budgets are remaining firm. Most leaders expect this recession to impact their revenue and access to resources, but only 6% of organizations report planning to cut back on tech spending.

What makes tech investments worth the money? First, tech and IT budgets can be adapted for a company’s exact and individual needs. That means an ecommerce-driven retailer, for instance, could buoy online sales through automated customer support, without drawing from the finite resources of time and energy from their on-site staff. Second, tech and IT budgets can be employed more effectively by engaging the right solutions, rather than undergoing a full overhaul of an enterprise system. The power of tech and IT budgets is that, unlike fixed assets like real estate and inventory, they allow for flexibility and nimble responses, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

Work Smarter, Not Harder with IT

Having more room to run when it comes to budget allocations allows IT departments to make bigger moves and realize greater improvements, but more money doesn’t automatically equate to success. Instead, CFOs and CIOs must make clear, strategic moves as they enhance and assess their processes and systems to make sure they get the biggest bang for their buck.

We’ve all heard stories or personally experienced how, even after expensive deployments, companies were unhappy with the results and employees were still having to infuse the system with their own manual input to keep it running. In those situations, the solutions were reinforcing inefficient methods already slowing down the company’s momentum or omitting an important step in the process, which introduces risk.

IT and business operations teams need enterprise software tools that simplify the user experience rather than complicate it. Most importantly, these tools should streamline workflows to reduce the number of manual inputs and time-consuming tasks required by human staff. The right IT investments should free up executives and staff team members to complete the tasks that can’t be automated. The good news is that companies don’t have to radically overhaul their entire lineup of solutions. As the saying goes: There’s an app for that!

Bridging the Gap

Many IT leaders aren’t aware of the available applications that can not only make their businesses better, but also improve and customize their existing enterprise system quickly and affordably. CIOs and IT leaders need to understand how they can maximize value from their existing enterprise solution investments and identify where those investments might come up short.

New software implementations only address about 80% of a company’s needs. To bridge the remaining gap, it is crucial to layer on an additional or complementary B2B application. Finding a multifaceted solution that addresses the real issues at hand is the best use of IT budgets.

Increased IT spending in the new year means companies will have the option to harness a relevant and renewed digital transformation through addressing their unique business needs, eliminating inefficient processes, and reducing manual, time-consuming tasks. By incorporating the right B2B applications to support an overall enterprise solution, IT leaders can be the technology heroes who lead the way in spending their budgets wisely while readying their teams and overall operations for what could be a difficult, recession-filled season.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Walicki is CEO and co-founder of Relish.

The post When Your IT Budget Increases, Spend it Wisely appeared first on My TechDecisions.

Gartner Research forecasts that by 2025, 40% of IT budgets will be spent paying off technical debt. For organizations this means shifting to a continuous modernization mindset to ensure that technical debt is properly controlled and in-house teams are given room to innovate.

However, understanding the best route to a modernized application portfolio is a real challenge, according to Cloudreach. With many organizations becoming late cloud adopters while others try to modernize its cloud infrastructure after scrambling to adapt during COVID, modernization is bound to become an expensive and confusing endeavor.

The traditional approach to application modernization is to treat it as a ‘one and done’ event, which is ineffective, expensive and encourages technical debt, according to Cloudreach.

Related: Cloud Infrastructure Spending Shows Strong Growth

The Sunstone software utilizes an agentless, onboarding process to rapidly capture a cloud environment, before leveraging advanced resource grouping services to profile the gathered data and build a picture of the distinct workloads that need to be modernized.  Data and analytics engines evaluate a target cloud estate for modernization opportunities and provide a prioritized roadmap, aligned with an organization’s business goals.

The software enables technology leaders to maximize their cloud spend ROI and rationalize their in-cloud application portfolio. Analytics engines immediately start parsing the discovered data for opportunities to move to cloud-native technologies to generate time savings, increase productivity, democratize access to compute and data,and save money.

In this way, the software introduces the latest innovations from cloud providers into the target environment to drive business transformation.

Cloudreach’s Sunstone software features:

• A rapid, lightweight onboarding mechanism
• Automated data ingestion pipelines
• Multi-layer workload grouping and dependency management
• Iaas-PaaS analytics to move in-house teams up the stack and utilize best in class cloud native technologies
• License optimization analytics to reduce overspend on licenses
• Prioritized modernization roadmapping

“As businesses see an increased need for cloud adoption and investment, they will need a solution that can quickly onboard their infrastructure and make it cloud-ready,” said Brooks Borcherding, CEO at Cloudreach, in a statement.”

The post Cloudreach Launches Sunstone to Enable Continuous Cloud Modernization appeared first on My TechDecisions.

This involves conversation with leadership about the IT department’s budget and how much they’re willing to invest in technologies, conducting thorough market research and comparing the pros and cons of solutions and viewing every investment through the lens of security.

Following these steps should help improve efficiency in the budgeting process as you bring on new technologies and services to your organization – regardless of how large or small it is.

Getting buy-in from leadership

To determine how much you’re willing to spend on a product or IT service, IT managers first need to have conversations with their leadership and sell them on a particular investment.

“There’s a lot more work as an IT manager or CIO on selling your leadership on why these investments matter,” says Vince Crisler, an IT consultant and CEO and founder of cybersecurity firm Dark Cubed.

It’s important to have transparency when you’re having those conversations with leadership so everyone knows how much these services are expecting to cost. That’s especially true when talking about core IT systems that every successful business requires, like internet, communications, operating systems, endpoints, and security.

According to Crisler, IT managers need to determine how important a particular product or service is to the company and how much leadership is willing to invest to improve the organization’s IT systems.

“As you’re thinking about core functionality, you don’t want sticker shock to come in and you need to be able to really know how you’re affecting the profitability of the business and the efficiency of the business with your investments in IT,” Crisler says.

According to Crisler, determining pricing really comes down to how well you articulate your message to leadership to get key stakeholders to support your technology decisions with a workable budget.

“What distinguishes a good IT manager from somebody who can’t get things done is they can articulate things in a way that company leadership can understand,” Crisler says. “As an IT manager, you’re never really just kind of going to the market, getting pricing and then going to your leadership with a quote.”

Rather, this process should start with a discussion with leadership about what technologies you think the organization needs and what you currently pay for similar services. The budget should be based on your market research, so you’re armed with that knowledge when it’s time to talk with vendors.

Going to market

Once IT professionals are armed with that information from company leadership, next is time to survey the market and collect a range of pricing data from which to compare vendors and their offerings.

For more commoditized services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex and other unified communications tools that are growing in popularity, forming a budget plan is a lot more straightforward since costs are generally predetermined.

Research and surveying the market should give you the knowledge of what you will expect to pay, says Crisler. That process should ultimately give you a range of prices. Once armed with that price point, then you can start asking those providers about specific plans and prices and get into the finer details.

“Then you can start to interview folks and figure out what you can get for that price point,” Crisler says.

This goes back to those original discussions with leadership about what you expect the product or services could cost. IT managers should pad that expected budget for products and services to account for any unforeseen costs, and that could also result in good news for the company if the price comes in lower than expected.

“If you think it’s going to be $25 a line and it comes in at $15 a line, you’re the hero,” Crisler says.

Read Next: How IT Pros Can Earn Budget from Key Stakeholders

This process will vary based on the type of product or service in question. For example, finding a managed service provider or technology integrator will be a much more involved process and should consist of meeting with a handful of service providers.

“They should go out and collect some pricing data as they can,” says Joshua Liberman, president of New Mexico-based IT provider Net Sciences.

For many service providers and other technology vendors, this can be a lengthy process before a price is even determined since many require a site visit, evaluation, and several rounds of interviews to determine the best course of action and price plan.

Technology managers should have those initial discussions with several technology providers and form a list of at least three in varying price ranges: budget-friendly, on the higher end and somewhere in the middle.

“They need to kind of think through why there is a difference,” Liberman says.

Budget-friendly options that do just enough for the company might look good on paper and impress leadership with cost savings, but they’re generally not as robust as enterprise-grade solutions.

Essentially, you will get what you pay for.

Reevaluate prices routinely

In the tech industry, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, buyouts, and private equity are constantly disrupting pricing structure and the IT ecosystem.

“They have profound effects on everything from the price structure to how stable the product is to how well it’s developed in the future,” Liberman says.

It can be hard to stay on top of the tech industry landscape given how quickly it can change, but a good IT manager should always reevaluate the market and look for cost savings where they can to help create some efficiencies in other areas.

“For the savvy IT manager, it’s not just about cutting your budget,” Crisler says. “It’s about expanding the services you can offer to your company.”

For example, if you can save 15% of a few products and use those savings to ring a new functionality to the company that drives more productivity, that creates more value for your organization.

“At the end of the day, your job is to help the productivity of the company and to be an asset to help people do their jobs,” Crisler says. “Your job is to make the company do as well as it possibly can given the resources you have to spend.”

Expect to pay a premium for security

The threat of a cyberattack on your organization grows each day as cybercriminals and their tools become more sophisticated, so security should be baked into every product or service you bring to the organization.

As such, you should expect to pay a premium for products and services that value security.

“Every product and service you engage with has to be viewed first through the lens of security because there’s so much potential risk, especially people who are diving into large IoT – the internet of threats,” Liberman says.

IT managers should analyze everything though a lens of security. When doing that market research, only products and services that make it through that security filter should be considered – regardless of price.

One you have those three offerings that make it through that security filter, now you can compare their costs and the pros and cons of each solution as it relates to your organization.

Pitching high-cost secure solutions to leadership could be a challenge since there is no short-term ROI, Liberman says.

“It’s a pure cost to implement secure procedures, tools and processes. It costs money,” Liberman says. “On the other hand, it prevents you from losing your business.”

More secure businesses are typically more stable and more profitable, but an investment in security won’t reap immediate benefits like it would for a faster internet speed, better endpoint devices or unified communications software.

“Security of the systems you purchase is starting to become integrated into the buying decision,” Crisler says. “Smart and savvy IT managers will realize that and stat to make sure they’re considering that when pricing out products and services.”

The post How IT Pros Can Determine Pricing appeared first on My TechDecisions.