IT budgets and hiring stabilise in 2014

Spiceworks has announced the results of its “ 2014 State of IT ” report, a survey examining the technology budget and adoption trends of IT professionals in North America and EMEA. According to the survey, which included responses from IT professionals representing a range of company sizes in Spiceworks, organisations on average will spend $253,000 on IT products and services this year. Additionally, 42 percent of IT professionals expect an increase in IT budgets in 2015. However, despite higher budgets and a growing number of technologies entering the workplace, 60 percent of IT professionals said they don’t expect their organisation to hire additional IT staff next year.

“Technology trends like cloud and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) are increasingly impacting the workplace, making it necessary for IT professionals to manage more complex environments so employees can remain productive,” said Kathryn Pribish, Voice of IT program manager at Spiceworks. “We’re finding that while companies are investing in technology solutions, they’re not committing to an equal investment in hiring the IT professionals who make sure technologies function properly and help employees get their jobs done.”

Cloud-based applications and infrastructure, virtualisation and the influx of mobile technologies in the workplace have dramatically impacted the ways IT professionals do their jobs. While these technologies continue to help IT professionals address the needs of employees, they’ve also created additional complexity and require IT departments to address a number of new challenges including security, employee mobility and the tradeoffs between hosted and on-premise technologies. Additional survey highlights include:

Cloud services are here to stay, especially within smaller companies
· Sixty-one percent of IT professionals are using cloud services today with an additional eight percent planning to deploy a cloud service in the next six months. Cloud adoption is especially pronounced in organisations with less than 250 employees.
· IT professionals in North America are more likely to deploy cloud services compared to their peers in EMEA. Sixty-five percent of IT professionals in North America are using cloud services versus 56 percent in EMEA.
· Of those who have deployed a cloud service, 80 percent are using web hosting, 58 percent have invested in email hosting, and 51 percent have deployed a cloud-based productivity solution. Looking ahead, online backup and recovery, productivity solutions, and infrastructure hosting are the top cloud services IT professionals plan to start using in the next six months.

Virtualisation is a mainstream technology, but smaller organisations choose a cloud-based approach.

· Seventy-four percent of IT professionals said they have already adopted virtualisation solutions with an additional nine percent planning to in the next six months.
· While 90 percent of enterprises have deployed a virtual infrastructure, 70 percent of companies with 20-99 employees and 54 percent of companies with 1-19 employees have implemented a virtualisation solution. According to respondents, these smaller organisations are more likely to choose a cloud-based infrastructure solution.
· IT professionals in EMEA are slightly more likely to use a virtualised environment than their peers in North America. Seventy-nine percent of EMEA IT professionals have deployed a virtualisation solution compared with 71 percent in North America.
Companies implement BYOD policies to address the needs of mobile employees
· Sixty-eight percent of IT professionals said their organisations are supporting BYOD today. Of those, 60 percent are supporting employee-owned smartphones, 51 percent are supporting employee-owned tablets, and 38 percent support employees’ laptops.
· IT professionals in North America are slightly more likely to support BYOD than IT professionals in EMEA. Sixty-nine percent of North American respondents compared with 65 percent of EMEA IT professionals support BYOD.
· Like cloud-based technologies, smaller organisations are more likely to support BYOD than their larger counterparts. For instance, 83 percent of organisations with less than 20 employees support BYOD, while only 61 percent of companies with more than 500 employees support BYOD.