by Jan Malasek | Sep 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
Along with the rest of the economy, the IT industry plodded through the Great Recession bringing with it tight corporate IT budgets. A ray of sunshine was Gartner’s July 2014 prediction that total IT spending would “rebound and grow until it reaches a new equilibrium.” One year later Gartner has adjusted their 2015 IT spend growth in constant currency to 2.5% – down somewhat from the 3.7% – 3.9% 2015 projections made in the last two quarters of 2014. A closer look shows us that the changes are not organizational belt tightening, but more a result of where budget is being allocated. There is a spending shift underway from hardware to software and services, and from infrastructure to the cloud. Rather than buying six new servers and an application to upgrade an existing HR system, organizations are investing in SaaS and cloud solutions. “As business solutions age, organizations are interested in the cloud and services for their updates,” says Larry Velez, CTO and founder of Sinu, a New York-based IT Managed Service Provider. “Just a few years ago, no one even considered SaaS solutions for things like hedge fund and portfolio management, but they do now.” The growth of cloud computing in 2015 has been significant. IDC recently reported that total cloud IT infrastructure spending has grown by 40 percent in 2015. This growth accounts for one-third of all IT infrastructure spending with that percentage expected to grow to nearly 50 percent by 2017. Hand-in-hand with cloud computing’s 2015 growth is an impressive 46 percent growth in IT security spending. Robert Westervelt, IDC Security Products Research Manager confirmed that...