Skip to main content

2016 Tech Budgets Focus on Security and Cloud

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

As technology continues to be a business differentiator and provide competitive advantage, tech budgets are increasing for almost half of organizations (46%), according to the annual Forecast Survey from Computerworld.

The survey shows that tech leaders are focusing on business priorities that will help their organizations contain costs, optimize and automate business processes, and accelerate business processes and agility.

Per the study, in 2016 organizations will increase spending on security (50%), cloud computing (48%), business analytics (41%), mobile apps (36%), and virtualization (35%). As business-critical applications and infrastructure move to the cloud, on-premise software, data center modernization and modernizing/replacing legacy systems are receiving fewer dollars.

As building a digital enterprise continues to grow in importance, tech leaders are exploring new technologies. Nearly one-third of organizations (29%) are planning to spend money on Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, followed by high-performance computing (HPC – 18%), and energy-saving and carbon reducing technologies (16%). Exploring new tech solutions and strategies does not stop there, the majority of enterprise organizations are adopting strategies around agile development and DevOps. This focus has grown from 48% in 2015 to 61% in 2016.

As technology trends advance, the promise of efficiencies is appealing; however having the right skillsets in place is vital for solutions to be fully utilized. While 37% of organizations are planning to increase headcount this year, finding employees with the necessary skillsets is proving difficult. Organizations are challenged to find employees with security, BI and analytics, cloud/SaaS, and programming/App Dev experience. These skillsets closely align with the areas receiving additional spending. Additionally, 42% are looking for employees with both a technology and business background to articulate IT’s value, showcasing that IT continues to embrace its new role as an organizational agent of change. Within organizations planning to increase head count, the most in-demand positions are IT architecture, programming/application development, project management and big data.

Methodology: Computerworld survey results are based on 181 respondents who are IT decision-makers across multiple industries.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

2016 Tech Budgets Focus on Security and Cloud

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

As technology continues to be a business differentiator and provide competitive advantage, tech budgets are increasing for almost half of organizations (46%), according to the annual Forecast Survey from Computerworld.

The survey shows that tech leaders are focusing on business priorities that will help their organizations contain costs, optimize and automate business processes, and accelerate business processes and agility.

Per the study, in 2016 organizations will increase spending on security (50%), cloud computing (48%), business analytics (41%), mobile apps (36%), and virtualization (35%). As business-critical applications and infrastructure move to the cloud, on-premise software, data center modernization and modernizing/replacing legacy systems are receiving fewer dollars.

As building a digital enterprise continues to grow in importance, tech leaders are exploring new technologies. Nearly one-third of organizations (29%) are planning to spend money on Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives, followed by high-performance computing (HPC – 18%), and energy-saving and carbon reducing technologies (16%). Exploring new tech solutions and strategies does not stop there, the majority of enterprise organizations are adopting strategies around agile development and DevOps. This focus has grown from 48% in 2015 to 61% in 2016.

As technology trends advance, the promise of efficiencies is appealing; however having the right skillsets in place is vital for solutions to be fully utilized. While 37% of organizations are planning to increase headcount this year, finding employees with the necessary skillsets is proving difficult. Organizations are challenged to find employees with security, BI and analytics, cloud/SaaS, and programming/App Dev experience. These skillsets closely align with the areas receiving additional spending. Additionally, 42% are looking for employees with both a technology and business background to articulate IT’s value, showcasing that IT continues to embrace its new role as an organizational agent of change. Within organizations planning to increase head count, the most in-demand positions are IT architecture, programming/application development, project management and big data.

Methodology: Computerworld survey results are based on 181 respondents who are IT decision-makers across multiple industries.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...