Report: IT automation to drive tech spending in 2022

A report from SWZD found that most organizations are optimistic that revenue will come surging back in 2022 after a significant year-over-year drop seen in 2021, and 61% of organizations expect their corporate revenues to increase in 2022. This expectation will influence 32% of budget increases, with 64% of enterprises (500+ employees) planning to raise IT budgets vs. 45% of small to midsize businesses (1-499 employees).

SWZD sought to understand how technology budgets will be allocated across hardware, software, cloud services, and managed IT services. The survey ultimately found that the pandemic-driven rush to remote work will continue to significantly impact future tech spend, as 86% of IT developers planning to change jobs in 2022 are considering remote jobs.

Due to this remote push, multi-year modernization efforts are anticipated, indicated by an elevated priority on IT projects in many organizations — the top driver of budget increases (49%) in 2022, up from 45% in 2021.

With ransomware on the rise and a lack of awareness around security threats among hybrid and remote employees, the report found that more than 75% of organizations plan to adopt employee training and spending on emerging anti-ransomware technology solutions to protect endpoint devices and remote users more effectively.

Concerning hardware, laptops will be the top spending area (19% of hardware budgets) in 2022, eclipsing desktop spending (14%). While server spending will represent 11% of hardware budgets, allocations have dropped significantly — from 14% in 2020 — as workloads shift away from on-premises datacenters.

As workloads shift away from on-premise datacenters by the push to remote work, IT budgets are shifting to hosted/cloud-based services. The report cited recent research on cloud-buying collectives that found 50% of all business workloads are expected to run in the cloud by 2023, up from 40% in 2021. The budget for cloud-based technologies has increased significantly in tandem, accounting for 26% of IT spending in 2022, up from 22% in 2020. Due to this, software expenditures associated with on-premises servers are on the decline, with planned spending falling significantly between 2020 and 2022 on virtualization (from 10% to 8%) and operating systems (from 13% to 11%).

Read the full report by SWZD.