IT Budget Planning for 2016

Featured article by Catharina Brenst, Author for Glorium Technologies

Planning is a crucial point in any case. But when it comes to business and your own company, planning appears to be vital. What’s more, it is subject to any aspect of your business activity, IT department is not an exception. It high time start planning your IT budget. Have you already considered your IT budget for 2016? If not, this article will be of extreme use for you.

When the one maps out IT budget, he or she should consider strategic points, as well, what future prospects of development a company possesses. Moreover, the ways of optimizing budget and minimizing it should be paid attention to.

It is predicted by Gartner that by 2025 any possible device will generate information on its own on any topic. That’s why the issue of how big data is managed and processed should be planned. Perhaps, it wouldn’t be superfluous to add switch to the Cloud to your IT budget expenses. You should face eventually cloud solutions in 2016 if you haven’t done it yet. The reason for this is simple: it will save you money. For instance, using Cloud, a company doesn’t have to spend money on hardware, servers, system administrators, etc. Moreover, buying the Cloud apps, you get backup and security service. This will improve the cost statistics, as well.

Computer Economics research firm found out that around 70% of companies are going to increase their operational budgets. However, even though IT expenditures are to be higher, many companies are not planning to increase their IT budgets. This can be explained by the fact that many companies has shifted to the Cloud and are to spend more money on the Cloud apps, which is still less than data center infrastructure.

Plus, Internet of Things is reported to get even bigger, so the companies that will arrange data-sharing processes will win. It is the point where IT department can turn into profit, but not cost. Companies can also benefit from the IoT in a way that it can improve and optimize the management processes, as well as, operating ones. For example, it can also help minimize energy usage. However high costs of IoT deployment might be, it will pay back in a few years.

Software integration is another possibility to make your IT budget smaller in the future, since as a company grows, it needs larger enterprise solutions. Software consolidation is a cost-effective answer to this.

Gathering and processing information is getting easier, as more and more day-to-day gadgets are getting equipped with sensors that can provide more actual data on daily basis. Paying more attention to studying and arranging this very data can become more demanded on market and bring the company using it beyond its competitors. Investments in it will bring strategic results.

Another important factor to decide on while budget planning is education and training of in-source IT specialists. As it was mentioned above, IT is developing with incredible pace, and to catch it up, you need someone who knows just everything about it.

To sum up, CIOs, when planning IT budgets are in a preferable position of requiring more investments on the strategic development. And interesting correlation should be mentioned, as well: even though IT expenses are to get higher, most IT budgets are to remain flat.

Catharina Brenst is one of the authors for Glorium Technologies blog. She will gladly answer any your question concerning IT support and IT solutions.