According to Gartner data released Monday, the top three priorities for midsize enterprises in 2022 are security and risk management, application and integration strategies, and infrastructure, operations, and cloud strategies. Businesses in Gartner’s midsized enterprise category have an average IT budget of $6.7 million, with average total company revenue of $345 million.
According to the report, Gartner found that security controls, tools, and processes were “part of virtually every technology discussion” and dominate active IT projects, which surveyed 134 midsize enterprises’ CIOs and IT leaders.
Two-thirds of respondents are dedicating the largest amount of new or additional funding to cybersecurity. Business intelligence and data analytics, and cloud platforms round out the top three.
According to the report, despite investments in cloud platforms, including SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, over half of midsize enterprise infrastructure will continue to be non-cloud-based through 2025.
Couple that with data from Spiceworks Ziff Davis in its new 2023 State of IT report. Fifty-one percent of IT departments plan to increase their IT spending next year, even in the face of a possible recession. IT departments mostly plan on spending their IT budgets upgrading outdated infrastructure (51 percent).
Managed services grew 11 percent, compared with 8 percent in the prior year’s survey results. According to the report’s authors, a perceived shortage of IT talent may be the cause of increased managed services spending.
Most businesses (59 percent) expressed a belief that it’s somewhat difficult or very difficult to hire skilled IT workers.
Meanwhile, a good number of IT pros (34 percent) are planning to “look for jobs in 2023.” The report’s authors suggested that IT pros are seeking better pay, but also they may be looking elsewhere because of return-to-office mandates.
The report speculated that the return-to-office phenomenon had affected IT spending somewhat. For instance, spending on managed services was 15 percent before the pandemic, but respondents expected it would be 18 percent in 2023.
If you were wondering, the average IT budget is roughly 2% of a midsize enterprise. I’m assuming that as a ratio based on the average company revenue versus the average IT budget. That DOES seem low, although if I do the math and reduce that down on a one million dollar business, the IT budget is 20K. That seems awful low. Listeners, I’m looking to get some feedback.
That said, the takeaway here is that even with the relative increases, we’re not necessarily talking about massive swings of money, and we should be prudent over how the money is spent…. Because it’s not endless.
The priorities are useful – security and upgrades to infrastructure. And your core value in IT services continues to be helping out teams that find it hard to find their own staff.