Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom The State of Information Technology

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom The State of Information Technology In order to get to the bottom of where IT is now and where the industry is going,Spiceworksrecently surveyed over 1100 IT professionals in North America and EMEA. A majority of respondents work for small to medium-sized organizations with between 20-249 employees, although companies of all sizes were included. Industries with the highest representation were manufacturing, IT services, education, and non-profit. Ninety percent of respondents are involved in developing and managing IT budgets, and 37 percent hold the title of network or systems administrator. IT Spending Spiceworks learned that IT administrators have large annual budgets (over a quarter million on average) that are growing. Forty-two percent plan to increase budgets over the next year. The respondents’ organizations have an average of 4.2 IT professionals on staff, and 28 percent are adding staff this year (60 percent are staying the same). Compared to other employee costs, IT is exceedingly scalable. The more employees an organization has, the less it spends on IT per employee ($2770 per employee for organizations with fewer than 19 people versus $698 per employee for organizations with more than 500 people). Cloud and Virtualization Adoption Once a fluffy buzzword, the cloud is a reality for a majority of the respondents. Whether IT professionals are adopting services for web and email hosting, file sharing, or content filtering, the cloud is helping their departments scale infrastructure and keep costs down. Sixty-one percent of respondents overall haveadopted cloud-based applications, and adoption is slightly higher the smaller the organization. In terms of the cloud-based services IT pros are eager to start using this year, online backup and recovery is #1. Virtualization refers to taking hardware into the cloud, and Spiceworks’ respondents are on board this ship. Seventy-four percent of respondents overall have adopted virtualization, including 90 percent of respondents working in organizations with 500 or more employees. The most commonly employed virtual workloads are in IT services (81 percent), internal IT (77 percent),productivity apps(64 percent), industry-specific apps (62 percent), and business support (60 percent). For more about the IT industry in 2015, have a look atIntuits Fast Track blog.