The recession caused a rare drop in IT budgets, but things are returning to normal for most companies.
Overall, tech budgets are expected to rise by 2.8% in 2011, according to a recent TechTarget survey of 2,300 IT managers around the globe.
For 42% of IT departments, that means their budgets are returning to pre-recession levels, while 43% said they’re “slowly recovering” from the recession, and 15% are still stuck in it.
Where do IT managers expect to allocate their more healthy budgets this year? According to the survey, the top 10 spending areas are:
- Server virtualization (56% of respondents will spend in this area)
- Windows 7 upgrades (55%)
- Network-based security (51%)
- Data protection (46%)
- Disaster recovery and business continuity (45%)
- Custom application development (41%)
- Business intelligence/analytics/data warehousing (41%)
- Wireless networks (41%)
- Data center consolidation (37%), and
- Backup for virtual servers (34%).
Server virtualization gets the top priority, possibly because businesses are finding that virtualizing and consolidating servers is a good way to cut hardware and maintenance costs and free up even more space in the budget.
