Cybersecurity remains the top concern shaping IT budgets and investment plans. Remote work for IT engineers is on the decline. Businesses are eager to roll out generative AI, but they're hampered by staffing shortages and lack of staff expertise.
In a nutshell, those statements highlight some of the most salient trends revealed by ITPro Today's 2024 IT Priorities Survey, which queried IT professionals about a range of topics that impact the industry. Compared with previous years, responses to the 2024 survey highlight the following notable trends and changes:
Cybersecurity — which was already among IT organizations' top priorities in past years — has become even more of a focal point.
A higher percentage of organizations are reporting decreases in overall IT budgets.
Businesses are eager to leverage AI to support a wide array of functions, such as application development, infrastructure management, and software testing.
However, the extent to which IT professionals say their companies have been able to implement AI remains limited, due especially to staffing limitations.
Data backup and recovery strategies are changing, with decreased rollout of cloud-based backup solutions.
In the realm of networking, upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 remains a priority.
Although significant numbers of IT workers are remote or hybrid, the percentage of those expected to work fully in-office has increased over the past year.
Somewhat fewer IT departments are prioritizing staff diversity.
This report assesses these and other trends to highlight what IT professionals should know about the state of the industry today. From budget planning, to cybersecurity, to infrastructure investment and beyond, the data presented in the following pages offers deep insight into what the typical IT organization is doing today and how it expects its operations to evolve over the coming year.
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