5 key IT budget priorities for 2022

The pandemic has forced companies to reevaluate their technology priorities

This has happened not only so companies can make it through the challenges that the epidemic has thrown at them but also to accelerate business transformation in order to come out stronger as things return to a steady state.

As these priorities have changed, we’re seeing that budget allocation for the 2022 financial year has shifted in many of our clients to prioritize the following areas:

1. Cloud adoption
   
   The adoption of various cloud-based services has accelerated. We’re also seeing a renewed focus on migrating from legacy environments into hybrid cloud environments to ensure that application workloads can scale seamlessly, that automation can be applied to the continuous operations of these workloads, and so that the end-user experience is enhanced by reducing the traffic path between the remote worker and the application.


2. Security
   
   During the early stages of the pandemic, most organizations didn’t have the infrastructure, licenses, or architectures in place to cope with most of their staff working from home. New services and technology were purchased outside of what was initially budgeted, to ensure some form of business continuity. As things have stabilized, clients are revaluating their security posture and are investing in strategic areas that might have not had the required attention during the early pandemic stages.


3. Backup and recovery
   
   As threat actors took advantage of the uncertainty and rapid scaling the pandemic initiated, organizations became more aware of the importance of having solid backup, recovery and resiliency planning. This is then forcing discussions on what business-critical applications are required, where these workloads and related data is located and what impact re-platforming and re-architecting will play in ensuring future scalability, adaptability and performance in alignment with business priorities.


4. Distributed work and next generation collaboration
   
   In most industries, we expect to see a significant increase in remote working compared to pre-pandemic times. This introduces several challenges for our clients. From reevaluating their collaboration strategy, which includes how meeting rooms are being used, enabling existing meeting rooms to have the ability to include remote staff, enabling the business to have visibility and analytics on how meeting facilities are being used, to what the user experience is like for both remote and on-premises staff connecting to collaboration tools like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, etc., the pandemic has driven the rapid adoption of these tools. We’re also expecting to see an increase in budget allocation to optimize end-user experiences, increase the business visibility on usage and adoption.


5. Networking
   
   Most importantly, companies have realized that the network is the enabler that unlocks the potential for new ways of working. This is done by enabling connectivity to business-critical services, providing the foundation to support business across vast geographical areas, and fundamentally changing functional services by adopting newer connectivity technologies. These include software-defined approaches using Wi-Fi-6 and private 5G in campus/branch areas, software-defined WAN to optimize branch connectivity to cloud and hybrid data centers and cloud networking technologies to securely connect application workloads.

Maximize benefits with a balanced approach

Focusing on any one of these areas independently from the other would lead to suboptimal results. The balance between security, remote and local user experience, applications, and resiliency models are all interdependent. These focus areas should be treated as a living organism that will have to continuously adapt to meet changing business needs and priorities.

We believe that this is best achieved through a combination of good practice built over many years and the experience of our consultants to tap into that knowledge that sets us apart.

We’re proud to be named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Network Consulting Services 2021 Vendor Assessment. The report recognized our network security capabilities, our ability to expand into new markets and global geographies, and improved employee efficiency.

Contact us to assist you in planning, building, and optimizing your modernized network to support your business over the coming years.