Rackspace Technology announced the release of a new survey, “Technology Budgets: Managing Shifting Priorities.”
The survey examines the proliferation of IT budget management across organizations. The results of the survey indicate that IT budgets are spread across many groups within organizations, making it increasingly difficult for IT decision-makers to maintain visibility into where and how their IT budgets are being spent.
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The findings indicate that many organizations are not properly governing and optimizing costs. The survey finds that 50% of IT decision-makers lack a basic understanding of what cloud cost governance and cloud cost optimization are, and how they are different. Businesses in this category are at risk of cloud sprawl.
Across the board, leaders recognize the value in investing, tracking, and managing IT spend but finding someone with the expertise to do this effectively is a challenge. 99% of IT decision-makers surveyed reported having a documented IT budget and dedicated resources to manage IT spend, and yet almost half of those surveyed do not feel these resources are skilled enough to be effective.
Cost management in turbulent times: The COVID-19 effect
Additionally, COVID-19 has taken an already difficult task and increased the complexity significantly, with respondents reporting the need to address a wide array of new technology challenges. 78% of decision-makers report new concerns around budget or cost in the last three months, with 43% reporting concern over being unable to fund planned projects.
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Also, businesses report a 59% increase in spend on technologies to support remote working (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), productivity, video conferencing/collaboration, etc.), which required shifting budget away from planned initiatives and toward obtaining the technology necessary to keep the business running. As different business units seek to quickly adopt tools to maintain business continuity, the investment in other IT priorities can get lost in the shuffle and go untraced.
“Many businesses have found out the hard way in 2020 that their IT systems, resources and spend tracking weren’t ready for COVID,” said Jeff DeVerter, Chief Technology Officer – Solutions at Rackspace Technology. “With a 59% increase spend on IT tools, businesses have been forced to adapt quickly to a changing environment which is why we designed the Cloud Optimization solution, to provide customers with an end-to-end solution to help them optimize their cloud workloads for cost and performance.”
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