Enterprise IT spending remains strong despite coronavirus

Despite facing the challenges of supporting remote workforces and meeting the online needs of customers, 58 percent of IT leaders expect to either significantly or moderately increase their annual technology budgets.

The report from SaaS infrastructure platform OpsRamp also finds 73 percent of IT operations and DevOps team leaders expect to either accelerate or maintain digital transformation initiatives and projects, indicating the value of digital products and services in an era of social distancing.

Investments are heaviest in information security and compliance (62 percent) to help protect remote workers from sophisticated cyber attacks; followed by big data and analytics (46 percent) that deliver rapid customer insights and feedback for fact-based decision making, and public and multi-cloud infrastructure (45 percent) to help teams quickly tap into on-demand computing power from hyperscale providers.

Investment in performance monitoring is up too, with AIOps (69 percent) topping the list, cloud native observability (51 percent), and network performance monitoring and diagnostics (51 percent). Investment in self-service technologies is up too in order to free IT staff from reactive tasks.

Management of costs is clearly on the agenda though, with IT leaders planning to hire more IT financial analysts (68 percent) than cloud architects (53 percent), DevOps engineers (50 percent) and data scientists (47 percent).

"Enterprises and their IT organizations are dealing with unpredictable change every day, and how they make decisions now and for the future will play a critical role in their recovery after this pandemic has slowed down," says Varma Kunaparaju, CEO of OpsRamp. "IT operations and DevOps teams should work with technology vendors and service providers that can help them quickly navigate this landscape with secure, high-performing and cost-efficient capabilities across business applications and infrastructure to weather this economic storm."

The full report is available from the OpsRamp site.

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