We here at ComputerScope Towers are pretty fed up reading, talking and publishing material about cloud computing. It realty has become tiresome the way it will change the way we do business blah-de-blah, etc, etc. Not that we doubt the claims, just that we are tired listening to them!
So, for the poll this month, we decided to try something a bit left field to see what the pain points are for IT in the current climate. Now that may have led to a discussion that may never have ended, because as we all know, there’s little to shout about in business in general right now, let alone in IT.
That said, we tried to narrow it down to see what people were concerned about. So we asked if you had 50% of your IT budget to spend in one area, what it would be. The choices given were infrastructure, virtualisation/cloud computing (there it is again) and applications.
Now, we usually let out polls run for a couple of weeks to get a representative result, but with some 150 plus response, the results are interesting to say the least.
In about 2008, when the recession was looming and people were trying to fathom how deep and wide the unpleasantness might be, some external commentators said that from an IT perspective, Ireland might well be better place to emerge the other side than some of its neighbours. The reason for this was that Ireland, during the boom, had spent with a certain profligacy on hardware to ensure demand was met. Now, this spending did not necessarily result in well organised, structured or maintained kit, just a lot of it and relatively new too. This meant that when the naval gazing began and the reviews were carried out, Ireland’s industries would find themselves with a lot of new kit that they could use to build a leaner, better organised and more efficient business upon.
That was in 2008. Arguably in 2009, this very circumstance came to pass and technologies such as virtualisation were implemented to get the best from existing infrastructure. But it is now 2010 and even if the above argument was true then, it is less and less the case now as server infrastructure in particular, is getting long in the tooth. With increasing demand to deliver more, IT has become accustomed to doing so with very little spend. And that may be why the poll has seen the majority go for infrastructure as the place where they would, if given 50% of their entire IT budget to do so, spend the cash. Some 67% said they would spend on infrastructure, with 33% saying that they would spend on virtualisation/cloud computing. No one indicated that applications were where the money was needed.
Now, contrast this with the previous poll, where 55% of people from more than 500 respondents who said that they expected their IT budgets to rise in 2011 and we have an odd juxtaposition. It would appear as if expected budget increases may not be sufficient to meet the needs of IT as regards infrastructure, as indicated by 67% of respondents saying that a further 50% of the IT budget could be spent in that area.
While 150 plus responses is early days as regards our polls, I’ll be watching it with interest.
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