2010 saw a rare occurrence for IT budgets – a stalemate, and in many cases a dip in overall spending, one that hasn’t been seen in the last decade. North America, Europe and even India saw minimal or negative growth in their IT markets as the worldwide recession – one of the worst since the 1930s – hit the entire globe hard. Fortunately, 2011 is already a brighter year and many companies are forecasting increases for IT departments, if not the ones that they were used to.
In North America, for example, only a 1.8% overall increase in budget growth is predicted, according to Tech Target’s 2011 survey. While 32% of IT shops are predicted to have over 5% growth in this coming year, most major corporations are only now starting to see their budgets get back on track and are being very cautious about where they spend their money. India will see the greatest potential growth, with a predicted 5% increase across the board.
The survey also detailed major areas of spending for companies, and the frontrunner with 56% of allotted budgets was server virtualization. Software, rather than infrastructure, and cloud movement rather than physical server build-up, are the focuses for 2011 as more and more companies make the jump from physical hosting to VPS options. Businesses hope to get more bang for their IT buck by spending less on staffing – only 38% – and more on moving their existing databases over to a virtualized platform.
While this movement doesn’t guarantee an upswing in the IT industry and the year ahead is still largely an unknown, some life has begun to return to the world of IT thanks to accessible and necessary VPS options.
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