Rackspace Technology’s new report, Technology Budgets: Managing Shifting Priorities, examines the proliferation of IT budget management across organizations, internationally and results indicate that it is becoming difficult to maintain visibility into where and how IT budgets are being spent.
As rising tech costs bring budgetary concerns, there is growing recognition of the importance of optimizing costs through the cloud. However, the research found that many IT leaders lack either the understanding or the skills to take full advantage of its cost optimization potential. Despite nearly all companies leveraging cost optimization tools within their cloud infrastructure (96%), a lack of understanding may be limiting their ability to seize their cost-controlling benefits.
As little as less than half (44%) of IT decision-makers actually understand what cloud cost governance and cloud cost optimization are and how they differ. This not only signals that there may be significant room for improvement in cost optimization strategies but also highlights how many businesses face the risk of cloud sprawl and other unwanted costs at this crucial time. Indeed, this is reflected in IT leaders’ confidence in their ability to optimize costs: about two fifths (36%) feel that while they or their teams are empowered to make IT budget decisions, they lack the skills to do so. This is despite a vast majority (75%) of companies having a dedicated team or individual in house whose responsibility it is to manage IT budgets and costs.
Cloud has emerged as the central focus of modern business operations, with almost two thirds (64%) of IT leaders seeing cloud infrastructure as their priority when budgeting.
Cloud is also viewed as an effective way of cutting costs, with nearly half (46%) of IT leaders planning to optimize their existing cloud infrastructure and about two fifths (38%) intending to deploy new cloud infrastructure in order to make savings. In fact, of those companies that had planned to either move to multi or hybrid cloud (76%) or develop cloud-based solutions (88%) in 2020, three quarters have now accelerated these plans (74% and 77% respectively).
