ITPro Today's 2024 IT Priorities Report: Complementary Guide

ITPro Today's 2024 IT Priorities Report — which you can download for free — offers detailed insight into a variety of IT trends, including cybersecurity initiatives and spending, how IT departments are approaching AI, and how remote work trends are changing, to name just a few of the topic areas that the report discusses.

But when we ran the survey on which the report is based, we uncovered so much information that we couldn't fit all of it into the original report. Not wanting to keep the additional insights to ourselves, we've prepared the following complementary guide, which explores the data that the main report doesn't discuss.

This analysis is based on charts included as an appendix in the original report, but we didn't interpret at the time. As you'll learn below, this data adds further depth and nuance to the findings of the main report, while also highlighting some additional notable themes about the state of IT.

Low Rates of Storage and Desktop Spending

As the main survey report notes, cybersecurity tops the list of initiatives driving IT spending in 2024. But of equal importance — at least if you want to understand what's happening in IT today — is areas where companies are spending less aggressively, yet where you might expect the opposite.

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One such area is storage. The amount of data that the typical business has to store has grown steadily in recent years, and the AI boom means that data volumes will probably expand even more. Yet only slightly more than a quarter of IT pros say that storage is a key spending priority this year (Figure 1).

Figure 1

This is likely because cloud-based storage has become so inexpensive and scalable that businesses are now able to accommodate ever-increasing storage needs without having to invest extensively in storage initiatives. That analysis is supported by findings about which storage-related projects IT departments planned to undertake in 2024. Cloud storage initiatives top the list (Figure 2).

Figure 2

IT spending data also showed low rates of prioritization for spending on desktops, which only 16% of respondents identified as a top area of budgetary focus. Additional data about desktop-related projects points at several reasons why. One is a shift toward software as a service (SaaS) and application virtualization (Figure 3), which reduces the hardware requirements of traditional desktop computers because applications don't run locally. Another is investing in VDI and cloud desktops, which also reduce the capacity requirements of traditional, on-prem desktops.

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Figure 3

Application Deployment Trends

As we just noted, taking advantage of SaaS is a major focus of IT departments at present. But which types of SaaS apps, exactly, are they using?

Survey data suggests that productivity apps like Microsoft Office 365 and Google Workspace top the list (Figure 4). Half of respondents said they planned to deploy these apps in 2024 (based on question wording, this figure likely includes companies that are already using these solutions, in addition to those that plan to deploy them for the first time).

Figure 4

The finding that 22% of IT pros report deployments of social collaboration software is also notable. While we didn't ask about such deployments in detail, the takeaway here seems to be that more businesses are investing in software that helps their employees collaborate or socialize — possibly in an effort to help build cohesive workforce communities in an era when many employees are not physically proximate to each other.

Business Application Deployments

As noted in Figure 4 above, 42% of IT pros report that their organizations are deploying enterprise business applications in 2024. When we asked which types of business apps they're using, answers varied widely (Figure 5):

Figure 5

Many of the responses — like finance, customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management (BPM) — are unsurprising because these are staple types of business software. Of greater note are social media management and monitoring apps, whose deployment suggests that businesses are increasingly keen to monitor how employees represent their brands online.

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Marketing automation software deployment is also notable. While we can't say for sure, we surmise that greater investment in marketing automation tools reflects growing interest among businesses in using new types of technology, especially AI, to automate functions such as marketing.

Low Adoption of Multicloud and Hybrid Cloud

Just a few years ago, multicloud — meaning the use of multiple cloud platforms at once — was all the rage. But currently, only 20% of survey respondents say they are using multicloud (Figure 6).

Slightly more (26%) report using hybrid cloud, another trendy type of cloud model, which merges public and private cloud resources.

Figure 6

It's possible that this finding underreports the percentage of organizations using either multicloud or hybrid because some respondents might have interpreted the question as asking only whether they plan to use one of these models for the first time in 2024. Still, it's interesting that adoption rates for both hybrid cloud and multicloud appear relatively low.

AI Software Project Trends

As noted in the main survey report, a majority of businesses say they will at least plan AI initiatives in 2024. But fewer than one-third said they'll actually deploy AI-related software projects (Figure 7):

Figure 7

That said, AI projects are nonetheless at the top of the list of software project types, suggesting that interest in AI among businesses is widespread — even if only a minority are in a position to implement their own AI software projects.

Note as well that it's possible that some organizations are using third-party AI services, and therefore don't plan to implement their own AI software but are still making use of AI.

Note, too, that only 16% of respondents reported plans to implement machine learning (ML) software projects. Since ML is a subset of AI, this finding suggests that a fair number of AI initiatives that businesses plan to implement themselves involve AI software (such as rules-based anomaly detection tools) that uses techniques other than ML.

Network Management Trends

In the realm of networking, a number of technologies and practices — like software-defined networking (SDN), network virtualization, and mobile networking — have long been trendy. Yet, according to survey findings, the bulk of networking initiatives focus on more basic processes, including network management and monitoring and VPNs (Figure 8).

Figure 8

This data suggests that, although some businesses are focusing on investing in more advanced types of networking solutions, many are prioritizing the fundamentals.

Mobile Investments

A similar trend applies to mobility projects. There, too, the most popular types of initiatives center on standard practices like deploying mobile enterprise applications and implementing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs (Figure 9).

Figure 9

More advanced mobile initiatives, like adopting wearables and building an internal enterprise app store, are further down the list — although it's worth noting that nearly half of respondents said their organizations either are not investing in mobility projects at all in 2024, or they don't know about mobility plans. This means that, on the whole, mobility is not a major area of focus.

What IT Pros Want and Think

The survey charts we analyzed above and in the main report tell only part of the story of what's happening in the IT world today. To capture the full picture, we also gave respondents the opportunity to answer open-ended questions about which types of IT projects they think would deliver greatest ROI (Figure 10):

Figure 10

The table above captures just some of the more popular and notable answers. As it shows, responses varied widely, but AI (and AI-adjacent topics, like automation and low-code/no-code) were a common theme.

Several respondents also mentioned initiatives related to user training and education, suggesting that in the eyes of at least some IT pros, the challenge organizations face lies not in implementing the best technology, but in making sure their users can actually use that technology effectively.

We also asked IT pros what they would do if they had an unlimited IT budget (Figure 11):

Figure 11

Here again, AI-centric responses abound. But also notable are answers such as conducting usability and adoption studies to determine what customers "want that they will actually USE," which hints at a perceived disconnect between what IT teams are asked to do and what users want them to do. Better infrastructure — including more capable workstations and network connections — are also clear priorities in the eyes of some respondents.