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Digital Transformation

New study highlights IT spending priorities for 2013

Virtualisation and data centre consolidation are key priorities for 2013, new research has found.

Many IT professionals and departments in the UK believe that virtualisation and data centre consolidation are the main infrastructure priorities over the next 12 months.

A Computer Weekly study questioned 400 IT executives and 71 per cent said that they would use on-premise hardware or software deployment models in 2013, with 49 per cent of the respondents wanting to focus on server virtualisation implementation, while 36 per cent named datacentre consolidation as their top priority.

Other popular responses included citing software as a service (30 per cent), platform as a service (19 per cent) and selecting public cloud as their deployment model for 2013 (13 per cent). 

Although it appears that cloud computing is well down on the list of priorities, this is not necessarily the case, as virtualisation and datacentre consolidation are viewed as fundamental steps towards implementing a cloud-based infrastructure.

Virtualisation will help companies to reduce the cost of their IT hardware, while datacentre consolidation regulates IT sprawl.

The report found that British firms are set to continue their investment in in-house datacentres, with 43 per cent scheduled to increase their budgets. Around a third are also set to make more funds available to facilitate their move to the cloud.

Key reasons for this increased spend were found to be improved business continuity and disaster recovery, storage virtualisation, backup for virtual servers and upgrading to Windows Server 2012 and VMware vSphere 5.1.

Away from the could, the research revealed that other 2013 IT priorities in the UK will be the implementation of desktop virtualisation, migrating to Windows 7 and planning and rolling out bring your own device policies.

However, Computer Weekly pointed out that one strange revelation was that even though there would be a lot of investment this year, around 30 per cent of IT professionals said they had no plans regarding big data management and analytics in 2013, while similarly another 16 per cent were not aware of their companies’ big data management plans.