Where Your IT Dollars Are Headed In 2017

Gartner's 10 Tech Predictions That Will Change IT

We asked readers of InformationWeek to tell us about IT spending priorities for 2017. Our flash poll, conducted October 2 to November 9, 2016, revealed that cloud is far and away your biggest spending priority for the year ahead.

The poll -- which was conducted on the InformationWeek website and via email newsletters -- received 351 responses. While the results are not intended to be scientific, they offer a good snapshot of what IT professionals are focused on.

More than a third of respondents (36%) cited cloud as the technology that will receive the greatest investment at their companies in 2017.

Nearly one fifth of respondents cited data management as their top area of investment, while 13% cited infrastructure.

The responses align with IDC's predictions that IT spending on cloud infrastructure -- servers, enterprise storage, and Ethernet switches for the enterprise private cloud and colocation services -- will increase by 15.5% in 2016 to reach $37.1 billion.

[Which IT staff jobs pay the most? Read InformationWeek 2016 Salary Survey: 10 Best-Paying IT Jobs.]

The long-term IDC forecast sees spending on IT infrastructure for cloud environments growing at a 13.1% compound annual growth rate, which will result in a total spend of $59.5 billion in 2020, or 48.7% of the total spending on enterprise IT infrastructure.

Overall, IDC predicted information technology spending worldwide will hit $2.7 trillion by 2020, led by the financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors.

(Image: Aleksandra Gigowska/Shutterstock)

According to Gartner, global IT spending is slated to rise slightly in 2017, with enterprises looking to invest about $3.5 trillion on technology in the next year -- an increase of 2.9% compared to the estimated figure for 2016, according to Gartner.

Business intelligence (BI), analytics, cloud services, digital market management, and security are among the top technology areas identified as spending priorities by respondents to the Gartner 2017 CIO Agenda survey.

What are your IT spending priorities for 2017? How do they stack up to the findings in our flash poll? Tell us all about it in the comments section below.