Top 2019 IT Trends for Small & Mid Sized Businesses

Small and mid-sized businesses are planning to beef up budgets for Information Technology in 2019, according to multiple surveys and IT think tanks.

Small businesses are looking mostly at bigger hardware budgets while large enterprises are increasing their cloud budgets in 2019, according to Spiceworks.

It’s no coincidence that the keynote speech at the 2019 Outsourcing World Summit is being given by WeWork Chief Growth Officer David Fano.  While the hot and growing coworking trend is a form of outsourcing, it also leads to more outsourcing of key services like IT.
BUDGET SHIFTS – As IT budgets grow, however, they are not necessarily pumping up the IT department itself, according to International Data Corporation (IDC). It forecasts technology spending by “line of business” decision makers will overtake technology spending by the IT department in 2019.
Businesses are forecast to spend $1.67 trillion on technology (hardware, software, and services) in 2018. Roughly half of that spending (50.5%) will come from the IT budget while the other half (49.5%) will come from the budgets of technology buyers outside of IT.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80 percent of enterprises will shut down their traditional data centers. In fact, 10 percent of organizations already have.
This data point does not necessarily mean everything is going to the cloud, according to Gartner, but IT leaders do need to start thinking about where current and future workloads will live based on business reasons, not technology reasons.

With a bigger presence in the cloud, businesses are also relying more on cybersecurity in the cloud. Outsourcing, artificial intelligence and data analytics are major concerns for the new year.
About 96 percent of businesses and other organizations were using the cloud in 2018, according to a RightScale survey.

“Almost every organization is using cloud at some level, with both public and private cloud adoption growing. On average, companies are using or experimenting with nearly five public and private clouds with a majority of workloads now running in cloud,” the survey said.
Public cloud is increasingly becoming the top focus among enterprises, and as a result public cloud use is growing more quickly.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – The rise of Artificial Intelligence will continue, mostly behind the scenes, according to an article in The Enterprisers Project.  That article quoted Tung Bui, professor and chair of the department of information technology at University of Hawaii, as saying the trend will see business systems getting smarter.

CYBERSECURITY – But cyber attacks will exploit artificial intelligence systems and use A.I. to make attacks more efficient, wrote two Symantec executives.
“The long-awaited commercial promise of AI has begun to materialize in recent years, with AI-powered systems already in use in many areas of business operations. Even as these systems helpfully automate manual tasks and enhance decision making and other human activities, they also emerge as promising attack targets, as many AI systems are home to massive amounts of data,” the Symantec article said.

AUGMENTED ANALYTICS – Along with those trends, you’ll hear a lot more about augmented analytics, Gartner reports:
“Data scientists now have increasing amounts of data to prepare, analyze and group — and from which to draw conclusions. Given the amount of data, exploring all possibilities becomes impossible… But augmented analytics represents a third major wave for data and analytics capabilities as data scientists use automated algorithms to explore more hypotheses.”