IT Trends & Technology

It is easy to think of outsourcing as just a way to reduce costs and overhead. Organizations contract with an outside vendor to perform an IT function or to provide an IT service that they can’t, either because their own internal costs to deliver it have become prohibitive or because it no longer fits their core capabilities.

As businesses of all sizes become increasingly dependent on information technology, it’s no secret that it’s becoming harder and harder to attract and retain talented IT professionals to keep all their systems and hardware up and running. Making matters worse, business is becoming more data-driven, software is becoming more ubiquitous, and the Internet of Things is bringing technology into more everyday items, all of which require IT professionals to work to stay ahead of the trends while also tending to the basic blocking and tackling of modern IT services.

It’s no secret that IT spending has risen dramatically over the past several years. This rise is because of a number of factors, including the rise in cybersecurity vectors, widespread adoption of IoT devices, consumer preference for online card payment transactions, and overall trends in the digital transformation, to name a few.

Global IT spending on enterprise software alone almost doubled from just over $225 billion in 2009 to an estimated $424 billion by 2019. Year over year, IT spending is expected to increase 5.5 percent.

One trend that theoretically should lower IT costs is application containerization. It is analogous to how the shipping industry uses standardized containers to ship cargo around the world. The application is packaged along with all dependencies, including runtime components isolated from other processes.

While a recent study by SAP Center for Business Insight shows that digital transformation in healthcare is growing, the slow pace of that growth can be directly attributed how healthcare organizations are grappling with some of the most significant IT challenges. While the use and plethora of digital platforms have become standard, the resulting big data, the need for interoperability and real-time analytics, as well as the need for greater mobility and security, are all setting the stage for more challenges moving forward.