Top insights for IT pros
From cybersecurity and big data to cloud computing, IT Brew covers the latest trends shaping business tech in our 4x weekly newsletter, virtual events with industry experts, and digital guides.
It’s that time of the year again when the weather is cold, the days are short, and CISOs and CIOs are finalizing their IT budgets.
Organizations are going all out when it comes to IT spending in 2025. According to Spiceworks’s annual State of IT report, more than half (64%) of organizations plan to boost their IT budgets in 2025, with overall IT spending expected to grow 9% year over year.
The 2025 wish list. CISOs and CIOs already have big plans for how they are using their newly inflated budgets. Carter Busse, CIO at Workato, an enterprise automation tool, told IT Brew that in the next fiscal year, his organization will go full throttle on investments in AI as part of its innovation efforts.
“We’re increasing our spend with AI providers, mainly foundational [large language models] and also some enterprise search tools as well,” he said.
Similar to Busse, Chuck Scharnagle, CIO of Revere Copper Products, one of the country’s oldest copper manufacturing companies, also has his eyes on innovation in 2025. Scharnagle told IT Brew that his priority for the next couple of years will be modernizing the systems within his organization.
“In the last couple years, we’ve been working on our infrastructure,” Scharnagle said. “Now our focus is more on the network and on the application side of the house.”
Meanwhile, SailPoint CISO Rex Booth told IT Brew that he looks forward to having more leeway to justify spending for more than just “the essentials” this upcoming fiscal year. With a “more generous” budget, Booth plans to focus more on government risk and compliance efforts within his organization.
“Those kinds of investments are harder to make in lean times, but making that investment this year should make us more efficient overall, and I’m super excited about it,” Booth said.
So last year. Security leaders also shared with IT Brew areas they planned to limit their spending in the next fiscal year. Busse told IT Brew that he sees his organization’s spending toward customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning software systems remaining flat next year.
Scharnagle told IT Brew that recent efforts around revamping Revere’s data centers, including replacing the infrastructure’s generator and fire system, have paid off as the center has finally become “rock solid” and an area the company can pull back on when it comes to spending.
While Booth told IT Brew that there are no areas his organization currently invests in that he doesn’t anticipate spending toward in the next year, he noted that he is currently looking for ways to “de-duplicate” services that overlap and has already reconsidered the need for a standalone service provided by his company’s cyber insurance policy that no longer made sense to have.
“We were able to remove that service out of our budget and reallocate the funds elsewhere,” Booth said.