The world is experiencing a period of economic uncertainty and the IT industry is feeling the effects, but that doesn’t mean it should stop investing.
Edgio, the platform of choice for speed, security, and simplicity at the edge, identifies how organisations can maximise IT budgets in today’s uncertain economic times.
According to a recent Gartner analysis, CIOs expect IT budgets to increase by an average of 5.1% in 2023 – lower than the expected global inflation rate of 6.5%.
To improve IT operations and restore business, a company’s management spending must focus on modernising legacy systems and optimising tools for greater efficiency and less redundancy.
Beware of the ‘invisible’ tool tax
Almost half of DevOps use two to five tools and 41% use six to 10. This dispersion costs companies $2.5 million per year and, in fact, 69% of operations and development teams want to upgrade their tools because of hidden costs, insufficient agility, and the time that maintenance takes away from security and compliance management. In other words, companies are paying an invisible tax on expanding the number of tools, which adds to the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) and reduces the return on investment.
Although three disjointed tools can somehow be put together, they are not necessarily well orchestrated. To reduce costs, it is necessary to have a tool that integrates and manages the available tools. This means investing in a holistic and unified platform rather than having to rely on several different providers.
A successful attack costs more than a security solution
New vulnerabilities and zero-day attacks are taking place every year and at an increasing rate. Threats are growing faster than the company staff that must defend them. Seventy-one percent of CIOs rate the security of their internal organisations as good or excellent. However, 43% feel fairly or rather unprepared for the future.
To help, ask yourself the following questions:
- Does your provider have the necessary network scalability to block increasingly large attacks, to maintain the highest levels of reliability and performance?
- Do you use automation and/or machine learning to help you adapt to changing threats?
- Are you able to deploy virtual patches and update the WAAP ruleset across your network to immediately mitigate zero-day threats?
- Do you have flexible models, including self-service with simple and predictable pricing?
If the answer to one or more of these questions is no, it is time to re-evaluate your current solution and consider a solution that reduces friction points through automated solutions at the edge.
“Sometimes, the best ideas come about during difficult times. And, ironically, the smartest investment for a company’s out-of-control technology spend is more technology. It is simply a matter of choosing the most suitable one to overcome uncertainties and grow revenue,” said Ajay Kapur, Chief Technology Officer at Edgio. “Forward-thinking companies must look for ways to solve the challenges through scalable, automated operations that only the edge can provide. Companies must find an edge-enabled solution that integrates security and application performance into the development process to achieve efficiency and cost reduction and facilitate compliance.”
Invest in the Edge
Modern Edge solutions represent a generational change, extending the capabilities of the Cloud and reducing the costs of assembling fragmented solutions and managing servers. A natural upgrade of on-premise solutions.
Going back to the early glory days of the Cloud, the new technology offered flexibility and lower TCO. However, these offerings were still the same as on-premise technology. Servers had been replaced by cloud servers and network-attached storage by cloud storage. If there was a spike in traffic, the Cloud offered the flexibility of providing more infrastructure, but the work of scaling up (and scaling down) was up to the team.
The new frontier of the edge eliminates this. Developers can activate applications, which are automatically hosted and deployed as needed, without having to manage servers. Modern Edge platforms are built to unify application tools, reduce TCO, and increase efficiency. This can double developer velocity.
Many companies do not realise that upgrading legacy technology stacks can be a hidden source of increased revenue. According to McKinsey, developer speed is an often-overlooked aspect that can quintuple revenues for all companies.
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