Bang for your IT buck

By all accounts the economy is stronger now than it was 12 months ago, but it is also clear that companies are still moving cautiously, and for the bulk of IT that means continuing to do more with what you have, which is at least better than doing more with less.

OUTLOOK: Virtual, mobile, social endeavors drive IT in 2012

According to Network World research, some 20% of IT shops got budget increases for 2012, while 39% are operating with the same funding they had last year (and presumably being asked to make those funds do more here in the new year). An unlucky 15% had budget cuts and, when the research was fielded last fall, 26% were still uncertain where their budget would end up.

The good news, of course, is there is a boatload of new technologies that can, in fact, help make IT more efficient, everything from cloud computing to virtualization techs that let you safely enable use of personal techs in the enterprise. The trick is figuring out how to incrementally embrace all of the new as you break free of the bonds of your highly optimized legacy stacks.

No mean trick. But if this stuff was easy it wouldn't be so important.

Happy New Year.

Read more about infrastructure management in Network World's Infrastructure Management section.