How to Face the IT Industry’s Biggest Challenges Today

All industry leaders face the same question repeatedly over time: how quickly can your organization adapt to unprecedented challenges?

Unfortunately, it took the COVID-19 pandemic to answer this looming matter across industries. 

The IT industry today is no stranger to the effect of this world-changing event, as this brought about many sudden changes within the sector.

As a matter of fact, IT asset management software was in demand, as businesses scrambled to adapt to the digital transformation, remote work, disruption of supply chains, slowed-down production, and post-pandemic workplace burnout.

This article will help your organization prepare for the current IT industry challenges by looking into potential problems, how you can address them, and how you can navigate moving forward.

6 Key Challenges in the IT Industry and How to Overcome Them

1. Hybrid work environments

The emergence of hybrid work has shaped culture, business processes, and the way employees perform their job functions.

Seeing this trend continue, companies that do not invest in a well-designed architecture for hybrid work environments may get left behind by the competitors. 

Prioritize a remote-first approach for your business and invest in systems and software that enable remote collaboration and communication. By doing this, you will be giving your remote employees equal opportunities for efficiency and productivity.

2. Cloud migration

Businesses shifting to cloud computing services has been one of the most significant tech trends in recent years.

A 2019 study suggests that software running on traditional servers will halve in the next three years amidst the shift to cloud technology.

A more recent Gartner 2020 survey found that 70% of organizations using cloud services plan to ramp up spending due to changes brought by the pandemic. 

Cloud migration can help your company reduce IT costs, increase efficiency, improve security, boost performance, and make room for innovation and development.

However, moving company data to a cloud is a complex and challenging process that requires careful planning and execution.

Therefore, your business should be familiar with the possible challenges of cloud migration to have the solutions ready once you venture into integration.

3. Cybersecurity threats

Companies were forced to change operational approaches during the pandemic, with some deploying work-from-home initiatives and cloud migration to continue productivity during lockdowns.

Unfortunately, an IBM report suggests organizations may have overlooked security measures amidst the chaos of rapidly changing IT and business processes. Costs of data breaches saw an all-time high of $4.24 million per incident during the pandemic.

A significant contributor to the increase of cybercrime during the pandemic was cybercriminals exploiting corporate data, customer information, and intellectual property from employees working at home.

Managing the security of hybrid work environments will be a pressing challenge for your IT department.

Still, by educating your workforce on the best practices of cybersecurity and putting in place a wide range of security measures, you can decrease the chances of suffering losses from a cyberattack.

4. Annual increase and unexpected IT expenditures

In recent years, IT spending has been steadily increasing. In fact, it’s on pace to exceed $4.4 trillion in 2022 as more organizations recognize that tech integration is the way forward.

Unfortunately, 2022 also brings considerable challenges to the industry.

A Russia-Ukraine war, a supply chain crisis, a chip shortage, and rising inflation rates are all simultaneously happening, creating unpredictable price increases and unexpected expenses that can add up and surpass a company’s annual budget.

To counter the potential increase in expenses in the coming years without decreasing efficiency, productivity, and output, your company should explore solutions that can reduce IT costs, such as license management and optimization tools. This technology will enable your company to scale while helping cut costs simultaneously.

Utilizing software asset management tools can help you track assets, monitor usage, and organize users, purchases, and tasks is an effective way to reduce costly downtime.

Tools such as the LicenseAnalyzer2022, for instance, can grant you an enterprise overview of your organization’s software usage by showing how, when and by whom assets are being used over time, by location, business unit, or project group.

5. The Great Resignation

The pandemic took a toll on the workforce of numerous industries, some more than others, as it instigated a “Great Resignation” phenomenon. The computer and IT industry are expected to take a heavy hit from this massive job switch, with 40% of employees resigning or planning to leave by the end of 2022.

Your company can evade the impact of this mass resignation by following how Open iT managed to overcome the problem.

They retained their 4.3-year median tenure compared to the industry’s global average of 4.1 years by launching initiatives to make work easy for employees during the pandemic.

These include but are not limited to keeping the annual salary increase, adjusting hours, giving mental well-being seminars, providing internet allowance, and issuing work-from-home mandates, among others.

6. Fast evolution of software

Before companies can access software and integrate them into the business, licenses need to be activated, and software licensing is a constantly changing landscape.

As companies adopt more applications and software, licensing and managing these technologies may become complicated.

Therefore, it would be best to phase out legacy or grandfathered software and hardware assets and adopt more efficient software licensing and IT asset management practices such as cloud asset management.

IT Will Move Forward

Undoubtedly, the IT industry is significantly different from what it was a decade ago.

So, be it technological advancements, business requirements, or pandemic disruptions, IT will find a reason to move forward.

No company can thoroughly prepare and address unprecedented challenges, but all have an equal opportunity to learn from them and adapt. 

If you think it’s your company’s turn to adapt to the changing times, schedule a demo with Open iT.

Learn how its software solutions can help your business better manage software licenses and adopt new IT industry trends.

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