With the promise of a fresh start that each New Year brings, IT managers get to take a deep breath, clear their heads of any residual holiday egg-nog and dive head first into the new list of IT challenges in 2014.

The good news is that with the United States steadily climbing out of the recession, and corporate profits at all-time highs, IT budgets are growing in 2014. Techtarget.com recently released a survey of 4,100 IT professionals and the results showed that 65% of them expect a budget increase for the upcoming year.

Where will the extra money go? Productivity enhancements or infrastructure? Software or hardware?

Here are a few of the technology trends that we believe top companies will be embracing in 2014.

Bring Your Own Device

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) isn't a new trend, but it is one that is catching on by a greater number of companies each year. There are numerous benefits to companies with BYOD, like costs savings, increased productivity and general employee satisfaction.

The downside is that it requires an organization to let go of some of the control that it maintained over hardware and software choices that employees had and that it increases the potential of data loss and security breaches.

As companies implement BYOD policies, they are going to need to develop a set of robust policies around acceptable use, containerization of company data, and retrieval of employer data in the event of employee separation.

Modernizing Data Centers

Companies will embrace green technology as a cost-savings project as well as a public relations initiative. IT departments will lower energy consumption by upgrading servers and systems for better consolidation and efficiency. Also likely are data centers supplement traditional HVAC systems with new technology like chilled water heat exchanges.

Additionally, businesses of all sizes are going to place a greater emphasis on cloud services.

Disaster Recovery

It seems that every few weeks a natural disaster devastates a region of the country. Superstorm Sandy in 2012 woke a lot of executives when they saw their systems knocked off-line when New York City became paralyzed by flooding rains and wind.

Companies will focus heavily on finding the gaps in their disaster recovery plans and develop new strategies for data replication, and utilize services that safely keeps their business critical applications and data far away from their primary facilities.

Big Data

"Big Data", which exploded in 2013 will continue to drive businesses in 2014. Most experts agree that location intelligence, i.e., where a consumer is at any given time, will be extremely important to those in the finance, retail and service industries. Organizations will be looking for ways to converge their online and offline data to better target new and existing customers.

More companies will recognize that being able to provide their salespeople with information pooled from social channels, purchase history, and CRM means arming them with the big data context needed to engage customers and prospects with highly targeted messages." --Andy MacMillan, VP of Salesforce Data.com.
Source One Management Services is uniquely qualified to help our clients through complexities of sourcing IT services. Whether your company needs a cloud hosting provider or a MSP that focuses on delivering and supporting enterprise level applications, Source One can identify best-in-class suppliers that will help your business lower costs, improve processes, and drive positive results.

Happy New Year



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Jamie Burkart

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