According to a recent Bloomberg Intelligence survey, chief information officers (CIOs) are prioritizing cybersecurity and cloud in their IT spending.
Budget priorities are shifting from servers, storage and networking solutions to large-scale language model (LLM) deployment, the survey found, with Microsoft the preferred vendor for cloud deployment.
However, since the last iteration of the study in December 2023, cloud has fallen to second place in IT spending priorities, replaced by cybersecurity. This increase is likely a result of the CrowdStrike outage, which occurred during the course of the study and highlighted the risk of business disruption. Servers, storage, and networking have also declined somewhat.
The broad focus on cloud is a result of pressures to remain competitive using emerging AI technology, the report suggests, with many companies laying the foundations for future AI infrastructure with foundational models, GPUs and cloud technology.
As these foundations solidify, the study noted that many companies are moving from proof of concept to deploying their AI co-pilots. When considering which public cloud provider offers the best value, scalability, and performance for data analytics, Microsoft’s Azure came out on top in the July 2024 survey, selected by 38% of respondents. It swapped places with Amazon AWS, which fell 17 percentage points since the December study.
Commenting on the findings, Mandeep Singh, Senior Technology Analyst and author of the report, said, “We are seeing a significant shift in CIO preferences as enterprise AI moves towards deploying its co-pilots, with 66% of respondents saying they are in the process of deploying it, up from 32% in December. This, coupled with new visibility on the need for robust cybersecurity spending following the CrowdStrike disruption, has significantly changed CIO spending needs, even in the last six months.”
Bloomberg Intelligence expects spending on AI models and workloads to increase over the next year, he said, as more companies move toward larger-scale deployments.
©Markets Media Europe 2024
