IT Spending Recovery to Accelerate in 2022

More than three-quarters of US companies expect to increase their IT spending in 2022 compared with their 2021 levels as the IT budget recovery that began last year picks up steam, according to our Covid-19 IT Buyer survey (see panel 1 above). The Covid-19 pandemic’s economic fallout forced about 85% of US companies to slash or freeze their IT budgets in 2020. The picture started to improve last year, when 40% of US companies reported that they increased their IT spending year over year while another third froze spending compared with 2020. This year, they’ll turn the corner; just 13% expect to cut their IT budgets, and only 10% will freeze them.

Companies are ramping up spending in all IT categories except for on-premise server hardware and on-premise software (see panel 2). Cloud-based security, public cloud infrastructure, core software as a service (SaaS), and other SaaS for remote work will see the largest budget increases in 2022 as the migration from on-premise infrastructure to the public cloud and SaaS continues to accelerate.