In 2022, businesses will modernize IT infrastructure and update client devices to support the workforce in our increasingly hybrid world.

Computer hardware is an integral part of our lives, especially in the modern workplace, and Spiceworks Ziff Davis (SWZD) finds that it still accounts for the largest portion of overall tech spending, at 30% of overall IT budgets. 

This report dives into future and historical hardware data from SWZD’s State of IT, sharing previously unpublished data to offer even deeper insights into laptop, desktop and server trends it’s observed over the past several years. The survey highlights tech adoption plans that reveal spending shifts and opportunities for vendors as businesses modernize tech infrastructure to prepare for a hybrid future. 

Driven by the shift to remote work which places a premium on portable computing devices, companies plan to spend significantly more on laptops than on desktops — 19% of hardware budgets vs. 14%, respectively.

In server rooms around the world, on-premises infrastructure will evolve by offering greater performance and growing more intertwined with public clouds. For example, fast solid-state drives (SSDs) continue to gain traction as businesses look to alleviate storage bottlenecks associated with legacy hard drives. Already, 55% of businesses use SATA SSDs in on-premises servers. Within two years, most IT departments plan to equip servers with even faster flash storage in the form of SAS SSDs (56%) and still faster NVMe SSD drives (53%).

As more workloads run in AWS or Azure to support the remote workforce, on-premises infrastructure will evolve to integrate more seamlessly with public clouds, offering organizations more resilience and the flexibility to run workloads wherever it makes the most sense. The report indicates that within two years, most businesses (54%) will integrate physical servers with a public cloud. More than one-third of companies (37%) will take it a step further by using consumption-based “as-a-service” billing, which simplifies building hybrid clouds by aligning technology stacks and by bringing the cloud payment model to on-premises infrastructure.

For its survey, SWZD included responses from 1,145 IT buyers in organizations across North America and Europe.

Read the full report by SWZD.