Three of every four CFOs plan to increase their organizations’ IT spending this year. Spending on cloud infrastructure services rose 20% last year. Unemployment among IT workers is lower than the national average. And two types of cyber attacks are bigger threats than ever.
That’s some of the latest from leading IT industry watchers and researchers. And here’s your Performance Intensive Computing roundup.
CFOs: More IT Spending
If it’s true that a rising tide lifts all boats, you might prepare to set sail now. A new survey finds that a majority of corporate CFOs plan to boost their technology budgets this year.
The survey, conducted this past fall by research group Gartner, reached just over 300 CFOs and other senior finance leaders. Gartner published its findings this month, and they include:
- Over three-quarters of CFOs surveyed (77%) plan to boost spending in the technology category this year.
- Nearly half the CFOs (47%) plan to increase technology spending by 10% or more this year compared with last year.
- Nearly a third (30%) plan to increase technology spending by 4% to 9% year-on-year.
- And fewer than one in 10 CFOs (9%) plan to decrease technology spending this year.
Cloud Infrastructure: Spending Rises
One of those lifted ships: cloud infrastructure services.
In the fourth quarter of 2024, global spending on these services rose 20% year-on-year, according to new metrics from market watcher Canalys.
Global spending for the full year also rose 20%, Canalys said. Spending on cloud infrastructure services hit $321.3 billion last year, up from $267.7 billion in 2023.
The key driver of the growth? That would be AI. The technology “significantly accelerated” cloud adoption, Canalys says.
Looking ahead, Canalys expects global spending on cloud infrastructure services this year to rise by another 19%.
Tech Employment: Mostly Strong
Also on an upswing: technology employment.
New figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor show that across all sectors of the U.S. economy, tech occupations grew by about 228,000 jobs.
Within the tech industry alone, the picture was more mixed. More than 13,700 jobs were filled in IT services and software development, but in telecom, 7,900 workers lost their jobs.
Tech is still a good industry to work in. The industry’s unemployment rate in January was 2.9%, compared with a national rate of 4%.
“Tech hiring activity was solid across the key categories,” says Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, an industry trade group. “Employers continue to balance the need for foundational tech talent and skills with the push into next-gen fields.”
Security: Phishing, DDoS Both Worsen
Two kinds of cyber threats are getting worse:
- The number of phishing attempts blocked worldwide last year by Kaspersky rose 26% over the previous year.
- Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks increased by 82% last year, according to a new report from Zayo Group.
Kaspersky, a cybersecurity and digital privacy company, says it blocked more than 893 million phishing attempts last year, up from 710 million in 2023.
In many instances, the attackers mimicked the websites and social media feeds of well-known brands, including Airbnb, Booking and TikTok. Others falsely presented product giveaways from celebrities. In one, actress Jennifer Aniston was falsely shown promoting a giveaway of 10,000 laptop computers — a giveaway that did not exist.
Separately, Zayo Group, a provider of communications infrastructure, has published its biannual DDoS insights report, and the findings aren’t pretty. The attack volume rose from 90,000 incidents in 2023 to 165,000 incidents last year.
In a DDoS attack, the bad guys make a machine or network resource unavailable by disrupting the services of a host connected to a network. Often they do this by flooding the target system with requests, overloading the system and preventing requests that are legit from being fulfilled
In one worrisome change, the bad guys are increasing the scale of their DDoS attacks by using large botnets, compromised IoT devices and AI.
“The sophistication of DDoS attacks continues to grow,” says Max Clauson, a senior VP at Zayo. “Cybercriminals are finding ways to exploit cloud services, higher-bandwidth availability, and new vulnerabilities in software and network protocols.”
Also, Zayo finds the targets of DDoS attacks are shifting:
- Telecom is still the most targeted sector, representing 42% of all observed incidents. But that’s down from 48% in 2023.
- Attacks on the finance industry grew. In 2023 finance represented just 3.5% of all observed instances. In 2024 that doubled to 7%.
- In healthcare, the total number of DDoS attacks more than tripled from 2023 to 2024, rising by a whopping 223%.