Most Industries Plan Substantial Investments in IT to Support Remote Workers in 2021

• Organizations don’t want to be caught off-guard again by a COVID-like crisis
• Most industries believe work-from-home is here to stay and are prearing to invest accordingly in security
• Some industries will invest way over 100 percent in their IT departments

Companies and organizations across the world plan to increase IT spending by over 100 percent in 2021 to support the remote workforce, a new survey has found.

The pandemic took companies by surprise when it forced them to quickly accommodate remote workers, often connecting to the corporate infrastructure from unsecure devices. Now, organizations plan to drastically increase the resources dedicated to support remote workers, in many cases by over 100 percent.

It’s no longer enough to deal with the current crisis generated by the pandemic as companies want to be prepared to deal with problems. In fact, a Bitdefender study found that half of infosec professionals revealed their organizations lacked a contingency plan or didn’t know if they had a plan for a situation like COVID-19. Companies can avoid this situation in the future, but investments are crucial.

A survey from Teradici found that organizations plan to increase IT spending by well over 100 percent to support remote teams. It also looks like remote working is a strategy that worked for many organizations and will likely be used again, if necessary.

“Two-thirds of respondents shared they would change the way they shift employees to work remotely if faced with a similar or like event,” found the survey. “IT respondents also shared what they’ve learned since the pandemic amid new concerns ranging from security to managing dispersed teams for an extended period of time.”

The survey also found that 65% of IT professional respondents expressed being comfortable with the security level they were operating with after sending their employees home. The rest of infosec professionals believe that the current level of security wasn’t enough.

If there’s anything that most industries agree on, it’s that remote work is here to stay. Different segments of the economy, however, have differing numbers in mind when planning for future remote work.

While 56 percent of the tech sector, and 53 percent of the media and entertainment sector expect more than half of their workforce to continue working from home, education (43 percent), finance (38 percent), government and military (38 percent) and manufacturing, engineering/AEC (36 percent) organizations plan on less than half of their employees to work from home in the future.

Depending on each industry's profile, the planned investments in the IT department vary from 250 percent for tech to 191 percent for education, 155 percent for finance and 139 percent for government/military.