Over 40 percent of utilities across Western Europe will increase external IT spending over this year, the latest IDC Energy Insights report showed.
According to the report, utilities will allocate approximately 55 percent of their IT budgets to maintain/run/compliance activities, while the remainder will be allocated to innovation and growth activities.
The report said over 40 percent of utilities plan to increase their external IT spending over the next 12 months, while 10.8 percent expects a decrease.
Western European utilities indicate that their leading business initiatives will include information security and data protection, which is also the only high-priority business initiative for these utilities.
Furthermore, they identified data loss and leakage prevention, mobile device security, and cloud security as their top 3 information security priorities for the next 12 months.
Arya MM