Life Sciences Survey Reveals IT Outlooks and Plans for 2013

By Bio-IT World Staff

April 4, 2013 | The first in an annual series, Bio-IT World's 2013 Life Sciences IT Survey captures a host of trends in bio-IT for the coming year. The forecast: increasing budgets, almost certain data increases, and more clouds.

Bio-IT World’s report dissects the responses of 121 senior executives in life sciences IT—CIOs and VPs—from a larger sample of 200 respondents. (60% of respondents herein are CIOs, the remainder VPs or senior VPs of IT.) Just under half the respondents work in biotech or pharma; the remainder work in government, hospital, academia, or vendor organizations.

The survey reports a robust trend for IT investment: 45% expect their IT budgets to increase this year, whereas only 8% anticipate a decrease. Two thirds of respondents are planning increases of 6-15%, while 20% expect even higher increases in spending. Even so, more than 60% said that budget constraints form the biggest challenge for 2013.

Cloud computing was the most highly cited area for IT spending in 2013, being highlighted by a small majority of respondents. Other key areas include security, workflow technologies and mobile technologies. One quarter of respondents said social media was a priority area for 2013.

In terms of the cloud, two thirds of respondents spend thousands a month on cloud storage, with 12% reporting expenditures greater than $25,000/month.

Half of respondents have engaged outside IT consultants. The most cited IT priorities were areas such as business intelligence and project management. Specific challenges include data storage, security, and staffing levels.

In terms of data storage, one quarter of respondents are already in the Petabyte storage range, with 7.5% storing more than 10 PB data. Fully 90% respondents expected their data repositories to grow in 2013. Roughly equal numbers (25-30%) reported using public clouds vs private clouds vs a hybrid cloud platform strategy.

While some 30% respondents reported using Amazon Web Services for their public cloud platform, the report details a long list of other vendor suppliers for cloud and in-house storage platforms. The most popular cloud application is email, but others scoring highly include Intranet and CRM. Nearly two thirds of respondents believe that all their IT platforms will be cloud-based within five years.

To download the free report, visit http://www.bio-itworld.com/IT_Survey_2013.