IT Q3 Report Card: Financial Crisis Impacting IT Decision-Making

OK, so we've endured about 60 days of the zig-zagging U.S. macroeconomy, and now we have a number of quarterly financial reports to view as early evidence about how bad the damage may be. How is IT in general holding up in this volatile environment, and what are the prospects of various sectors going forward?

That's what everyone wants to know, and about which few people are willing to go out on a limb and make predictions.

A few weeks ago, we took a cursory look at several areas within IT that seem to be positioned well despite the downturn, such as risk management, data storage, e-discovery, secure- and managed file transfer, e-mail archiving and enterprise search. Tools and online help involving all of these services are going to be needed by a large number of businesses in the recovery that inevitably will follow.

A survey of C-level executives conducted by venture capital law firm DLA Piper concluded that a majority of them believe that the U.S. economy downturn will last anywhere from 12 to 24 months but that it won't be nearly as deep and hurtful to IT as was during the 2000-2003 tech bubble.

A PriceWaterhouseCoopers security study finds that despite the economy, technology security spending will not dry up, although security implications may stall the enterprise adoption of cloud computing.

There are more stories of this kind sprinkled in the pages here at eWEEK, and others are certainly in the offing. We know that our readers are very interested in hearing what industry leaders have to say about all of this; eWEEK's page views have increased markedly this month, and certainly a lot of this interest is directly related to this topic and our coverage of it.

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