Despite a number of high profile technology failures and an increasing number of cyber attacks, fewer than half of all companies are planning to increase IT staff, according to a new survey.

Only 49% of all companies are planning to increase IT staff in 2017, while budgets for IT are shown to be growing slightly. This is a slight growth over 2016, where only 46% of companies planned to increase headcount, but is a decrease from 2014 and 2015, when 52% and 50% of companies, respectively, were recruiting IT staff.

The report suggests that the ongoing growth of software as a service (SaaS), cloud platforms, virtualisation, and increasing automation is allowing IT departments to increase service levels without requiring more staff.

While the overall growth is flat, the report shows growth in specific high level skills. Business and data analysts, as well as security experts are in greater demand, while the shift to cloud services has increased demand for staff with procurement and vendor management.

The composition of IT staff is also changing. The survey data provides a breakdown of roles within organisations as follows:

• 16.8% – Application development
• 11.6% – IT managers
• 10.3% – Desktop support
• 9.9% – Application maintenance & support
• 8.1% – Server support (a decrease from 12.1% in 2012)

Again, the move to virtualisation and automation is given for the decrease in server support staff.

The research is based on a survey of over 200 IT executives in the US and Canada across a range of organisations. The full IT Spending and Staffing Benchmarks 2017/2018 study is available online. A free executive summary is also available.