It’s that time of the year again when the weather is cold, the days are short, and CISOs and CIOs are finalizing their IT budgets.

Organizations are going all out when it comes to IT spending in 2025. According to Spiceworks’s annual State of IT report, more than half (64%) of organizations plan to boost their IT budgets in 2025, with overall IT spending expected to grow 9% year over year.

The 2025 wish list. CISOs and CIOs already have big plans for how they are using their newly inflated budgets. Carter Busse, CIO at Workato, an enterprise automation tool, told IT Brew that in the next fiscal year, his organization will go full throttle on investments in AI as part of its innovation efforts.

“We’re increasing our spend with AI providers, mainly foundational [large language models] and also some enterprise search tools as well,” he said.

Similar to Busse, Chuck Scharnagle, CIO of Revere Copper Products, one of the country’s oldest copper manufacturing companies, also has his eyes on innovation in 2025. Scharnagle told IT Brew that his priority for the next couple of years will be modernizing the systems within his organization.

Read the rest here.—BM

In a world where digital banking is essential, cybersecurity is key.

For experts like Lumin Digital’s Chief Risk and Security Officer Sean McElroy, in order to take charge of finance technology security, stakeholder and IT team leaders need to prioritize the same old solutions—basic cybersecurity hygiene and adapting responses to threats.

“Time is of the essence,” he told IT Brew.

Checking. There’s real cause for concern. The Cybernews Business Digital Index, updated on Oct. 9, found that a majority of finance companies they looked at—58%—scored a D or worse on their outcome reliability vulnerability assessment. A little over one-quarter, 26%, scored an F; only 11% scored an A. European companies did best of all geographic regions, but in each region, the D or worse score was common.

Much like other industries facing cyber threats, the digital banking and financial tech spheres need to apply tools like multi-factor authentication (MFA). Luckily, McElroy said, MFA adoption is no longer intimidating for users—but attackers are still trying different techniques.

“You might be dealing with brute force attacks, where the next kind of data breach, exposure of passwords, can be reused because people still are reusing the same passwords everywhere,” McElroy said.

Read more here.—EH