You’re probably ready to integrate Generative AI (GenAI) in 2025 if you haven’t already — who wants to get left behind?
Most midmarket companies need to modernize their IT environments before they can truly leverage AI’s potential.
But what does it take to modernize? This table outlines the top-line differences between a traditional IT environment with some cloud services (think pre-pandemic) and a modernized environment that’s ready to run AI.
Before-and-After: What modern, GenAI-ready IT looks like
| Before: Traditional IT Environment |
After: GenAI-Ready IT Environment |
|
| Infrastructure | Your business relies mostly on physical servers located in your office.
Scaling up operations means buying and setting up new hardware and managing any limitations related to physical location, server capacity, internet capacity, software platforms, data capacity, etc. |
Your business runs mostly on cloud services.
You can scale operations up or down quickly and only pay for what you use. You have access to powerful cloud-based resources for AI workloads, which are not limited to a particular set of resources and can provision what you need practically on demand. |
| Software | Updating your business applications can be a complex process that disrupts operations, and vendor sprawl complicates management.
For data analytics, capabilities are limited and often can provide historical insights but lack predictive or real-time capabilities. |
You are subscribing to SaaS applications that update automatically and have standard built-in integration capabilities.
Modern architecture also provides the ability to perform predictive analytics, real-time insights, and personalized customer experiences. |
| Security | You have basic security measures that protect your office network — anti-virus, firewalls, and possibly MFA.
Ensuring compliance with regulations is a manual and reactive process, often involving extensive documentation and audits. |
You have advanced, automated, auditable security measures that constantly monitor and protect your data and systems from threats.
You have set boundaries for who can access your data, including via AI, and compliance is managed through automated systems, ensuring adherence to standards in real time. |
| Operations | IT teams often operate in a reactive mode, spending a lot of time fixing problems as they arise. Automation is minimal, and many IT processes and management tasks require significant human intervention. | Your IT team uses automated tools and processes to proactively monitor and manage systems proactively, preventing issues from becoming problems that impact operations. Greater efficiency enables your team to focus on strategic initiatives. |
| Data | Information is scattered across different departments and systems, making it unorganized and unstructured. It’s hard to get a complete picture of your business. | Cloud data systems use advanced tools to ingest and analyze structured and unstructured data. Data accessible in cloud infrastructure is ready to be leveraged for productivity, analysis, and decision-making. |
GenAI modernization and other focus areas for your 2025 IT operations budget
Modernizing your IT environment for GenAI enables your entire company to become more agile and efficient — it’s not just about incorporating AI. It’s about running a company that can continue to compete and thrive.
In our next post, we’ll cover AI spending trends and offer recommendations for developing a budgeting strategy for 2025 that balances speed and thoroughness. We’ll also share tips on achieving some quick wins with GenAI as you modernize your IT environment.
Leapfrog has been helping clients make complex IT budgeting decisions for more than 25 years. For this coming year, we think you should focus your spending on these three areas while continuing to meet your IT production expectations:
- Embracing AI and IT-environment modernizations
- Updating cybersecurity strategies amid new and rising threats
- Reducing expenses and improving efficiency through consolidation and automation
For tips on getting your budget-planning process on the right path, please see 7 Key Questions for IT Budgeting for 2025.
If you would like more information about how Leapfrog delivers holistic IT and Cybersecurity services, we invite you to get in touch. We’re here to help.
