With digital transformation dominating the business agenda, IT pros are under pressure to create a modern-day tech foundation sturdy enough to drive that change as they head into 2017. What milestones are they aiming for in the year ahead? Where should they direct their limited resources?

According to Computerworld's Forecast 2017 survey, IT professionals will prioritize security, analytics, XaaS or "as a service" technology, virtualization and mobile apps in the coming year. If you're thinking of adding those technologies to your own 2017 to-do list, read on for findings from our survey, along with real-world advice from other IT leaders.

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Security is a top priority at the Bank of Labor, but the financial institution updates its formal information security policy only once a year, maybe twice, regardless of what's happening in the ever-changing threat landscape.

That's not to say that the union bank ignores emerging threats such as new malware variants or phishing schemes, says Shaun Miller, the bank's information security officer. On the contrary, the organization, which has seven branches in the Kansas City, Kan., area plus an office in Washington, routinely tweaks its firewalls and intrusion-protection systems in response to new and active threats. To avoid fatiguing its 120 users, however, it refrains from formalizing new policies more frequently.

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Phenix Energy Group, an oil pipeline operator and construction company, is preparing to take its IT infrastructure from zero to 60 in a matter of months. To get a years-in-the-making pipeline project off the ground, the company is preparing to grow from a relatively small office environment to a data center setting of 75 servers and 250TB of storage. As a result, security, which hasn’t been a top priority, is suddenly a big deal, according to CIO and COO Bruce Perrin.

Given the high stakes — a downed system could cost about $1 million an hour — Perrin has spent the past five years researching options. While he’d prefer to run security in-house as part of an on-premises data center, Perrin is leaning toward outsourcing the function, at least initially, because he doesn’t have time to staff up a dedicated information security department in the few scant months before the pipeline goes online.

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Remember that popular relationship book, “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” which aimed to help couples communicate better by helping them understand the innate differences between the sexes?

As it turns out, the neuroscience explored in that book can help businesses create more gender balance in their ranks — not simply by upping the numbers of female hires or treating everyone the same in the hopes of eliminating bias. Rather, the practice, known as gender intelligence, applies gender science to highlight and create an appreciation for the natural differences between male and female attitudes and behaviors, according to Barbara Annis, founding partner of Gender Intelligence Group (GIG) and a pioneer behind this leadership style.

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After five years at LinkedIn and a prior decade spent at tech startups, Erica Lockheimer had grown used to navigating a male-dominated workplace, despite bumping up against the occasional gender-related bias.

Over the years, Lockheimer, a software engineer, made a point of attending women-in-tech conferences and diversity programs to learn to steer around those roadblocks and advance her career. As her confidence grew, so did her desire to leverage those experiences to coach female colleagues struggling with similar issues.

You've honed your list of hot technologies to focus on in 2016, but you also need to make longer-term plans and prepare for changes that are fast approaching by keeping an eye on developments just now taking shape.

What should be on your radar screen as we head into the new year? The 182 IT professionals who participated in the Computerworld Forecast 2016 survey singled out these five potentially disruptive technologies and trends: the rise of DevOps, virtualization 2.0, carbon-reducing technologies, the evolution of the IT-marketing alignment, and a sharpening of IT's focus on the customer experience.

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