IT spending tends to swing between neglect and panic: nothing for months, then a large unplanned bill when something breaks. A good budget smooths that out by making the predictable things predictable and leaving room for the rest.
Three buckets
We split IT spend into three: run (the recurring cost of keeping things working and secure), grow (projects that move the business forward), and risk (the reserve for replacements and incidents). Mapping spend to those buckets makes trade-offs visible and stops the year being derailed by a single failure.
