Analyst Firm Tells Asia’S CIOs to Adopt an IT Recovery

The new year is quickly approaching and IDC has provided Asia/Pacific chief information officers (CIOs) with the top ten insights that they need to be aware of in 2010.

IT Relief Will Lag Economic Recovery

Companies in Asia have been treading cautiously given the unstable economic scenario but their ‘wait-and-see’ IT policy will no longer work next year. The economy is expected to start once again and this means companies have to change their IT strategies.

IDC says that CIOs should adopt an IT recovery strategy, focus on cost reduction and the dematerialisation of IT, and protect business from disruptive innovation and subsequent technology churn. The companies should also be aware of cloud migration, security, and identity and access management.

CIOs should know that cloud multi-tenancy is about innovation, get better acquainted with virtual private and hybrid clouds, focus on business intelligence as a service, consider social enterprise architecture, and examine green IT approaches. They should also be aware that cloud multi-tenancy is about innovation.

Adopt a sense of urgency

IDC emphasises that IT is in the midst of a renaissance and Claus Mortensen, principal for the IDC Asia/Pacific emerging technologies research group notes that in 2010, companies will have to be more proactive when dealing with an economic recovery.

All lines of business have suffered because of the economic downturn and according to Mortensen, companies should develop a strategy that could help them during the next upswing with a sense of urgency.

“Companies will have to make a strategic bet on when the economy will turn and plan their IT investments accordingly.”

Dematerialisation of IT

IDC has put forward the concept of ‘dematerialisation’ of IT, which requires companies to do away with their fixed assets. On-premise IT assets are typically underutilised and escalate in cost to support. The research firm suggests that CIOs ‘dematerialise’ these assets–that is, move them off the premises and off the books.

This concept is not altogether new as evidenced by the increasing popularity of cloud computing, cloud services, virtual dynamic IT, elastic infrastructure, on-demand architecture, web-oriented architecture and software plus services models.

Claus said that if we look around, we will see that ‘dematerialisation’ is already taking place in various forms. Services such as cloud computing share the same core element of virtualisation, he added.