Top priorities for APEJ IT managers

SINGAPORE & HONG KONG: In a recent survey of over 1,100 IT decision makers in the Asia/Pacific region, IDC measured the importance of 10 key solution areas touted by IT services vendors globally.

Network infrastructure solutions came up as being most important, with over 70 percent of respondents in markets such as Australia, China, and India indicating that solutions pertaining to the network were either important or very important.

Business continuity and disaster recovery was a close second in importance among survey respondents.

IDC estimates that total spending in network services will grow from US$4.7 billion in 2007 to US$9.1 billion in 2012 at a CAGR of 13.7 percent from 2007-2012.

This bids well for companies such as IBM, HP, and Dimension Data (including Datacraft), ranked by IDC as the top players (in terms of revenue) in APEJ for the calendar year 2007.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR), which includes a variety of activities aimed at protecting and safeguarding critical corporate information against unpredictable events, is another key area of importance to IT decision makers. According to the survey, end-users have stated that overall security concerns (51.9 percent of responses) and past experience with security threats (44 percent of responses) are the two key issues, which have prompted increased focus on BCDR.

Eugene Wee, Research Manager of IT Services at IDC Asia/Pacific is concerned with the nonchalance that still exists in the marketplace. "Currently, most of the needs assessments and process improvement around BCDR occurs as an afterthought to threats arising. What end-user organizations need to be aware of are the potential losses which could occur when the problems arise. It would therefore be in the interest of organizations to look at the root of the problem, which more often than not is the lack of governance and/or the absence of business continuity planning.

"This is very much akin to employing traditional Chinese Medicine, which looks at the root causes of a problem and directly addresses these, rather than waiting for symptoms to arise before repairing the damage."