IT Leaders of APAC Optimistic About Tech Expenditure

26 per cent continue to maintain the same budget they had the preceding year. While just 8 per cent of more than 500 respondents who took part in the study are cutting through IT disbursement.

Apac CIOOutlook | Saturday, March 18, 2023

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APAC leaders are investing in technology to drive innovation, improve efficiency, and stay competitive.

FREMONT, CA: IT leaders all around Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, remain optimistic about IT expenditure despite macroeconomic headwinds, as they continue to invest in deliberate areas, such as cyber security, automation, and cloud computing to boost their digital chops. 26 per cent continue to maintain the same budget they had the preceding year. While just 8 per cent of more than 500 respondents who took part in the study are cutting through IT disbursement.

The optimism spells satisfactory news for the tech industry, which has been struggling with redundancy and longer procurement cycles as the majority of companies investigate their IT splurge and reclaim their preferences to position themselves better for the future. Cyber security, cloud, business and IT automation, and data management are the top IT precedents that have emerged in the current year. This is not astonishing given that those are key investment areas for any company that is driving efficiency and innovation across the enterprise.

By investing in people, process, and technology-related security initiatives, especially cyber security organisations have taken a measured approach. The priority order for strengthening cyber resilience is led by initiatives that focus on people, such as security awareness training, followed by programmes that emphasise processes and technology, including security monitoring, vulnerability management, and penetration testing.

It is a point of concern that few organisations in APAC are miscalculating the importance of incident response and recovery, which are just as condemnatory to limiting the harm caused by a cyber attack or data breach. Only 20 per cent of the leaders are making investments in incident response capabilities, and merely 33 per cent have intentions to subsidise backup hardware and software as well as ransomware protection.

The focus towards the cloud, among organisations in APAC, has been accelerating in recent times, which has led to speculation in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Nearly 40 per cent of companies in APAC claimed to be cloud-first, but that figure was lower than the North America, where 50 per cent of respondents claimed the same. APAC’s lower cloud maturity level was underscored by the fact that 70 per cent of respondents have less than half of their workloads on the public cloud.

The growing cloud adaptation is propelling APAC firms to invest more in cloud-based networking, security and storage offerings. The current year is expected to have investments in software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), secure access to service edge (SASE) and cloud-based storage. In APAC, organisations have increased their efforts in IT automation, with 41 per cent of them focusing on this area, and 30 per cent of them using observability and orchestration tools to streamline their IT operations and make them more efficient.

Business productivity was shored up to 49 per cent by automating business processes, leveraging integration, and automation platforms. Merely 68 per cent of organisations in the region plan to ramp up their automation efforts, more than in other parts of the globe.

The implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) is closely linked to automation efforts, and recent developments in generative AI models like GPT-3 have brought attention to this technology. Investments in AI are a key focus for the current year, along with other related capabilities like data science, analytics platforms, and machine learning operations (MLOps).

APAC leaders are optimistic about IT spending. Automation investments and artificial intelligence are among the top priorities for organisations in APAC regions. They are willing to invest in technology to drive innovation, improve efficiency and stay competitive in the market. IT leaders in the APAC region are bullish on tech spending and see it as a key driver of success in the coming age.