Companies in Asia have mostly applied ‘wait-and-see’ or ‘back-burner’ IT tactics during the last year or more, but it is not expected to work as the economy starts to turn again, according to research and analytics firm IDC.

The research firm has unveiled top-ten insights that portrays the issues Asia/Pacific CIOs need to be aware of in 2010. The firm portrays how IT is in the midst of a renaissance and the importance of the renaissance to businesses has been increased by the economic crisis.

The IDC’s top-ten CIO insights for 2010 is based on the concept of dematerialisation of IT. For many companies, on-premises IT may have a serious economic flaw and can potentially hold IT to ransom with fixed assets that are typically underutilised and escalating in cost to support. Dematerialising these assets by moving them off the premises and off the books is one such alternative of overcoming this dilemma, the firm said.

Claus Mortensen, principal for IDC Asia/Pacific emerging technologies research group, said: “In 2010 companies will have to adopt a sense of urgency and be more proactive with how they will deal with an economic recovery. The economic downturn has taken its toll on all lines of business in the last year and that makes it even more vital to be ready to deal with the next upswing. Companies will have to make strategic bet on when the economy will turn and plan their IT investments accordingly.”

According to IDC, top-ten issues include adopting an IT recovery strategy; cost reduction and the dematerialisation of IT; cloud migration 2010; protecting business from disruptive innovation and subsequent technology churn; security and identity and access management; cloud multi-tenancy; virtual private and hybrid cloud; business intelligence as a service; social enterprise architecture; and green IT.

Mr Claus, said: This process of dematerialisation is already taking place in various forms. We see them in the market as in cloud computing, cloud services, virtual dynamic IT, elastic infrastructure, on-demand architecture, web-oriented architecture and software plus services all sharing the same core element of virtualisation.