True or False: COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of digitalization technology and services?
FutureCIO roundtables since the start of 2020 suggest that organisations are upping their spend on cloud services compared to other technologies.
Analysts at IDC seem to agree but with a caveat.
For overall ICT spending in Asia/Pacific, there is a definite intention to reduce budgets in the short term – at least in 2Q20. At this stage, some countries are signalling that they will still have a modest spend growth for full year 2020.
“The pandemic has brought opportunities for some organizations to take advantage of changed operating conditions to address the weaknesses on what projects to deliver under the current conditions,” says William Lee, research director for Cloud Services at IDC Asia/Pacific.
As organizations transition to the Next Normal, increased demand for public cloud services has solidified and is likely to be maintained.
Asia/Pacific countries are emerging from the immediate reactive state and are building plans for recovery – with some countries moving faster than others. Moderate growth can be expected across all countries, with the exception of New Zealand which will generally remain unchanged.
The IDC Asia/Pacific’s report titled Cloud and COVID-19: Asia/Pacific (Excluding Japan) also pointed out that the increase in software-as-a-service (SaaS) spending will be driven by remote work solutions and conferencing/collaboration services.
With the initial temporary interruption of hardware supply chains, some of the increase on infrastructure-as-a-service IaaS spending is likely to be short-term virtual private cloud (VPC) with hyperscalers.
Security is one of the top areas for spending and also the area with little impact on the spend, making it a must-have item.
