According to a recent IDC survey of over 3,200 end-user organisations across Asia/Pacific including Japan, managing increased IT investments has become the forefront of IT issues for many CIOs and IT managers, surpassing even “IT Security” as the top infrastructure requirement in 2007.

With the region’s economic growth expected to continue to outpace the worldwide average by a point or two, its share of WW GDP will also grow and account for over 28% of the world’s GDP by 2011, according to economists.

"The recent survey of over 3,200 enterprise and public sector CIOs and IT managers region-wide indicates that managing IT costs as top priority", notes Gary Koch, associate VP for IDC’s Asia/Pacific IT Spending. "This is not surprising as organisations which reported increasing IT budget by far outnumbered those with diminishing budget needs. While this has been the case in previous surveys, nearly 60% of organisations stated their 2006 budget was an increase over the previous year, compared to about 5% who revealed declining IT budget”, adds Gary.

The list of the other top IT infrastructure requirements in the 2007 survey include - building a secure IT environment and faster deployment of applications.

The survey mentions that while hardware accounts for the lion’s share of budget, IT staff compensation, training, and retention of internal IT staff will garner a growing share of total IT expenditure.