In a recent survey of more than 1100 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 more than 70 per cent 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 estimated that total spending in network services (which includes network consulting and integration services -- NCIS -- and network management --NM) will grow from $US4.7 billion in 2007 to $US9.1 billion in 2012 at a compound annual growth rate of 13.7 per cent from 2007-2012. This bodes well for companies such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dimension Data (including Datacraft), ranked by IDC as the top players (in terms of revenue) in Asia/Pacific, excluding Japan, for 2007.

Business continuity and disaster recovery, which include a variety of activities aimed at protecting and safeguarding critical corporate information against unpredictable events, was another key area of importance to IT decision makers.

According to the survey, end-users have stated that overall security concerns (51.9 per cent of responses) and past experience with security threats (44 per cent of responses) were the two key issues that have prompted increased focus on business continuity and disaster recovery.

Eugene Wee, research manager of IT services at IDC Asia/Pacific, said he is concerned with the nonchalance that still exists in the marketplace. "Currently, most of the needs assessments and process improvement around business continuity and disaster recovery occurs as an afterthought to threats arising."

Len Rust is publisher of The Rust Report