EDITOR’S QUESTION
WHAT KEY AREAS
SHOULD CIOs BE
CONCENTRATING
THEIR BUDGETS ON
FOR 2016?
T
his will be a pivotal year for CIOs
across the region in terms of
spending and budget allocation;
depending on the company and their line
of business, the priorities will naturally
vary, but the core technology applications
to bolster business will take the headlines
again during the year ahead.
While last year saw many businesses
questioning whether or not to adopt
the cloud because of security concerns
2016 will see CIOs up the amount spent
on cloud security. A survey by Bitglass
of close to 100 CIOs at the Gartner
Symposium IT Expo last year found that
about one in three (34%) IT leaders
anticipate an increase of over 20% in
cloud security spending in 2016.
Cloud is inevitably linked to digitisation
and naturally businesses will want to be
safer than ever as they prepare for an
explosion of connections within their
businesses in the coming years. Gartner
has predicted that within the next five
years there will be one million new
devices coming online every hour. By
2020, 60% of enterprises’ information
security budgets will be allocated for rapid
detection and response approaches, said
72
INTELLIGENTCIO
Gartner. What this means is that security
needs to become less about building walls
and more about swiftly detecting and
responding to threats. More significant
investments also need to be made into
risk management disciplines.
If cloud was the future last year, it is even
more so now. We are all headed toward
living and doing business in a digital-first
world and without cloud, that’s not going
to be possible. The ever-increasing amount
of connections that need management as
well as the endless growth of the amount
of data being produced in businesses
means that CIOs definitely need to reserve
budget for cloud services.
Support services that are tailored to fit
a business’s needs are an intelligent
investment, so CIOs need to ensure
to keep a spot for them in their 2016
budgets. They can’t plan for everything
that may go wrong during the year but
if they invest in support services they’ll
always have a safety net. Our technical
support for example, gives IT the
ability to deliver proactive support with
monitoring and managing capabilities
for network or/ and security devices, so
that it has a little less to worry about.
By 2019, spending on cloud
software will exceed
$112.8
billion
( Q