IDC has announced the top-ten insights that highlight the key issues Asia/Pacific CIOs need to be aware of in 2010 and IDC’s view of the key end-user strategies for the next year and beyond. During the last year or more, companies in Asia have mostly applied 'wait-and-see' or 'back-burner' IT tactics - but this will no longer work as the economy starts to turn again.

“In 2010 companies will have to adopt a sense of urgency and be more proactive with how they will deal with an economic recovery," said Claus Mortensen, Principal for IDC Asia/Pacific Emerging Technologies Research Group. "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.”

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

"This process of ‘dematerialization’ is already taking place in various forms," said Claus. "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 virtualization."

IDC's 2010 top-ten CIO checklist highlights how companies can respond better and more dynamically to future market change. It also provides insights into how the choice of IT architecture can provide business technology a rapid and flexible way to revise, scale, upgrade and change BPM and workflows in minutes rather than in months. IDC sees the top-ten issues that CIOs should be aware of as:

1. Adopting an IT Recovery Strategy

2. Cost Reduction and the Dematerialization of IT

3. Cloud Migration 2010

4. Protecting Business from Disruptive Innovation and Subsequent Technology Churn

5. Security and Identity & Access Management

6.Cloud Multi-Tenancy is About Innovation

7. Virtual Private and Hybrid Cloud

8. Business Intelligence as a Service

9. Social Enterprise Architecture

10. Green IT

IDC's 2010 top-ten CIO checklist is part of IDC's newly launched "Recovery Watch" program.