Asia’s chief information officers (CIOs) must no longer rely on a 'wait-and-see' or 'back-burner' strategy for information technology, but must instead take a more proactive stance as the glable economy recovers, a research firm suggests.

Researh firm IDC said this ‘wait and see’ tactic 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," Claus Mortensen, principal for IDC Asia/Pacific emerging technologies research group said.

He said "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,” he added. At the core of IDC's top-ten CIO insights for 2010 is the concept 'dematerialization’ of IT.

IDC said 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," Mortensen said. "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 sees the top-ten issues that CIOs should be aware of which includes; adopting an IT recovery strategy; cost reduction and the dematerialization of IT; cloud migration 2010; protecting business from disruptive innovation and subsequent technology churn; security and identity & Access management; cloud multi-tenancy; virtual private and hybrid Cloud; business intelligence as a service; Social Enterprise Architecture and green IT.