In my last post of 2014, I shared some findings from the EMC Global Data Protection Index survey, including some new stats on data protection maturity.
I also included a link to the full report, which provides more detailed information about data protection practices on a global level as well as on a country-by-country basis. Very interesting stuff even to the non-data-protection-minded reader.
Not surprisingly, organizations worldwide aren’t as mature, or ahead of the curve, as one might expect given the world in which we live. It always amazes me how forward-minded we can be in some areas (think self-driving automobiles) and not so much in others (think data protection). Perhaps it’s just a “cool factor”?
Anyway, while I wasn’t surprised to learn from the EMC survey that China and the United States ranked in the top five in terms of data protection maturity while France and Switzerland were in the bottom five, I was interested to see how countries such as Japan, Mexico, Russia and Australia fared.
This survey got me thinking outside the U.S. box.
How much does geography play into IT trends? How significantly do the rankings of 2015 IT trends, for example, differ country by country? Is the top three the same? Five?
Take the new UXC Forecast Top Seven Technology Trends CIOs Must Consider For 2015. UXC is Australia’s largest locally owned IT services and solutions company. Based on research conducted by Telesyte,* UXC’s independent technology and advisory business, UXC has identified the top seven 2015 technology trends for CIOs in Australia as:
- Business unit IT spending makes its mark
- Service-centric delivery paves the way for ITaaS
- The shift to cloud continues
- Communication becomes collaboration
- Big Data brings new business intelligence
- Future workplace breaks location boundaries
- Wearable technology moves into business
The list looks about right for the U.S. market… and jives with research and predictions from folks like Gartner as well as EMC’s own executive team.
But the priority and adoption pace of these trends do differ depending on the region of the world in which you live, and I’d contend that maturity (of people, process and solutions/products) has a lot to do with it. From our research, we know it does from the data protection side.
It is interesting to compare data. For example, the UXC Forecast finds that nearly half (49%) of marketing and sales departments within Australian enterprises have their own IT budget, whereas the CEB study I reported on back in December found that 25% of marketing and 23% of sales departments of the organizations it surveyed now run their own IT projects. I’m not sure what the country breakdown is on the CEB study, but I’d love to know. Would it align with our maturity findings?
Does the UXC list jive with what you are seeing in your organization or region of the world? What other regional differences are you seeing? Share your story with us.
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*Telesyte data pulled from its annual digital enterprise survey (461 CIOs and IT decision makers), annual digital consumer survey (1,018 respondents), as well as from financial reports released by vendors and service providers and interviews conducted with executives from IT vendors, end-users, channel partners and service providers.