Australian and New Zealand CIOs to prioritise security investments

A new survey conducted by Gartner found that 87% of CIOs in Australia and New Zealand plan to increase their investment in cybersecurity the most out of all spending categories in 2024.

The company’s global survey of CIOs and technology executives found that the proportion of CIOs planning to prioritise cybersecurity investments the most has increased from 62% last year.

Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Andy Roswell-Jones said the highly publicised data breaches of the past 12 months have ensured that cybersecurity remains top of mind across the two countries.

“While a significant amount of focus has been directed towards generative AI (GenAI) this year, cybersecurity remains at the top of the investment list again,” he said. “Every organisation’s risk and audit committee are worrying about a potential cybersecurity fallout and most industry regulators are actively pushing for improved competence.”

After cybersecurity, ANZ CIOs are expected to prioritise spending on cloud platforms (79%) and data analytics (78%). Roswell-Jones noted that despite the recent hype over the technology, AI and machine learning currently ranks in sixth place in terms of investment priorities (62%).

“This will change, however, once organisations move past the proof-of-concept stage, particularly for GenAI,” he said. “Currently only a small number of organisations are edging towards production with their GenAI trials — deployment is when the real investment starts.”

The research found that 68% of ANZ CIOs have developed or plan to deploy low-code platforms enabled by GenAI. Meanwhile, although only 10% of CIOs have already deployed GenAI technologies, over half (58%) say they will deploy over the next 24 months.

Other leading emerging digital technologies that enterprises in ANZ have already deployed or plan on deploying in the next 24 months include AI/machine learning (76%), distributed cloud (62%) and 5G (57%).

Meanwhile, 50% of ANZ CIOs expect to decrease their investment in legacy infrastructure and data centre technologies, the survey found. Other categories where CIOs plan to decrease investments include ERP and next-generation compute technology (both 10%) and application modernisation (9%).

Image credit: iStock.com/simoncarter