The State of the CIO 2018 survey reveals India’s top IT leaders are looking at technology investments, customer expectations and C-suite relationships in a whole different way. As Indian IT industry embraces transformation and innovation, here are the top tech priorities of CIOs in the coming year.

You can now download the full report of the State of the CIO 2018 survey here.

The startup ecosystem, top enterprises’ decision to move workloads to the cloud, competitive vendor and partner landscape will continue to drive cloud adoption in India. 2018 will see bigger investments in cloud computing and SMAC technologies.

According to IT decision makers, IT security strategy and IT strategy are being viewed through the same lens. 80 percent of surveyed IT leaders expect IT security strategy and IT strategy at their organization to be tightly integrated within the next three years.

50 percent of survey respondents said customer experience will be the most significant factor in driving IT investments in 2018. Besides improving customer experience, generating new digital revenue streams will be the most important part of an organization’s IT budget.

Every organization wants to mint more value from the available data and derive actionable insights. Enterprises are starting to invest in machine learning, and AI tools, which can not only analyze complicated data sets but also generate value in terms of customer experience.

According to SOTC 2018, 43 percent of IT leaders expect to face the issue of IT skill shortage in the next 12 months. This gap is expected in the top five technologies in which the CIOs will invest most in 2018 - SMAC and IoT.

Replacing traditional IT with emerging tech is the top priority for IT leaders. According to the survey, the top two activities that will keep the IT team busy will be assessing which processes need to be digitally transformed and identifying the tech to accelerate this transformation.

You can now download the full report of the State of the CIO 2018 survey here.