According to the firm's recent Asia Pacific Semiannual IT Services Tracker, a robust growth of 13.4 per cent year-on-year is expected, after a good performance in 2010 of 18 per cent.

"We are seeing new rounds of investment from global ICT players to build and expand their datacenters in the region. In addition to cloud services provisioning, the demand for business continuity and disaster recovery services, particularly after Japan's recent earthquakes, has boosted hosting services in offshore locations as well," said Natalie Wan, senior research manager of IDC's Asia/Pacific Services Research Group.

The study suggested that the outsourcing trend has moved towards flexible sourcing, with different selected vendors offering best-of-breed services, alongside competitive offerings with higher flexibility and pricing options.

IDC also believed that next-generation datacenter design needs to enable automation and dynamic provisioning across the entire infrastructure, connectivity across multiple locations and access to virtualised resources by any mobile device.

Globalisation and mobility trends are driving the demand for network and communications services, and more and more users want to access enterprise applications via mobile devices, said IDC.