SHARE It is no secret that Covid-19 has accelerated consumer demand for online and mobile services. What is less well known is that this has placed a significant financial burden on the IT infrastructure, and budgets of businesses, big and small, throughout the region. Businesses without the ability to adapt quickly to an increasingly online and ‘digital first’ model suffered during the last 12 months. Many of these problems arose because of inflexible software and the costs associated with a full-scale digital transformation. When you consider that the global business software and services market is expected to more than double to US$917 billion by 2026 – up from $396.69bn in 2018 – it is perhaps no surprise that businesses looking to digitise are facing significant, potentially prohibitive, levels of investment in their IT infrastructure and software.