Authored by Neelesh Kripalani, Chief Technology Officer, Clover Infotech
Organizations are undergoing a massive shift in their IT strategies to enhance revenue and boost growth. Always on, always connected, and always working has become the new mantra for enterprises. Many organizations have settled on a cloud-first strategy. As the C-suite races to out-innovate their competition, CIOs have taken the mantle to lead the innovation initiatives within their organizations.
The adoption of cloud applications and infrastructure, the introduction of web 3.0, virtual and augmented reality, omni-channel experience and other new-age technologies have the potential to deliver enhanced business agility. Organizations are embracing these technologies to increase speed of deployment, create new customer experiences, reengineer business processes, empower business users, and find new opportunities for growth.
The convergence of these innovative trends creates an infinite number of opportunities for CIOs to innovate and facilitate business growth.
Security Challenges
There are several challenges along the way towards the journey to the cloud. Growing use of the hybrid, public or multi-cloud environments can significantly increase business risk, as regulatory requirements and compliance mandates keep changing. Even security policies that are applied to internal systems can be circumvented in multi-cloud environments or might be vulnerable to external risks. The ever-expanding universe of cyber threats creates new risks and attacks every minute that are new to security systems that run on the cloud. These threats must be constantly monitored and worked upon by OEMs to ensure business continuity for their customers.
Cloud systems empower virtual collaboration. Work-from-home policies have given rise to ‘internet and access anytime, anywhere’ which exposes the end-device to a new environment and, eventually, to new threats. Cloud OEMs are continually improving their security ecosystem to fight these vulnerabilities and support virtual interfacing demands of today.
Strategy for a seamless Cloud Journey
CIOs must prioritize business continuity and IT security to be able to pivot to cloud efficiently. The time has created a need for stress-testing the application and infrastructure landscape to bring more stability and resilience. Business-critical processes that rely heavily on manual data must be transformed with the help of digital tools and SaaS solutions. CIOs must facilitate this transformation across business processes, and train existing incumbents to convert them into a virtual, cloud-ready workforce.
CIOs must build strategies to mitigate data silos within the organization. Cloud can help them to break these data silos across risk, finance, compliance, and customer support. The organization can apply advanced analytics for integrated insights once the data is synchronized to create a single pane of glass view for the CIO to gather insights and make quick decisions.
With changing times, CIOs must prioritize their goals and investment with a clear focus on reducing overall carbon footprint. This can be achieved incrementally by shifting low-hanging processes and applications such as CRM, HCM to the cloud followed by mainstream enterprise applications. This will create a perfect pedestal to later expand to cloud-ready solutions and become a ‘cloud-first’ enterprise. CIOs must create new and optimized avenues for their ICT landscape to reduce their carbon footprint, and cloud is one of the most sought solution that can deliver agility and control, while helping CIOs to achieve their carbon goals.
Conclusion
With changing customer expectations, cloud is the way forward to help CIOs to position themselves as leaders in this digital-first world. CIOs can build successful cloud strategies by establishing the business outcomes that they hope to achieve, partnering with the right cloud vendor, and determining the business model that best suits organizational goals. This will eventually help them to build the customer experience of tomorrow.
