Cloud Tech News

We are beginning to see the emergence of a new member of the board: the chief disruption officer (CDO), who can act as a channel and a focus for bold approaches to strategic decision-making. Technologies like big data and software-defined networking are paving a way for positive disruption in the sense that they force organisations to evaluate new business models and new routes to market. Andrew Carr, CEO for UK & Ireland at Bull discusses how these individuals are driving adoption of a new wave of technologies to improve business performance.

Transforming time into dollars matters far more to many CEOs I've spoken with versus what platform their applications are running on. What matters most is getting all they can out of every hour their business is operating. They are all focused on getting beyond the constraints that held their growth back in the past - everyone wants a growth accelerator today.

While alternative sourcing approaches such as shared services, outsourcing, and cloud services are much discussed at conferences and in the media, the reality for this group of CIOs is that ICT management is still about managing the people, processes, and technologies of the in-house ICT department. It is therefore not surprising that a shortage of people and skills was regarded as one of the major challenges.

The accuracy, speed and precision of IT systems means the difference between winning or losing customers, keeping supply chains profitable, and solidly translating new concepts into revenue-producing products and services. The world’s best-run services businesses have customer-driven IT as part of their DNA; it is very much who these companies are internally.

Information as an asset to a business is more important than ever, but the term ‘big data’ is misleading: our data issues today don’t just relate to the vast quantities of data we generate, access and share. In 2013, big data is a competitive advantage. By 2018, I’d go as far as to say that those businesses without a clear data strategy in place will not be around.

Seeing skeptical CIOs agree to cloud-based pilots of CRM, ERP and other applications is evidence of how cloud computing is slowly winning the trust war. Further evidence can be seen from how skeptical many of these CIOs initially were, and how successful pilots led to their gradual trust. But this trust hasn’t come cheap...

Many companies without the means to hire a large and experienced staff have found that outsourcing to an MSP (managed service provider) is a sound management decision. Taking this one step further, when you consider outsourcing features such as security-as-a-service or policy-as-a-service, you create new benefits of security expertise without additional man hours or expense.

The biggest eye-opener in Gartner’s recently-published study on the current agenda regarding the digital landscape for Chief Information Officers is that CIO’s recognize that cloud computing will not only be a significant part of the future, but that their own roles and behavior need to be updated to survive in the modern enterprise.