Today's CIOs need to be multi-disciplinary in their approach to managing their domain. They not only need to have intimate knowledge of the technology they manage but they need to keep up with emerging trends in computing. They need to be cautious about securing their enterprise's data and maintain an ever-tightening budget with an ever-expanding demand for new functions. And that's just a starting point.
Consolidation that provides both increased responsiveness and flexibility is one area that progressive CIOs are investigating with some considerable optimism. J.J. Thompson, managing director and CEO of Indianapolis-based Rook Security, offers some insights based on his experience in this arena.
"IT infrastructure services will continue to consolidate and move towards an ITIL-oriented (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) metric focused on service delivery models. This will simultaneously lead to commoditization for internal IT administration roles that will most likely become outsourced services through NOCs, SOCs, and service providers. Cost, responsiveness, and risk drivers will continue to lead to cloud infrastructure, and challenges will continue for managing controls in the cloud. However, the solutions will be far easier and more cost effective to deploy than on premise solutions.
CIOs will be held accountable by boards for the spending on protection, security and controls and will need to show real financial metrics on controls deployed, results, and associated spend."
As Thompson says, the tools and components are moving into place. It's up to savvy CIOs to put the pieces together and make the most of them for their enterprises and for their own careers.
