“Everyone is talking of the digital era, but how do you move to being digital?”-

Gartner Research’s vice president Cassio Dreyfuss well said at the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona.

With the tectonic shift in the landscape of technology, digital needs of almost every business are intensifying and business goals are changing more rapidly than the response of traditional IT. So, a CIO – Chief Information Officer, must pursue agile practices to compete at the digital speed.

Moreover, as we move forward in the IOT-Internet of things, users will need more seamless experience with different devices – phones, tablets, PCs etc. This makes it necessary for CIOs to rethink and retool their business’s platform, weigh their changing roles, understand challenges in their path, and adopt right technological solutions like cloud computing to –

Drive successful transformation of business with technology.

Execute their organization’s objectives successfully.

Stay relevant in the industry.

Become trusted allies to their CEOs.

Challenges faced by CIOs

A decade ago, the typical CIO was concerned mostly with IT infrastructure but today, a CIO’s role is evolving, so does the role of IT in the business and same with the growing challenges, namely-

Meeting the growing needs of agility or creating an agile platform.

Finding the right technology to mark the transformation.

Cutting legacy spending and delivering more with less.

Managing workloads.

Data security.

Delivering real business value.

Besides above mentioned challenges, forecasting the route of any technology to understand the past and present patterns of the relevant business and then, utilizing that core understanding to pick the profitable direction of the market, is another mind- teasing challenge for a CIO to face.

So they need to select such technologies which help to reduce overheads and consolidate the costs as quick accommodation of changing priorities ensures security and reliability, and improves business agility.

Changing roles of CIOs in this digital age

Growing expectations of CEOs force CIOs to grow out of their conventional role of mere custodians of technology and sell the benefits of business to drive revenue instead.

Winning CEOs now look upon their CIOs to be the guardians, operators and the innovators – all rolled into one.

Advantages of cloud computing technology, deliver perfect solution to CIOs’ challenges. So they should use cloud to transform business capabilities.

As per IDC ‘s five-year forecast report, cloud IT infrastructure spending will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 15.6 percent and reach $54.6 billion by 2019, accounting for 46.5 percent of the total spending on IT infrastructure.

To know benefits of cloud computing for CIOs, keep reading!

Advantages of cloud computing for CIOs

Deliver real and faster value to your business Agility for business requires the ability to create new business processes and change the existing ones and this needs either adding to or changing the supporting IT resources. As a CIO, you know the difficulty of doing this, and the time that it takes. But Cloud computing removes this barrier by enabling the enterprise to add to or change its IT resources quickly and easily. It helps in developing things and scaling deployed resources faster as per user demands, that too, in a cost effective way. The cloud’s agile environment helps you to deliver the most lasting business value when it allows you to enter and perform in a new market, create a new product or service or even invent an entirely new industry. Also, projects that take time to deliver ROI are generally delayed by companies. But CIOs can use pre-built applications and project management services in the cloud to streamline design, coding, testing and training and can create user experience by explaining ‘business logic’ and ‘data model’ to deliver real value to business. Enable seamless continuity of business As per BLS statistics, employees working remotely work longer an hour (each day) than their team members working in the office. Getting the right employees on board is only half the battle and keeping them engaged is yet another challenge for any CIO. But cloud provides you the solution for this, as it makes your business accessible from anywhere in the world irrespective of any device via an internet connection. It allows you to monitor your team, collaborate and share documents online, enables easy discussion with clients via video conferencing, important online meetings with CEOs and other team members respectively. Know more. This working without walls allows for greater productivity, customer and employee satisfaction. Thus, accelerating the pace at which business results are achieved. Manage workloads intelligently Your servers connect to multiple clients who use multiple applications at the same time and all of them expect consistent execution times and uninterrupted access to network resources and databases. But is it possible? Yes, it is possible with workload management (auto- load balancing) of cloud which works to fulfill these expectations. Cloud’s load balancing feature helps to minimize response time, optimize resource usage, maximize throughput and avoid overload of any single resource. It provides the organization with the capacity to control each work request by making sure that no single processing node is overburdened while others are underutilized. MS Azure’s built-in load balancing for cloud services and virtual machines creates highly available and scalable applications in minutes, probes the health of various server instances and gives you the control over inbound communication management. Know more. Reduce legacy spending on IT modernization 82% of companies reportedly saved money by moving to the cloud- SiliconAngle How to reduce IT costs? For CIOs, it is the biggest challenge to deliver ‘maximum with minimum’ due to limited budget options. But cloud service providers have the solution to this challenge. Hybrid Cloud’s pay as you go model requires no upfront capital costs for purchasing hardware, so CIOs can benefit from this subscription pricing model. Also, it reduces operational costs significantly. Virtualization feature of cloud enables multiple operating systems to run on the same physical platform. It aims at better resource utilization which actually eliminates the need of maintaining different servers, different services/applications/equipment. You can move them on cloud and manage them centrally. Thus, this reduces project time and cost and also capital costs for purchase of new hardware. So use cloud technologies to reduce operating costs and improve returns on investment. Improve IT Security and guarantee disaster recovery Security and privacy are handled well by the cloud technology. It offers in-depth protection to data and applications. Microsoft Hybrid Cloud’s private cloud element offers security for sensitive data as well as for storage and data handling. Private cloud provides SLAs and assurances for privacy protection to organizations.

Above mentioned benefits are just the tips of an iceberg, CIOs must make decision with confidence and join the cloud revolution to prove the value of IT to your organization.

Are you a CIO? Let us know the challenges you face and how you overcome them. And if you are using cloud computing, let us know it’s why and how in comments below.

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