18 Aug The 11 Biggest Challenges CIOs Face Today
CIOs have more than their share of concerns keeping them up at night, from changing cyber threat landscape, help desk support, infrastructure updates, and retraining IT talent. CIOs say they’re more concerned with how to protect data, as organizations struggle with new privacy regulations. Executives focusing on securing their cloud-based assets across multiple cloud environments, but that isn’t all that CIOs face today. We are breaking down the 11 biggest challenges CIOs face today.
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New Security Threats
The cyber threat landscape is continually evolving and changing at a rapid rate. This can be difficult for some IT departments to keep up with. It is a full-time job for IT departments to stay on top, but that isn’t all that tech leaders are going to have to prepare for AI-driven cyber-attacks. Security professionals must be extra vigilant with detection and training against these threats. Companies will need to introduce AI-based protection systems to be able to contain these attacks launched by this next-gen tech.
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Data Protection
Forward-thinking organizations are now implementing privacy by design in their products but making sure those efforts meet GDPR standards is an ongoing concern. U.S. businesses will need to consider a GDPR-type policy to protect citizens even before any regulations are enacted. Ultimately, there must be international guidelines to ensure customer privacy and protection on a global scale to allow for easier compliance.
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Skills Gap
There is a deficit in IT currently when it comes to skills need vs. what is available in the market. Making the available pool limited and is costing IT departments a massive amount of education and training for their employees.
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Multi-Cloud Security
When looking into new cloud-based services, CIOs now need to ask about security across multiple platforms. Cross-cloud security platforms are now fundamental in ensuring consistency, and most importantly, completeness of securing company assets regardless of where these assets are.
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Innovation and Digital Transformation
About two-thirds of business leaders think their companies need to speed up their digital transformation or face losing ground to competitors. This leaves CIOs’ fighting the constant battle of IT spend on strategic business capabilities and answering the question of how this will make us more competitive. Value stream-based funding models, as opposed to project-based funding, are becoming more and more effective at tying board-level objectives to budgetary influences.
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Finding New Revenue Streams
When it comes to revenue-generating opportunities, the place the CIO belongs is focusing on those projects and digitizing the business into an automated platform at scale. We need to stay focused on driving costs out of business and scaling from a go-to-market perspective.
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Lack of Agility
Unfortunately, when it comes to making IT changes, software development, or adoption of new policies and procedures tend to have extended lead times. This enviably leaves the IT department not able to the flexibility that is often desired. This can be extremely frustrating for the IT department and users alike. CIOs are continually trying to find ways to improve this overall dynamic.
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Outsourcing Risks
The skills gap will lead many organizations to seek outside help. But these sometimes-necessary solutions can lead to concerns with reliability and security. Each CIO will have to vet out each vendor that they bring into the fold, which can be extremely time-consuming. MSSP and cybersecurity firms have made a lot of strides in overcoming these concerns.
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Business Results
Many CIOs find themselves at the behest of business leaders that don’t understand the importance of innovation with technology. Most organizations have a hard time adopting new processes and procedures to drive new results. Too often, businesses find themselves working through the way things are currently done and can’t ever adequately address the root of the IT challenge.
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Tools for a Digital Native Workforce
A new workforce of employees who grew up with digital technology demands new ways of working that will boost the bottom line. CIOs are trying to find a balance to appease the generation requirements that desired for a workplace environment.
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Rebuilding Trust
CIOs have to rebuild trust with customers when it comes to issues such as privacy, security, and device addiction must be addressed immediately by big and small players in the industry. It is essential for IT departments to be responsible corporate citizens and show that they care about the people claim to be serving and act in their best interest.
Contact our team to see how we can help CIOs overcome the 11 biggest challenges CIOs face today!