Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2024. Read them in this 16th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
How CIOs Can Prepare for AI, Security, and Cloud Strategy This Year
By Fernando Castanheira, Global CIO, Riverbed
In the hybrid work era, IT leaders are under greater pressure to support a flawless digital employee experience amidst ongoing staffing shortages and increased innovation expectations across their organizations. In 2024, I predict that AI and cloud strategies will play a larger role within organizations. Below, I offer three ways that CIOs can lead the way in preparing strategies that improve the digital employee experience, advance digital monitoring strategies, and guard against security threats.
AI Will Revolutionize Digital Employee Experience in 2024.
“Just as the Internet drastically changed the tech landscape 20 years ago, companies are finding themselves in an age where the development and practical applications of AI will revolutionize the tech industry. As AI continues to gain widespread adoption, it will have a greater capacity to help overworked and understaffed IT teams troubleshoot issues more quickly. CIOs will need to prioritize automation in 2024 to provide IT teams with specific knowledge to solve specific problems and, in turn, provide a better overall employee experience. And as we move along the hype cycle from the theoretical to the practical, companies will need to ask themselves what kind of guardrails they need to have in place to keep their data and their customer’s data safe.”
Cloud Strategy will be a Top Priority for CIOs in the Coming Year
“Cloud adoption will continue to increase in 2024, particularly as hybrid work continues for the foreseeable future. As companies increase cloud adoption, IT teams are losing visibility into networks, applications and devices. This will drive organizations to focus on observability as they try to get a handle on what’s happening within their technology stack. It will also force companies to examine their cloud adoption and monitoring strategies.”
CIOs Will Need to Find a Way to Increase Observability without Sacrificing Security
“As IT teams respond to an increasingly complex threat landscape, many companies are adopting a zero trust security model for greater cybersecurity. But as companies adopt zero trust, they also run the risk of losing visibility across their applications, networks, and data centers. Zero trust strategies create a black box environment where everything is secure and trusted, but you can’t detect what’s happening on the network stack. As a result, CIOs will turn to observability tools that help them monitor the employees’ digital experience, providing a picture of which side of the pipe is creating a bottleneck or if it’s in the VPN.”
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fernando Castanheira is Riverbed’s Global CIO responsible for all aspects of IT, including digital transformation, Cyber/IT security, infrastructure, operations, and business platforms. In addition, Fernando leads the Saas Business Strategy function, partnering with the customer facing teams on new approaches centered on providing ongoing customer value and delightful experiences. You can follow him on LinkedIn.
