The speed of innovation and the disruptive technology that cloud solutions offer make the CIO chair look pretty exciting. For most CIOs, the excitement is balanced with some serious stress, as IT issues of various sizes and types pile up. From a digital transformation strategy that seems stalled out to difficulty identifying the right talent for their teams, your clients are dealing with some sticky situations, and understanding them might help you serve their needs better.
The speed of digital transformation: One of the most critical IT issues facing your clients is the effectiveness of their digital transformation. While many line-of-business managers see the connection between the need to innovate and the ability to remain competitive, there are often bottlenecks in the process. It’s important for enterprises to recognize the need to tie IT spending to strategic business innovation and its relationship to competitiveness.
Skills gap: Many IT teams are recognizing the difficulty of obtaining the talent they need to support cloud migration. In addition, there’s a shift away from employees being responsible for their own career development and training, simply because innovation has moved at such a fast pace in the last decade. Not only do employees need to be trained for the complex network configuration needs of cloud services, but also to combat cybersecurity threats that are more complex every day.
Data overload: While one of the great benefits of cloud solutions is their ability to capture and analyze data, then use it to predict customer behavior, the sheer volume of data is a burden for some IT teams. Managing storage options, cold data retrieval and identifying the best tools for leveraging that data into a competitive edge are all weighing on the minds and agendas of CIOs.
Tightening budgets: Even as companies recognize the need to remain competitive and focus on the customer experience through cloud software adoption, many IT departments aren’t receiving the necessary budget increases. Budget constraints limit innovation, but they also place stress on the team’s ability to prevent and manage cybersecurity threats.
Lack of agility: For companies that have stalled out in their digital transformation, one of the challenges is being stuck in a cobbled together hybrid solution that was meant to be a transitional step. As a result, service level agreements, outdated legacy systems and a lack of cohesiveness between the solutions all serve to impair a company’s agility.
Controlling costs: The migration to the cloud promises significant cost savings, but one of the significant IT issues facing CIOs is keeping costs under control in areas like data retrieval and vendor lock-in resulting in rate hikes.
Understanding the IT issues affecting your clients is key to ensuring that you’re meeting their needs. To learn more about what keeps CIOs up at night, contact us at eXemplify.