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How CIOs can Navigate the Cloud in 2018
Chin Ying Loong
2018 has gotten off to a good start, in terms of Singapore’s technology push toward becoming future-ready and achieving our Smart Nation aspirations. With developments including the announcement of Singapore’s Digital District in Punggol and more schemes to support businesses in their digital push, we foresee cloud coming to the forefront with the Government and businesses alike bolstering cloud adoption to realise its benefits of increased productivity and resource optimisation.
Business leaders, in particular, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), thus need to be privy to how they can ride the wave of cloud developments already emerging in the year. By aligning the capabilities of the cloud with business priorities, CIOs can ensure optimal business outcomes for their organisations.
Invest in greater cloud security
Cybersecurity has become a key necessity, especially with the increasing sophistication and regularity of cyber attacks, case in point being the near doubling of cybercrimes over the past year in Singapore. While businesses realise the need for the cloud, for its speed and scalability, CIOs are aware of the potential security threats that they are susceptible to, even with the slightest vulnerability or breach. As such, CIOs need to look at stepping up their investments in cloud security as they continue on with the rest of the year, to mitigate risks of costly breaches and outages.
A step up from the usual security features, this will involve the use of artificial intelligence to analyse a unified data set consisting of the full breadth of security and operational telemetry, as well as provide automated remediation. This will, thereby, enable quick changes to the organisation’s security and operational posture. With that, CIOs need to invest in solutions that offer security incident and event management (SIEM), as well as user and entity behavioural analytics (UEBA), powered by cloud activity monitoring and threat detection to ensure that business operations are safeguarded from unwanted cyber threats.
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CIOs should look to making AI their priority to maximise their cloud usage by integrating AI apps within their cloud platforms
Leverage blockchain to obtain quality information on time
With an approximate 10 percent of the global GDP stored in blockchain technology by 2027, Blockchain will transform how business is done by enabling more efficient, secure and transparent interactions.
By maintaining distributed ledgers via a peer-to-peer protocol, blockchain enables participants to transact directly in a trusted business network while ensuring the validity and non-repudiation of their transactions.
As such, CIOs need to prioritise cloud services with integrated blockchain solutions. This will enable their organisations to stay agile and competitive, yet secure, by extending business applications while speeding up transactions. Additionally, benefits can be reaped by extending enterprise boundaries by deploying new business models from untapped markets with blockchain-verified identity and offerings.
Incorporate Artificial Intelligence in business management services
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) already making waves in impacting consumer experiences and industries in Singapore, data will only further this trend through apps that rely on raw data for predictive analytics. CIOs should look to making AI their priority to maximise their cloud usage by integrating AI apps within their cloud platforms.
Through the use of algorithms to determine business priorities, the system continually updates and derives insight from experience more rapidly and objectively, thus empowering businesses to manage their resources and plan better for the future.
This could also involve the use of AI-powered chatbot capabilities that optimises the end-user experience, as a more conversational channel to engage customers with, offering insight into how to personalise and troubleshoot the end-user experience.
Through this, CIOs ensure that their organisations gain smart and timely insights, making the decision-making process simpler and more efficient for various business functions across the organisation.
Move mission-critical workloads through an autonomous database
We have already started seeing an increase in automated databases since the beginning of the year. Requiring almost no human intervention, and virtually eliminate human error, they help reduce security risks while freeing managers to focus on higher-level work.
CIOs should prioritise to make this a reality in their organisations, so as to eliminate human error and positively re-define roles and capabilities of their IT department.
2018–A year started, with more to come
In conclusion, the current year continues to hold much promise for the future of business and for CIOs to set a positive strategic direction. Still in its early phases, CIOs are still able to set an intentional business direction for the rest of the year. By keeping a close eye on technological innovations and setting cloud-driven priorities, CIOs will be able to ensure that their organisations positively leverage new developments and gain competitive advantage.
