10 Ways CIOs Can Gear Up for 2024
How can CIOs create a more robust, secure and modernized enterprise in 2024? Our experts share 10 of their top tips for the New Year.
CIOs, what’s on your list to gear up for the New Year?
To prepare for success in 2024, CIOs should upgrade their infrastructure, operations and security. To hit the mark in workforce planning, their modernization efforts should focus on adopting hybrid cloud solutions, implementing zero trust security models, and deploying edge computing to enable scalability, resilience, and readiness.
For implementation, CIOs should be thinking about ways to upskill workers, including providing AI training to optimize emerging technologies and infrastructures and drive greater business value.
By exploring edge computing, improving energy efficiency, adopting zero trust security and preparing the workforce for AI, CIOs stand to gain significantly stronger systems, enhanced cybersecurity, vital future skills and a reduced environmental impact.
We’ve assembled our top ten ways to gear up for 2024 right now.
- Modernize your data centers: Take stock of your existing data centers and assess opportunities to modernize them. This could entail implementing hyper-converged infrastructure, for example.
- Embrace hybrid cloud solutions: Build a hybrid cloud strategy that integrates your existing on-premises infrastructure with a mix of public and private cloud services. Interconnecting infrastructure delivers the flexibility to optimally deploy workloads, scale on-demand to meet changing needs, and allow efficient computing resource sharing.
- Implement software-defined infrastructure: Explore software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS) solutions. Adopting these software-driven technologies brings increased flexibility and automation to managing infrastructure, improving adaptability and meeting your evolving business needs.
- Enhance your network security: Strengthen network security by implementing advanced threat detection capabilities, intrusion prevention systems and encryption protocols. Focus on securing your internal network traffic, not just the perimeter. Taking these measures helps you identify and defend against cyberthreats from both outside and inside the network.
- Ensure hybrid business continuity and disaster recovery readiness: Review disaster recovery plans and test backups to build resilience and ensure you can quickly rebound after a crisis. Comply with industry regulations by determining relevant laws, actively updating recovery strategies, and optimizing offsite data storage to ensure you are meeting sector-specific governance standards.
- Explore an edge computing infrastructure: Identify use cases for edge computing within your organization and devote resources to infrastructure that powers edge implementations. Deploying computation and storage closer to data sources through edge computing can actively decrease latency while improving the real-time responsiveness of your applications.
- Conduct energy efficiency audits: Audit your data infrastructure's energy use, then actively target upgrades, like consolidated workloads, energy-efficient hardware and renewable sources to reduce environmental impact.
- Implement zero trust security model: Transition to a zero trust security model that actively authenticates every access attempt, rather than implicitly trusting users or systems by default. Adopt context-based, strict access controls across devices and environments to dynamically verify every identity and minimize breach risk by granting least-privilege access.
- Evaluate AI operations: Adopt an AI and machine learning platforms with robust model deployment, monitoring, and governance to enable streamlined oversight and full lifecycle management that accelerates rollout while safeguarding production.
- Plan for evolving workforce and symbiotic roles: Ensure that you create workforce strategies that consider hybrid work models, upskilling initiatives and shifting roles as AI augments more business processes.
With proactive upgrades across operations, CIOs can drive digital transformation and build organizational resiliency for the evolving technological landscape in 2024.
The 2024 IT Outlook Report
About the Authors
VP - Evangelist and Senior Architect
Ben Blanquera
Ben is VP-Evangelist and Senior Architect with Rackspace Technology. He works with enterprises, architecting solutions to enable them to drive business outcomes through thriving in a multicloud world. He is a 35-year veteran in multiple industries including health care, manufacturing, and technology consulting. Prior to Rackspace, Ben was with Covail, a leading-edge provider of AI/ML and cybersecurity services to Fortune 1000 clients. At Covail, Ben was VP of Delivery and transitioned to VP of Revenue and Client Success. A recognized technology leader, Ben was named a Premier 100 leader by Computerworld. Outside of work, he loves to travel, ride his bike, and spend time with his wife and four daughters. He is an active organizer in the tech community and curates the Central Ohio CIO forum (150+ CIOs) and founded Techlife Columbus. Ben also serves on the Pitch Advisory Board for South by Southwest and the Editorial Board for CDO Magazine.
Read more about Ben BlanqueraChief Technical Officer, EMEA
Simon Bennett
As Rackspace Technology™ Chief Technical Officer for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions, Simon’s goal is to deliver end value to customers with world-class multicloud solutions and services. He is focused on inspiring and supporting technical leaders to find best-fit solutions, combining a perfect blend of services and capabilities from the Rackspace Technology™ and partner portfolio. Simon enjoys working with customers at all levels to understand their challenges and opportunities to help them to succeed. Simon’s extensive experience has been gained from working across a broad spectrum of customers in different industries. Before joining Rackspace Technology, he worked at IBM for over 20 years in leadership roles. In his most recent position, he provided technical pre-sales and detailed solution support for strategic deals within technology services.
Read more about Simon BennettCTO - Public Cloud
Travis Runty
As a technologist with extensive global leadership experience in the cloud space, Travis boasts a strong track record of successfully building and leading high-performance engineering teams that deliver innovative solutions. Fostering an engineering culture has resulted in a collaborative, agile, and customer-focused work environment that consistently achieves business outcomes. With a deep understanding of hyperscalers, Travis effectively creates partnerships and aligns solutions to leverage their strengths, driving significant revenue growth and improved customer satisfaction. Committed to organizational success, Travis employs a strategic approach that harnesses emerging technologies and focuses relentlessly on delivering customer value. Travis has been in the Cloud Computing space for nearly 20 years.
Read more about Travis Runty