IDC South Africa CIO Summit 2023

Given the pace of change and the introduction of new threats, the threat landscape shows no signs of contraction. Organizations will require models that ensure the security of core systems and infrastructure is reliably enforced while remaining sufficiently resilient for 'future-ready' service expectations.

Zero trust is everywhere, with digital transformation across all sectors picking up speed, hybrid working practices accelerating in response to the pandemic, and supply chain disruptions and geopolitical threats increasingly on the rise. Zero trust represents a new era of business agility that is powered by digital, cloud, and security transformation. Zero trust is being increasingly incorporated into new technologies, reshaping how vendors and organizations define it.

Cloud technologies can deliver great advantages in terms of cost savings and resilience. However, these benefits can come at a cost if every detail is not managed with security in mind. With products, services, and projects being pushed to the cloud, the concept of securing the cloud takes on a whole new meaning and requires innovative strategies

As the digital-first approach to business has become the norm, organizations will accelerate digital initiatives, increasingly adopt cloud, and modernize applications using best practices to address change management.

Enterprises have increasingly adopted service management to address cross-team requests for standard actions and information. This adoption is expected to accelerate over the next five years and evolve as the interactions between data, people, processes, partners, and technologies become increasingly complex and unpredictable.

Legal and compliance teams spend countless hours and substantial costs on interpreting laws to ensure their organizations meet regulatory requirements. They also work closely with IT leaders to meet these requirements. In this context, technologies and strategies for modernizing regulatory change management to fit into an organization's overall risk and compliance transformation strategy are needed.

To meet the changing 'world of work' requirements, organizations need to address the three key areas of culture, augmentation, and space. Augmented reality (AR), RPA, automation, cloud, and many other emerging technologies are revolutionizing the employee experience as we know it.

As employees return to the office, business leaders will start believing that work can carry on just as it did before and IT support, cybersecurity, and employee engagement concerns will be quickly resolved. However, the world of work has mutated and changed forever, requiring new approaches to successfully tackle key challenges and design successful hybrid work models.

Organizations are still experimenting with entirely new ways of organizing the workforce. A virtual floorplan allows employees to collaborate and form connections primarily over digital channels. However, a balance must be achieved between productivity, wellness, and security in today’s hybrid workplace. Adopting end-to-end intelligent technologies can help maximize productivity, morale, performance, and team cohesion.

Prevention against continuous malware attacks is critical, as is the augmentation of security operations with tools that ensure visibility across the entire estate and the deployment of prevention-first measures to safeguard business continuity. Teams are increasingly deploying AI and ML applications in and out of the cloud to ensure organizational cyber-resilience for a sustainable future of continuous and integrated protection.

Compliance and cybersecurity requirements are usually intertwined, making close collaboration between IT security teams and compliance teams a necessity. As regulatory frameworks and compliance policies continue to evolve to keep up with digital innovation, teams must stay ahead of the market and work closely with vendors and service providers to ensure they are in full adherence to regulations.

Following the rapid rise in cloud technology investments over the pandemic period, organizations now grapple with securing the additional layers of complex cloud platforms. At the same time, companies have a sustained need for secure cloud migration processes. Security service providers should emphasize their cloud security-focused services to address these needs

In their initial forays into cloud computing, most organizations moved portions of their application or workload portfolios to cloud-based solutions — including software-as-a-service CRM or HR solutions, websites, and some customer experience innovations. However, these are only a piece of the entire digital infrastructure pie, and the question about what to do with all the remaining application workloads persists. Organizations must make major investments and address many complex questions about how to deploy cloud in a way that avoids future problems.

There is no doubt that the future is in the cloud. However, for IT leaders, this is only the beginning. As the cloud market matures, it becomes more complex. Organizations turning to multicloud and hybrid strategies must choose the right service provider, operating model, and architecture that allows them to advance their business objectives.

The journey of enabling digitization through business transformation is exciting. However, it requires cautious and methodical strategies to optimize cost and complexity and drive competitive value and agility. What are some of the best practices, lessons learnt, and solutions to lay a solid foundation for building your hybrid cloud strategy?

Data is now the lifeblood for organizations. However, organizational approaches have led to highly fragmented, inconsistent, siloed, and redundant data infrastructures with limited standardization and poor data quality. Building a solid data foundation, including a data governance framework, is a fundamental first step and critical success factor for a data-driven business. This foundation should be accompanied by initiatives to pull data from multiple sources, attract the right skills and talent, improve data literacy of all staff, and move away from IT-led innovation and transformation toward a business-led approach.

Organizations embracing the digital-first world must cater to the hyper-digital consumer. They must harmonize with physical elements and conveniently hand off and reconnect channels throughout the customer journey. Brands are comfortable with orchestrating content across multiple channels and elevating the customer experience at an accelerated pace. In this context, what is the future of content, and how can it be designed for equity, trust, and connected relationships?

Organizations are using a growing variety of devices to create and capture data, including sensors, mobile devices, and IoT devices. Rather than being held in a datacenter, data lake or warehouse, or some other central data storage location, data exists on the so-called edge — close to, or at, the original source. On one hand, this data must often be analyzed and acted on immediately to support instant business decisions. On the other hand, streaming data often does not need to be retained after it is acted upon. Edge computing provides unique value when extracting insights and synthesizing or summarizing data to be sent to the enterprise.

The increasing complexity and dynamism of today’s environments is driving a widespread move to observability. This is emerging as a critical consideration for today’s DevSecOps teams that are tasked with adapting to the radical transformation of IT environments.

Although Agile and DevOps (A.DO) processes are multidisciplinary, they are not mutually exclusive. The endgame of A.DO is to automate, optimize, and ensure high quality throughout the entire continuous delivery pipeline. Coupled with improved collaboration platforms and tools and new hybrid work environments, A.DO projects benefit from combinations of teams working remotely or from the office on flexible work schedules. Team members are not limited by location and can reassign work and resources to meet product backlogs. A.DO processes enable true agility and give teams greater flexibility to win in competitive markets.

As the public sector continues to digitally transform, citizen experience will remain a core strategy pillar. However, many public administrations continue to struggle with achieving initial breakthroughs or accelerating early successes, despite increased digital attention and associated investments. Intelligent automation can break this deadlock and accelerate success by enabling constituents to serve themselves and empowering agents to deliver personalised services, improve operational efficiency, and boost cost savings.

As the world of work continues to evolve and organizations shift to hybrid work models, new challenges and opportunities present themselves. How can technology leaders leverage these shifts to enhance online and virtual experiences and strengthen competitiveness by developing people, talent, and skills? This panel session will examine how the technology talent market has changed and compelled organizations to leverage innovative work models. It will highlight the latest trends in hiring and managing talent amid the move toward hybrid work policies. In addition, panelists will discuss how organizations can change themselves and their team structures to leverage the current situation and enhance productivity. The session will conclude by highlighting how organizations can address the shortage of skilled technology professionals, given that the shift to distributed workforces has enabled them to retain global talent.

Sustainability is now a key priority for governments and enterprises across industries as they strive to meet the national and industry-specific ESG goals and regulations. CIOs will not only need to offer “sustainable / green” technology solutions for their customer organizations but would also require advise and handholding through the journey. This discussion would address roadmaps and solutions that support the data collection and reporting, governance and compliance and benchmarking needs towards sustainable strategies and technologies.

Objectively measuring the performance of your IT department is something that will create great insights. It will enable focused decision making, supported by your peer experiences. This session will show some examples and the exciting results that have been achieved. It will present a framework for portfolio management that improves predictability and show how smart, flexible contracting can enable an increase in quality and flexibility in a dynamic market. It will also outline an agile software development framework that increases quality and output and showcase vendor life-cycle performance measurements that ensure constant compliance with contracts while reducing waste.