Six Challenges Facing CIOs & IT Managers

In an ever-changing environment, CIOs have more than their share of concerns keeping them up at night. Here are six challenges that CIOs face today and inhibit technological growth within a modern organization.

1. New Security Threats

The cyber-security landscape has evolved and continues to change at a rapid rate, and it can be difficult for many IT professionals to keep pace with these changes. Today, security is a full-time job for IT departments, and to stay on top of both the challenges take technical leadership. In addition, security professionals must be extra vigilant within the detection, prevention, and training standards in defense of these real threats. Companies need to introduce programs and standards, built on AI-based prevention systems, to enable the organization against these attacks and protect organizational assets.

2. Skills Gap

There is a deficit in IT currently when it comes to skills need vs. what is available in the market. Making the available pool limited and is costing IT departments a massive amount of education and training for their employees.

3. Multi-Cloud Security

When looking into new cloud-based services, CIOs now need to be concerned about security across multiple platforms. Cross-cloud security platforms are now fundamental in ensuring consistency, and most importantly, completeness of securing company assets regardless of where these assets are.

4. Innovation and Digital Transformation

About two-thirds of business leaders think their companies need to speed up their digital transformation or face losing ground to competitors. This leaves CIOs’ fighting the constant battle of IT spend on strategic business capabilities and answering the question of how this will make us more competitive. Value stream-based funding models, as opposed to project-based funding, are becoming more and more effective at tying board-level objectives to budgetary influences.

5. Lack of Agility

Unfortunately, when it comes to making IT changes, software development, or adoption of new policies and procedures tend to have extended lead times. This inevitably leaves the IT department unable to achieve the flexibility that is often desired. This can be extremely frustrating for the IT department and users alike. CIOs are continually trying to find ways to improve this overall dynamic.

6. Tools for a Digital Native Workforce

A new workforce of employees who grew up with digital technology demands new ways of working that will boost the bottom line. CIOs are trying to find a balance to appease this generation’s requirements for a workplace environment.

Six Challenges Facing CIOs and IT Managers