12:31 PM
Cisco: Cloud Is Changing CIO Role
The Internet economy is making IT departments more central than ever to business success, but it's also putting CIOs under pressure to deliver more with less.
Those pressures will only increase as new technologies like cloud, collaboration, and mobility create a workforce that is connected to the enterprise 24/7, said Cisco chief technology officer Padmasree Warrior during a keynote presentation Tuesday at the Interop IT Conference and Expo in Las Vegas.
"CEOs now expect IT to provide profitable growth and business agility," said Warrior. "The role of the CIO is changing."
Warrior said the convergence of the cloud and mobility will drive new, collaborative work styles that will combine conventional text and messaging tools with heavy doses of real-time video. "The number one priority for CIOs over the next few years will be video," said Warrior, adding that online video usage is expected to quadruple over the next two years.
As cloud technologies progress, CIOs will have to focus on more than just keeping employees connected, they'll also have to ensure that their company's products and facilities can access real-time analytics and talk to each other--sending messages when inventories are low or leveraging data to predict malfunctions. "The Internet of things is already here," said Warrior.
While facilitating new business models, and giving CIOs a louder voice in the executive suite, these trends will also add considerable pressure to traditional areas of IT responsibility such as the network and security. "This creates a foundational requirement for risk management," said Warrior.
To read the entire original article, visit InformationWeek.