“The role of IT is more critical than ever,” said our CEO at VMware, Pat Gelsinger, last week at VMware vForum Online. “As businesses are looking to their digital transformation, the role that you play, the role that IT offers to the business, is more critical than ever. It’s also more challenging.”
Pat, VMware Americas CTO Chris Wolf and other experts discussed the changing role of IT amidst digital transformation at vForum Online (our online conference for IT professionals to keep current on the latest technologies and connect with industry experts). Here’s what they say should be your new priorities to enable the digital business.
Your Company Is Counting on IT
IT is reshaping every industry you can name. The healthcare industry is changing the way clinicians work and revitalizing patient engagement with mHealth apps. Education now happens in massive open online courses. Power and utilities companies now distribute energy by using smart grids. Manufacturing is getting customized, and finance is going mobile.
“The businesses that you serve are being reshaped in a fundamental way,” said Pat.
It’s an exciting time for IT to redefine entire business models and play a major role in business outcomes. Just look at Nike. Traditionally a manufacturing company, Nike is now building their company around software and delivering virtual machines in minutes to support their software developers, according to Chris.
Or look at General Electric. GE now sees themselves as a software company first, said Chris, and is using IT agility to innovate faster and take more risks. And General Motors is redefining the car as a vehicle not just for transportation but also for applications.
These types of innovation, the kind your IT team enables, are what keeps companies in the game today. “We all need to think and act like a software company,” said Chris. “It’s about leveraging technology to be closer to your customers.”
[Related: (Video) Transforming the Digital Enterprise: A Conversation with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger]
Your IT Team Must Reprioritize
About 85 percent of CIOs agreed their role is becoming more important to the business, according to research. But an overwhelming 91 percent also said their role is becoming more challenging.
CIOs are tasked to discover ways to get their teams moving faster, to plan long-term strategies for using evolving cloud-based technologies and to protect company information from new security threats. And for the VP of IT Infrastructure, Pat added, new priorities like end-to-end mobility strategies and multi-cloud environments require attention.
According to Pat, IT leaders need to tackle five key priorities to drive digital business. CIOs must:
- Figure out how to manage across multiple clouds. This is a core mission for IT as you increasingly utilize a broader set of managed, private and public clouds. But the multi-cloud world also makes it easier for siloes to multiply across teams, technology stacks, security and compliance.
- Deliver a private cloud. The private cloud is transformative for your datacenter, with capabilities to automate and simplify. But how do you go from silos of infrastructure to hyper-converged infrastructure?
- Get a grip on the growing device ecosystem. Today, every user has three devices on average, and most likely, they’ve already brought these devices into your ecosystem (BYOD is now Brought-Your-Own-Device). And with an Internet of Things (IoT) explosion around the corner, that ecosystem growth isn’t slowing down. “Productivity has hit new levels, but if we think about the future, we’re just getting started,” said Pat.
- Develop a sound IT security architecture. With devices and apps on the rise in the enterprise, strengthening security is critical, but research shows that the more you spend on security, the more you fall behind (the costs of security breaches are outweighing your investments in security).
- Deliver cloud-native apps to developers. How do you make the developer a first-class user of the datacenter?
“Productivity has hit new levels, but if we think about the future, we’re just getting started.”
Now, You Have an Opportunity to Do Something Different
These mounting new priorities create huge challenges for CIOs and IT organizations, but they’re also opportunities to do things differently—to create an IT infrastructure of the future, to rethink cybersecurity, to mobilize everything.
And we’ve been making a strategic shift here at VMware to enable your digital transformation through the ability to scale, stay flexible, continuously improve and automate. For us, the solutions to the key priorities listed above are:
- Getting a control plane for unified management, networking and security across clouds.
- Applying solutions like VxRail and Virtual SAN for a hyper-converged infrastructure.
- Acquiring a digital workspace, a complete set of tools that help your IT organization manage every mobile device, PC and app at the speed of life.
- Using network virtualization and micro-segmentation as powerful tools for securing your environment with ubiquitous enforcement and universal control (instead of just reinforcing the perimeter, we’re helping you strengthen the core).
- Using integrated containers to deliver high-performing environments to developers so you can empower them with efficiency.
[Related: New Video Exclusive: What is the Digital Workspace?]
We provide a single, integrated architecture to support the devices, apps and multi-cloud environments of both today and tomorrow. That’s how we’re thinking differently with technology. Now, what will you do with it?
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