Sudhanshu Kela
VP Technology transition
EXL
Perspective on Innovative Technologies like Cloud and Virtualization
I feel that these technologies will help enable various organizations
leverage IT in a more flexible, seamless, with faster implementation and
cost-effective manner to be more aligned with business and help he
business to enhance the value to the end-customer. These will provide
reduction of up-front costs, lowering the overall TCO and de-risking
services provided from localized & owned facilities and data center.
Keeping Pace with Latest Technologies
Well its reading, interacting with colleagues, partners and
participating in various discussion forums, though I feel thats never
enough & too much to be completely abreast with this ever evolving
field.
Biggest Obstacle
I always believe the biggest challenge that any technology evangelist
and a CIO faces is to ensure that we can help business derive benefits
as per the strategic objectives of the organization. If we are able to
achieve just this then it will not just benefit all technologist but
will ensure that technology plays a leading role in creating innovations
for the business.
Technology as a Rescue Act
Technology can play a leading role in creating innovative solutions for
the business and the end-customers by enhancing customer satisfaction,
operating efficiency and responsiveness. When IT plays a critical and
innovative role, it will obviously mitigate the business problems and
become a vital cog for the organizational strategy.
Decisive Role of IT during Recession
IT innovations are not just critical during slowdown but have become
integral part of creating business value. Any organization that needs to
grow in todays economy leverages IT heavily in building new &
innovative business models. For e.g. in the ITES space business
platforms and processes as a service as a business model is only
possible due to innovations led by IT.
Importance of Cloud in the Organization
The cloud is maturing into a compelling imperative for IT as a service
for business consumption in our organization. The adoption of our cloud
policy involves an integrated framework that will influence the design
of future application development and enablement to induce high level of
decoupling and componentization of application nodules, breaking them
down to services that imitate the basic requirements of business that
can be consumed/reused by different enterprise/business applications in a
uniform way.
Using cloud to Secure Database
To ensure information security on cloud some of the simple steps that an organization can adhere are as follows:
1.
Encryption of data at rest and in transit becomes extremely important
because of the lack of visibility into network traffic and your cloud
provider‟s admin access logs.
2. Deploy every security tool you
deploy on your physical servers in the cloud as well because all the
cloud providers will give you is a naked OS without adequate security.
3.
Ensure to get all the security policies and procedures around access
controls and network traffic from the clouds service provider. Clouds
service providers customers need to know who did what and when, and they
need to be allowed to see the logs.
IT Leader must be Manger or Technologist First.
An IT leader is in a leadership position and hence needs to evolve being
a leader from being just a technologist . He needs to ensure that he
demonstrates true leadership & managerial traits as ultimately he is
part of the ecosystem that is much beyond technology
Welcoming New technologies
Some of the new technologies that will shape 2012 and beyond is the
unification of cloud computing, social media and social networking,
mobility and information management which are all evolving at a rapid
pace. Business unit stakeholders often recognize the value of new
technology before IT departments can harness it. In addition, emerging
markets are growing rapidly in terms of technology expenditures and
influence. Growing technology use and energy consumption around the
globe have led to an increased emphasis on green technologies and power
conservation within IT industries.
Bond between CEO and a CIO
In todays environment I believe that all the CEOs understand the
importance of IT with respect to integrating it with the strategic
blueprint of the organization, which makes it imperative for the CEOs to
leverage ITs strength to build competitive differentiation for the
business.Though there may be instances where CIOs dont directly report
to the CEOs, yet in todays world you can figure out how strategic the
CIOs function is by the amount of time spent in IT discussions in the
corporate boardrooms
