IT executives explore cyber resilience

Details: Sunday, 03 December 2023 15:25

December 3, 2023 – Canadian businesses continue to prioritize digitization to satisfy the needs of their stakeholders and improve operational efficiencies. Over the last decade, most organizations have turned to the public cloud to accomplish their modernization mandates. This approach helped CIOs to realize cloud benefits while addressing the talent shortage to operate in new environments.

While public cloud spending continues to increase, investments in private cloud are also forecasted to grow. Factors driving this dual focus include workloads and data that must be on-premises, unsustainable cloud cost growth, and modern advancements enabling private cloud. As a result, organizations realize that a hybrid cloud (a mix of public and private clouds) should be part of their technology blueprint.

With these principles in mind, The IT Media Group brought together 20 cross-industry IT executives for a roundtable entitled "Modern Strategies for Digital Resilience." The session uncovered approaches for achieving digital resilience as organizations modernize their cloud strategies.

Jeff Ishii, Chief Technologist at The IT Media Group, moderated the roundtable. Also participating were executives from the session sponsors, Hitachi Vantara Head of Central and West Canada Chuck Canfield and Canadian CTO Andrew Close.

Roundtable participants discussed the challenges and best practices for the following topic areas:

1. Enhancing the cloud strategy

Public cloud lessons learned
Cloud workload and data placement considerations
Business casing for a private cloud
Hybrid cloud enablers

2. Achieving cyber resilience

Protecting data from cyber-attacks
Recovering from a cyber incident

Roundtable participants described the lessons learned from their cloud journeys. Charles Canfield noted, “Organizations find that their data needs to be in multiple places.” Canfield explained that Canadian companies increasingly choose a hybrid cloud approach for cost and security reasons. He added that enterprise risk mitigation satisfies a variety of components for a private cloud business case. “We’re seeing organizations that have been on a cloud first strategy start to pull back and embrace hybrid cloud instead.” Roundtable participants discussed how factors such as business continuity, disaster recovery, technical debt management, data privacy, cost containment, and the ability to meet SLAs play a crucial role when deciding to invest in a hybrid cloud.

The session covered the importance of cyber resiliency to recover quickly from a security incident. Andrew Close stated, “Companies aren’t protecting their data as they should. Some organizations still don’t have proper ransomware recovery processes in place.” Close advises enterprises to take a “before, during, and after” approach to cyber security instead of just focusing on the proactive aspects. He added, “If we can’t completely protect ourselves from being hacked, we have to look at how we can improve recovery after an attack.” Close recommends that CIOs work with business units to categorize critical data elements and define their RTO/RPO requirements to support development of their cyber resilience strategies.

All participants will receive a strategic insights report containing more than 75 tactics organizations use to address their challenges.

For more on how The IT Media Group fosters collaboration amongst the CIO community, please visit our events page. Interested parties can subscribe to our Youtube channel to watch a host of CIO roundtable highlights and executive interviews covering leadership, technology, and operations topics that address compelling issues.

The IT Media Group is an award-winning producer of events and content for senior IT executives. Based in Toronto, our leadership team includes some of the most experienced and well-respected media, technology, and business professionals serving the IT executive community.