Rebalancing through Recalibration | THAT IS

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“We have to walk a new path with our customers,” says Kamal Nath, CEO of Sify, who sheds light on ways to work closely on pre-pandemic complexities and how we are heading into a new post-pandemic era. He focuses on strategic insights into how companies would operate in the future.

“Building new business-aligned cost models, configuring disaster recovery platforms and BCPs, enabling remote working, redesigning the corporate network from the ground up, and migrating to the cloud should be some of the key focus areas for CIOs as they move towards their operations in the new age.”

According to Foundry’s 2023 State of the CIO Research, growth in the tech budget is reaching pre-pandemic levels. 91% of CIOs expect their technology budget to increase or remain unchanged in 2023. Technology initiatives expected to drive the majority of IT investments in 2023 security/risk management, data/business analytics, cloud migration, application systems /pre-existing modernization technologies, machine learning/AI and customer experience.

Since nearly all organizations are data-driven, adopting or migrating to the cloud should be the primary mindset for scaling up operations, according to Kamal.

“We have driven cloud adoption over the past decade; if organizations that were skeptical or hostile to the cloud existed before the pandemic, they can no longer afford to do so. Bringing agility and speed to meet the user’s goals is a must. Being cloud ready and cloud compatible should be the primary directives for organizations in the future. There has been a distinct mindset shift regarding digital adoption models; they were ‘good to have’ before the pandemic, now it has turned into a ‘must do’ practice across all verticals,” he adds.

CIOs as digital innovators

In this process of growing digital adoption and workplace innovation, the roles of CIOs have changed dramatically. CIO roles have moved from being an operations driven role to a more innovation driven role as stated by Kamal Nath. The pandemic, while most businesses wish they never saw it again, has provided organizations with a huge context on which to base their priorities.

“The improved user experience, the creation of business-aligned digital models, the mitigation of security risks, the assurance of business continuity, the introduction of innovation at the core, the management change at scale and the selection of partners remain some of the priorities CIOs need to focus on now,” Kamal added. According to him, the KRA of C-level executives has changed today, and this necessary growth in a CIO’s business priorities can become an overwhelming responsibility. It is therefore very essential for a CIO to rebalance these priorities by recalibrating their business strategies.

“Today we are rebalancing by recalibrating the main aspects of companies. It’s something we’ve learned through interactions with CIOs, CTOs, and our customers.

Recalibration of business strategies:

According to Kamal, the recalibration of strategies for a CIO should extend to all departments. When developing your app strategies, consider cloud migration, app-driven modernization and DevOps, and the use of AI and ML technologies for faster validation processes and faster time to market .

Recalibrate your cloud strategy:

During the pandemic, everyone rushed into cloud adoption without understanding its full scope. Today, there are multiple versions of clouds such as public, hyperscale, non-hyperscale, hosted private, on-premises and more, Kamal said.

“Recalibration of cloud strategies should be based on ‘Horses for Courses’ principles; give specific applications the right residencies instead of a straightforward approach of moving all apps into one place,” said the CEO.

“Of course, it should be a hybrid model and your cloud strategies should also have a predictable cost component so as not to burden the CFO’s priorities,” added Kamal

Recalibrate IT operations strategy:

He said that, in the last quarter, Sify renewed 3 managed services contracts due to changing business and end-user priorities. To increase revenues, companies need to focus on transformational services instead of business-as-usual services. Therefore, the key drivers for IT operations should be site reliability, end-user experience, self-service models, and service catalog-based metrics.

Recalibrating the Edge Strategy:

To connect the people in your organization, CIOs need to focus on building an enterprise mobility solution. The mobile experience of users across devices is a must to ensure edge scaling, Kamal added.

One of the leading steel maker in India is among our valuable clients using our Edge services. We have implemented a managed wi-fi Edge Connect, which interconnects their multiple business segments such as factories, mines, offices, hospitals and others. So as a positive result, we have connected people, IT and OT under one secure platform.

Recalibrate your security strategy:

Is the cloud provider responsible for your security strategy? Well, it’s a shared responsibility between consumers and suppliers. To better understand, cloud security is the customer’s responsibility and cloud security is the vendor’s responsibility, Kamal said.

According to the IDG Security Priorities Study 2022, to overcome their challenges, security leaders continue to allocate a significant amount of their overall IT budget to security, an annual average of $65 million. This number increases for businesses to $122 million and decreases for small businesses to $16 million. The small business budget has tripled since 2020 from $5.5 million.

“Existing security strategies should be improved and developed by prioritizing shared responsibility, DevSecOps, data protection and zero-trust network access in organizations,” Kamal said.

Emerging CIOs

The CIO ecosystem is changing with more people working around the clock, prompting organizations to retool. Roles and responsibilities will depend on the company’s goals, Kamal added.

“It is essential that organizations have an up-to-date shared accountability structure between different management roles. CIOs’ focus should remain more on operations efficiency, infrastructure transformation and end-user experiences, while SOC, regulatory compliance, app architecture and modernization, AI/ML and technical architecture, which generate new flows of revenue, should be managed by CISO, CTO and business CDO respectively,” added Kamal.

In regards to our role in your journey, we strongly believe in changing and upgrading ourselves. We focus on staying ready in both the mindset and skills to engage with diverse people and align to achieve their digital goals, Kamal added.

“Innovation starts with a CIO,” says Kamal. “CIOs should therefore consider that their roles now translate into ‘Chief Innovation Officer’ rather than the standard nomenclature.”

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