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Challenges in Technology to Meet Enterprise Needs in 2013 and Expectations

By Raghavendra Vaidya ,CIO ,GE India Technology Center

Following are the biggest challenges for the enterprises:

• Information Security and IP Protection: With always connected devices on the edge of the network becoming a reality and their numbers increasing by the day, protecting IP and information is a big challenge for enterprises.


• Cloud Adoption: Adoption of cloud based solutions is on the rise and it will reach critical mass in the coming years. We need technologies and practices to enable the side- by- side existence of cloud based and non- cloud based solution.


• Big Data and Smart Domain Specific Analytics: Big Data is going to be the most important technology disruptor in the coming years. We all know that it takes a lot of effort to convert terabytes of data into usable information which are of value to businesses. We need smart domain specific analytical tools which can give real time analytics usable by domain experts in making important product/ service decisions.
 

The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier

The biggest issue that we have is our inability to detect and stop APTs before it is too late. APTs are becoming so varied and sophisticated that it is very difficult to detect most if not all of them. Pro- active trouble shooting for IT infrastructure is one area where there needs to be a lot of improvement. We have many tools for monitoring IT infrastructure but most of them fall short of detecting issues in time and alerting the support teams.

End- to- End application performance management is another area where we need to progress. We have tools to measure the performance of the individual layers of IT infrastructure and produce metrics but when it comes to measuring application perforce end- to- end we fall short.
 
Technology trends impacting enterprise business environment 

Big Data: Big data will have a huge impact on all organizations and so is the case for GE. It is extremely critical to get our big data strategy right and there are several pieces of technology which are still in a nascent stage of development and we are watching them very closely.
 
Super/ High Performance computing: This is an area that has seen significant developments in last few years. With the usage of GPU's for faster number crunching, fast and reliable file systems for HPC and several other improvements have significantly reduced the time required to solve the engineering problems.

My roles and responsibilities as a CIO

The role of a CIO has evolved from being the "IT Guy" who manages the IT infrastructure and application environment to being a true business partner. Today, CIO's are expected to understand the business environment in fair amount of details and work with the business leaders to deliver business value using technology. It is extremely critical to understand the domain and business processes to be able to deliver value through technology.

Lessons learned and advice for fellow CIOs
 
It is key to stay in lock step with the technology trends as it gives the CIO the various options that are available to solve problems. It is also imperative to understand the domain and the business that we are part of.  If we do not have a good understanding of the business environment– macro and micro then it is impossible to deliver business value with technology.

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