FEATURE: CIO’S PRIORITY FOR 2019
are able to capitalise on its benefits.
Re-training existing members of staff is
critical. There are a range of options to
help organisations upskill their IT teams
through training; from government
programmes through to vendor academies,
such as the Oracle Academy. The latter
is useful for providing both the technical
skillset required and the necessary security
and compliance training.
Work smarter
CIOs don’t just want to save costs – they
want to move faster and smarter to take
the business in more exciting directions
than ever before. Autonomous will be
key to fulfilling those aims. Accenture, for
example, needed a better way to manage its
largescale professional services workforce.
Trialling an autonomous cloud solution
against its key, data-intensive HR application,
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the company can get quicker and more
personalised analytics to make smarter,
faster workforce decisions.
Similarly, Hertz has used an autonomous
cloud solution to remove the pain of
administration and focus on delivering
faster projects.
Instead of setting up and tuning a server
and database, the team can invest its man
hours in innovation – delivering the right
products to market, and customers, with
more speed.
Build security resilience
By 2022, Gartner predicts that a company’s
cybersecurity rating will become as
important as its credit rating to customers,
suppliers and partners. Yet, security attacks
and breaches are increasing, and humans
can’t keep up. In fact, Gartner previously
predicted that 95% of cloud security failures
will be the customer’s fault.
With AI and automation, businesses can
automate the detection, prevention and
response to security breaches, performance
anomalies and vulnerabilities. Only by using
machines to fight machines can companies
reprioritise and rethink about how they
defend their information.
Autonomous services are precisely the kind of
technology that forward-looking CIOs in South
Africa should strive to adopt. The power of
autonomous services, capable of self-patching,
self-tuning and automatically optimising
performance while running, is just the start.
It won’t be long before autonomous cloud
services bring simplicity, self-service and
security into all areas of the business,
providing new fuel for innovation. Some
organisations are ready. What about you? n
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