CIOs are worried about cloud safety
The Turkish ICT industry was lacking a gathering where CIOs could socialize and discuss the newest trends and technologies. In it is fourth year the IDC’s CIO Summit is filling this gap. The summit is organized around this idea: “Budget cuts, ‘cloud’ everything, data getting ‘bigger’, more stakeholders than ever before and a rapidly evolving competitive landscape – the CIO’s world is not getting simpler. With CIOs striving to align IT objectives with those of the wider business and endeavoring to enhance business efficiency and agility, IDC’s CIO Summit 2013 will focus on a pressing theme – Seize the Moment: Transform, Innovate, and Collaborate. What are the strategies that the business-savvy CIO needs to consider? How they can demonstrate greater value to the business user and thereby increase the profile of IT in the boardroom?”
The value proposition of the summit is as follows: “Transform remarkable ideas into executable plans. The generation and dissemination of ideas is critical. But as an executive, your end goal is solving a problem or creating a new opportunity. Stretch your mind beyond accepted definition of possible. The daily grind requires the brain to be mostly analytical, to conform with the ‘one right answer’ requirements of business. But breakthrough innovations come from those who take the path less travelled. Evaluate alternative approaches to established conventions. Business as usual no longer exists. Examine current assumptions and explore the possibilities outside them. Compare and contrast how companies have achieved success in different ways, with different models, and different mind sets.”
The discussions were focused around cloud and security. Many CIOs wanted to ask about how they can tap into cloud better without sacrificing security. Some of the cleverest questions were for the multinational firms. A CIO asked Microsoft this: “You are a big target for the best hackers around the world. I am not. So, why would it be safer to store my data in your cloud?” Another one was to Blackberry and Samsung: “You update your software whenever you wish to. This is a critical risk to my business, how can you customize it to my needs?”
The IDC’s regional director said that he now better understands why Turkish CIOs are slower than European or American ones in adopting the cloud-based solutions.
Indeed giving all of your valuable data to a multinational firm and having it be stored somewhere you don’t know is not appealing to all. That’s why Turkcell is keen on emphasizing that they are holding the data within Turkey.
We will see in the future if the safety concerns of CIOs can be overcome and how.
