Everything-as-a-Service: Key points from CIO Summit Fireside Chat

The CIO & IT Leaders Summit took place on Tuesday 28th June, and our CTO Kevin Reid spoke as part of a "Everything-as-a-Service" Fireside Chat with Séamus Dunne, Managing Director of Digital Realty, and Conall Laverty, Founder of Wia.

Some of the key points discussed by the panel included:

• The importance of finding the value in your existing IT people to insure that are engaged in higher value work and not the mundane.

• The benefits of colocation in IT when moving legacy workloads to managed infrastructure.

• Digital infrastructure needing to go hand in hand with a modern businesses operating model.

• Making the decision between managing the software stack or consuming the outcome. Managing the stack which requires skills that are not always used - comes with complexities, but selecting the right partners delivers the vision and outcome for you.

• Flexible delivery models result in accurate and secure information ready to be consumed.

• When it comes to backing up data that’s typically the easy part. However, when it come to recovering in a crisis, your organisation is not used to having to deal with high pressure problems or being in crisis.

• Companies like SureSkills and Digital Realty are used to managing change. In fact, that’s what they deal with every day. Importantly for clients they are also able to carry what they have learned from one scenario to the next.

• Transformative models are not required to deal with the extra workload/knowledge – they just want the outcome and added value.

• The impact of digital transformation on the people based outside of the IT industry can be seen most clearly in the world of education. Adapting to online learning, at flexible times, no physical books, and hands on labs to name a few areas where people are accepting this change.