Four years ago, I sat down with Frank Slootman, now Former CEO of ServiceNow and Data Domain, and shared my idea of re-architecting backup and recovery from the ground up to manage the data explosion in a cloudy world. Backup and recovery was overdue for a technology refresh. There was opportunity to bring the power of public clouds to backup, expand the role of backup data into a business asset for test/dev and analytics, and replace the traditional cumbersome architecture and user experience with one that was radically simple and infinitely scalable.
Fast forward to ten product releases and 600+ employees, Frank and I caught up on why he invested in Rubrik and how our vision resonated with him. During the discussion, we traded notes on where IT is headed and what’s top of mind for CIOs. Four out of the five business days, I’m usually found on the road, meeting with customers around the world across all industries. After countless trips, I have noticed a clear trend in my discussions with CIOs – the CIO of today is starkly different from the CIO of yesterday. They are business strategists and spend their time figuring how best to leverage technology to empower the business and topline growth.
Why is that? In the past, CIOs were primarily focused on routine functional tasks such as cost control and operational improvements to keep businesses up and running. The arrival of cloud coupled with the rise of consumer applications, such as Facebook, Uber, and Netflix, spurred an everything-as-a-service revolution where experiences were delivered in a click or a swipe. Consumers are on the hunt for instant gratification and expect services on-demand. The same expectations reside within the enterprise. Time to market has shrunk, and IT needs to empower the business.
To survive in the always-on economy, enterprises need to deliver services, not infrastructure. What if you could deliver an Amazon Prime-like service experience, provision workloads on-demand, anywhere while providing secure access to all resources at the doorstep of any department or user? How much more revenue could you drive back to the business?
Intelligent Data Management for Simple Service Delivery
To deliver service delivery in an economical and agile manner, enterprises need a multi-cloud data control plane to manage all their apps and data across on-prem and cloud, achieving unlimited mobility with Uber-like simplicity. What does intelligent data management for the modern enterprise look like?
- Always-on services: Serious, financially impactful threats are becoming more prevalent – such as Ransomware. These threats are tough enough to surmount when dealing with on-premises environments but become extremely risky for legacy solutions with multi-cloud adoption. To ensure that you are protected from Ransomware and other disasters, you must be able to bring applications back online instantly, regardless of where they live, without breaking so much as a sweat.
- Unlimited self-service: To accelerate the delivery of services, enterprises need to empower other business units and end users throughout the organization, such as HR, Finance, and Marketing, while maintaining control within IT. This requires a simple approach to providing secure, granular permissions over data access, enabling designated users to perform data management services without lengthy response times or bottlenecks at the help desk.
- Seamless automation across a multi-cloud environment: With the explosive data growth and fragmentation of applications and data across data centers and clouds, leveraging automation to simplify and orchestrate deployments at massive scale is essential for business survival. A powerful easy-to-use orchestration engine can integrate with any automation framework, such as ServiceNow, VMware vRealize Automation, or BMC Remedy, to deliver services faster and on-demand.
The choice is yours – be the disruptor or become disrupted. To evolve with customer demands and maintain customer loyalty, organizations must adopt technology that gives them access and control over their most valuable asset – data. Empowering agile service delivery begins with modernizing data management.
To learn more about the new role of the CIO, watch the full conversation in which Frank and I share our stories and perspectives for modern enterprises.