IT Solutions for Top Challenges Facing CIOs In Fort McMurray
2020 brought technology to the forefront because the pandemic forced businesses to shift toward remote work, accelerated cloud computing, remote serving, and software as a service adoption.
The increased reliance on technology has resulted in an escalating talent war.
The talent war left CIOs with the formidable task of filling in the tech gap in their companies. Organizations shifted to making critical tech investments to recover economically, accelerate growth, and resolve existing IT issues.
The face of consumerism is slowly recovering from an extreme makeover.
However, the makeover brought new monumental challenges to CIOs. Solving remote network issues, redesigning customer experience, protecting remote networks, leveraging big data, rethinking tech management, boosting productivity — the list is huge.
According to World IT Spending Forecast, CIOs have little choice but to outsource work. Outsourcing appears to resolve most challenges a CIO faces. Let's explore how outsourcing IT tasks in Fort Murray helps CIOs solve challenges they face.
1. Solving The Challenge of Home Network Security
While shifting to remote work ensured that business operations continued, home networks have made organizations more vulnerable to cyberattacks.
According to Tenable study, remote home networks are:
- 3.5 times more likely to have at least one type of malware
- 7.5 times more likely to have at least five different types of malware
- Exposed to cable modem control interface — almost 1 in 7 work from home - remote office IP addresses are exposed
What's more, cloud services and applications, remote access tools, and the use of personal devices eliminate businesses' security perimeters. Lack of business security compromises network protection and risks more cyberattacks.
Many CIOs struggle to manage the security of remote network security. The tenable study reports that 80% of CIOs find that their organizations are more exposed to cyberattacks because of remote work. The risk stems from:
- A lack of visibility into remote employee home network
- Cloud migration
- Expansion of the software supply chain
Since over half of remote workers use personal devices to access work data, and 71% of CIOs lack sufficient visibility into workers' remote networks, a large portion of attackers target workers.
CIOs are riddled with unmanaged risks, unrelenting cyberattacks, and the need to accelerate productivity and operations securely.
Outsourcing your network security needs to Corporate Networks can help your Fort McMurray business secure employees' remote and hybrid networks. Our managed IT services will ensure your organization's data is protected even when employees use personal devices remotely.
2. Redesigning Digital Customer Experience
Business Insider reports that since the beginning of the pandemic:
- The phenomenon of businesses going digital has been accelerated 3-4 years ahead
- The purpose of digital adoption is no more to gain an advantage but to survive
- 74% of buyers say their digital experience with companies has changed
In other words, ICOs have the task of designing digital customer experience infrastructure that could be done in 3-4 years to come.
Digital customer experience is a defining aspect of business today. A CIO must work with the marketing team to co-design a frictionless customer experience. Many businesses struggle to achieve the digital experience that customers demand.
You have a formidable task of handling outdated and inadequate ways to engage customers with your brand. You are responsible for delivering your company's product or services to customers profitably.
Real-time engagement, customer support through third-party devices, creating a seamless, multichannel infrastructure — it's your responsibility to redesign customers' digital experience.
The real challenge is that customers don't just expect more. Their expectations shift quickly. You face an increasingly complex landscape of methodologies, technologies, and compliance and regulatory compliance pressure.
Outsourcing some redesigning IT tasks can help your business embark on journeys to transform your operation models quickly. The efficiency, exposure, and several IT solutions from Corporate Networks can help navigate the axis of change from customer expectations on technology.
3. Decoding The Supply Chain Cybersecurity Problem
The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity finds that 66% of attacks target the supplier's code. CIOs find that solid security protection for organizations isn't enough because attackers are shifting attention to suppliers.
Attackers target the ecosystem of resources a business needs to design, make, and distribute its product. The supply chain includes:
- Hardware
- Software
- Local storage
- Cloud storage
- Distribution mechanism
Attackers compose a supply attack for months, targeting one or more suppliers in the chain and later attacking the final target — the customer. For the most part, such attacks go undetected for long.
Even with good defence, an organization can still be vulnerable to supply chain attacks because attackers search for new potential highways to infiltrate your organization by targeting your suppliers.
To compromise the target customers, attackers focus on suppliers' code. Your organization will be safer putting effort into validating third-party code and software before using them to ensure they aren't manipulated or tampered with.
Corporate Networks can shoulder the heavy validation of third-party code and software tasks for you so that your in-house team can handle the more important tasks in your business. Our managed IT services entail cybersecurity measures to protect your business from supply chain cyber-attacks.
4. Helping with The Task of Leveraging Big Data
Big data is a big buzzword in every industry doing big things.
In the ever-changing world, CIOs have the task of helping their companies to think fast and stay agile. That calls for strategies like deriving sense from complex data sets and using them.
Big data analytics is a top priority for many CIOs.
Leveraging big data and analytics can decrease chain distribution, provide business insights, improve forecasting. You can merge big data with AI to predict and prevent machine failure and increase uptime.
CIOs can help their organizations to get a competitive advantage using data-driven insights to better engage with customers. You can get valuable insights that point to growth opportunities and improve buyer-facing interaction from big data.
For instance, many businesses use chatbots as cost-effective and readily-available customer service. However, you can use chatbots as gold mine growth opportunities by identifying customer issues and revealing barriers to purchase.
As a CIO, you'll shift from focusing on only the technological aspects of IT to information that your business technology is meant to manage. Big data will help you create a hybrid team with analytical and technical expertise.
Outsourcing big data analytics will help you take advantage of the new generation of analytical solutions and help the business make more predictable data-driven decisions.
5. Shouldering the Burden of Increasing Efficiencies
CIOs play a huge role in driving profit improvements using technologies. As the pandemic hit, many businesses struggled with profitability because of increased downtime stemming from:
- Labor shortage
- Supply chain disruption
CIOs got the task of formulating a digital transformation roadmap to move their businesses back on track quickly. Companies wanted to boost production and increase efficiencies.
However, CIOs are the ones to lead the way. The challenge gets even tougher because hiring and retaining a highly-skilled IT specialist is difficult, but you must fill in the skill gap to ensure efficiency.
After all, tech expertise is a powerful asset today.
You can outsource the technical skill gap in your business to allow your employees to focus on what they do best and improve their job satisfaction.
More importantly, outsourcing reduces risks and liabilities, especially for non-core tasks. The IT service vendor knows how to start projects quickly and with great efficiency to quickly streamline your business technology and your team. As a result, you get improved efficiency.
Corporate Networks offers you the option of co-managing IT services or fully managed IT service to help you fill in the tech gap in your business.
6. Helping You with the Challenge of Fostering Innovation
One of CIOs' priorities is to drive innovation. For the most part, innovation is typically situational, so CIOs need to be authentic across the business to take advantage of opportunities.
The next step for a business is transformational. The step after transformation is innovation.
CIOs have the task of establishing new business solutions that offer a competitive advantage to the entire business, not only the IT department. This means you need to focus on optimizing the underlying value creation mechanism in the industry.
However, keeping up with business demands for existing resources can be challenging.
To keep up with business demands, you need to implement new processes and technologies. It's nearly impossible for innovation to happen when there's a massive backlog of business requests in an organization.
Then you need to educate the rest of the business on the potential coming from innovation.
Sometimes, fostering innovation means partnering with an external team to share ideas, business cases of invention, and proof of concept.
Corporate Network has a team of technologists exposed to the outside world that can share innovative ideas, cases of innovation, and proof of concept. What's more, the IT resources you can leverage to meet your business demands leave you with only innovation to worry about.
Corporate Networks Solves Top Challenges Facing CIOs In Fort McMurray — We Can Help You Too
The value of digital operations, channels, and products is evident to businesses today.
The CIO has the grand opportunity to support an efficient and more agile supply chain and is more connected to the customer experience through transformative digital technology. You must do it battling the evils of the dark web, which makes it more challenging.
To go ahead and conquer, you need a trustworthy partner to proactively help you put in place sound strategies and commit to making the right moves to access the new market. Corporate Networks will help you invest in value-creating technologies and allocate resources to the technologies to improve productivity.
Our experience has allowed us to see recurrent patterns of success and step functions in productivity. We'll help you implement the leading forces that allow companies to move up. Contact us today for more information about how we can partner.
