CXO’s from India & Africa appreciate the urgency for Digital Transformation to stay relevant.
iValue hosted the 3rd edition of iStorm at Atlantis, Dubai from 10th to 12th September. The exclusive conclave for top CXO/CTO/CISOs attracted 100+ CXO’s across verticals like BFSI, ITeS, Telecom, Pharma, Manufacturing and eGovernance, from India and Africa.
“iStorm is a platform where consultants, OEM’s, and analysts share their views on market transformation, changing business needs and evolving threat landscape. It gives participants a 360-degree view of what is required to stay relevant,” stated Sunil Pillai, Founder & Managing Director – iValue InfoSolutions. “Digital transformations across industries are forcing businesses to reinvent themselves to stay relevant. The evolving threat landscape is keeping businesses on its toes to stay ahead”, he added.
The underlying theme for iStorm 2015 was ‘Together Towards Tomorrow’, towards understanding business and IT challenges around Data, Network and Application protection and management, along with evolving compliance and threat management needs. Technology and domain experts from HDS, HP Security, Websense, Check Point, Tenable, NetScout and Array Networks brainstormed with CXOs to evolve a blue print on the Digital Transformation road map, around SMAC. The event provided a platform for CXO’s to learn and share best practices relevant to their vertical, case studies from peers with similar business and challenges and navigating compliance needs, amidst growing risks from threat vectors.
Vivekanand Venugopal, Vice President & General Manager, Hitachi Data Systems, said, “The key principle of HDS strategy is to drive data independence from the application that created it and underlying infrastructure. This enables customers to eliminate IT silos, leverage existing assets and facilitate information integration. The second principle of the strategy is focused around customers having ownership over their data or rather have the keys to their kingdom or Metadata. Losing control over this will inhibit their ability to leverage digital technologies and drive business outcomes for their organization.”
Digital Transformation – critical for relevance and success of every business
Social, mobility/cloud and extreme big data are both an opportunity and threat for enterprises. Most of the leaders agreed with the fact that ‘Digital Transformation’ is going to be the way forward, with SMAC adoption being the base camp for digital transformation. The key takeaway for participants of iStorm 2015 was the importance and criticality for business across size and verticals to embrace digital transformation, for ensuring relevance and growth in the digital age.
Eric Anklesaria, Partner – Management Consulting, KPMG India said, “From the customer’s perspective, there is a heavy focus on pricing and it’s just one of the important aspects of how technology is judged. Instead, customers should look for the benefit they get and consider if the pricing does justice to the benefit. We are also seeing a shift where IT decisions are made along with business leaders for business initiatives.”
Staying ahead of threat through security intelligence
According to Identity Theft Resource Center, 551 breaches have been recorded in 2015. Hackers are sophisticated and leave no trace, unlike earlier breaches. Most organizations don’t realise they have been hacked. On an average, it takes 229 days to detect a security breach within an enterprise, according to the Mandiant 2014 Threat Report. Therefore, it is crucial for enterprises to invest not only in the right technology but also the right skill sets and ‘intelligent’ security strategy to detect breach fast and stop data loss.
While the number of data breaches rises and budgets of CIOs are shrinking, security has become the top priority of IT decision makers. Jyoti Prakash, Country Director – India & SAARC Countries at Hewlett-Packard commented, “Everyone who attended iStorm 2015 had a key objective- to keep the bad guys out. The biggest challenges that enterprises face today are cyber-attacks, transformation of enterprise IT and regulatory processes. The question isn’t if a breach will occur in your firm, but when it will occur.”
Ajay Kumar Dubey, National Manager – Partners & Alliances at Websense shared, “Many customers are not aware of the threat landscape. Some even go days without realizing they have been attacked. iStorm 2015 has helped us educate customers who are keen to learn about these latest threats and stay ahead of the security curve. The event also helped us to build our brand and reinforce our positioning as a security provider.”
Sachin Mandhare, Director – Technology, Pinwheel Technology: Understanding the latest technology and threat landscape is a primary need for our industry i.e. BFSI. These days, one cannot afford to ignore the value that IT brings to an enterprise. iStorm 2015 helped us understand the latest solutions to emerging problems in enterprise IT.
Krishnan Nilakantantan, CIO, Muthoot Fincorp: iStorm 2015 gave us an in-depth awareness of the threat landscape. It’s also a great platform to network and meet people who bring value to your profession.
R Manikant Singh, Head – IT and Security, ORBIS: The information security perspective of enterprises has changed drastically. Our short-sightedness converted into a long one after we got insights about common problems and solutions from various organizations like customers and OEMs at iStorm 2015.
Sreeraj P, Malayala Manorama: Data management, availability and security are the prime focus areas for IT decision makers today, especially in media. Information travels in and out of many avenues. Events like iStorm 2015 give insights on new risks and solutions addressing how we can tackle evolving issues.
