How CIOs crack large data, analytics and cloud security challenges

The role of the CIO position has been changing. And with the rapid rise of large data, analytics and cloud computing, and the size of the data itself, it is no doubt that CIOs are given a new definition of responsibility by the pressures of it innovation and continued high and technical complexity. Businesses want the IT department to handle more business with less, and CIOs need to find a balance between budget and IT service spending, and all of the problems seem to have erupted at this point.

At such a critical juncture, outstanding CIOs and CEOs have come forward to speak at the Sloan CIO Symposium held at MIT last week, hoping to help their own perspective in the field of data analysis and cloud computing technology for both IT executives and business executives to improve their business philosophy. Of course, all this is premised on not bringing extra pressure on already stretched IT resources.

Data to be flexible and data to be rapid

Guess has a number of product lines, but how many clothing products in the selection of the main push style or accessories style is the key factor in the sales trend. In order to make the right decision, the data analysis mechanism needs to query all the data in the spreadsheet. The process took hundreds of hours, and the company's senior vice president and CIO Michael Relich had to face an endless number of calls as a result of the failure of numerous inquiries. After learning how guess handled the master data, Relich and his technical team developed a two-dimensional code scheme that customers can use to scan the ipad and view details about the costume on the screen.

The project is not part of a strategic plan or a long-term move. On the contrary, it comes entirely from the actual needs of customers. In fact, most of the major data analysis projects are directly driven by customers.

The senior vice president and CIO William Miller Jr, a semiconductor chip maker at Bo Tong, suggests that technicians should focus their eyes on demand rather than just chasing demand.

At Bo Tong Company, it and engineering team in the same operating environment. To meet the interaction needs of both parties, the company deployed corporate social networking technologies such as Jabber and Yammer, designed to help engineers spontaneously organize temporary teams when tasks occur, and then dissolve them once they are complete. "This allows engineers to maximize productivity because they don't have to spend time slowly organizing and coordinating their work environment," Miller explains. "This is a very efficient process or organization plan. ”

The company's engineers also set up a private cloud environment that ensures that staff can work flexibly at any time of day, including at night. The company has just acquired a new company, and outside workers in Monday were surprised to find that their familiar programs and tools were fully integrated into the work environment of the Bo-A-week, which is the highlight of flexibility. "It convinced us that the investment we made before was absolutely worth it," Miller told us.

Data visualization meets real needs

For large data investments to be effective, we must ensure that the information generated by the analysis tools is visible in the presence of the current staff. In the past, the Mojgan Mutual Insurance Group received a 80-page operating report each quarter, and the executive team spent hours reading and understanding the content, the group's senior vice president and CIO, Lefebvre, said.

Translating this tirade into a list of key performance indicators requires step-by-step, Lefebvre explains. First, decide what key issues you need to find answers to. Then, create a series of grouped reports. Finally, the data visualization is processed. The whole process is intended to "get the data to meet real needs by organizing." Lefebvre adds that it often takes more than a quarter to get the report to really guide the work and the conversion process.

"Getting people to use data warehouses is a huge problem," Relich. This is particularly true in the retail sector, where buyers often have very strong intuitive judgments. Guess's solution will first deliver valuable data to the BlackBerry platform, and then visualize it with the flash-supported information panel, which will eventually deliver the results to the ipad app. Relich points out that the sales figures for each retail store are aggregated to improve the speed at which decisions are made and to reduce the number of planning meetings.

Real-time data visualization is not limited to the number itself. The site risk engineers at the Lee Po Insurance company are able to photograph the actual situation and upload it to the database side. Here, the picture will again be inspected by the premium rate engineer. According to Lefebvre, this mechanism allows the audit cycle of premium payments to be shortened from the past few days to the current hours.

Private clouds, mixed clouds can be the answer to security and latency issues

The equipment that employees use to take photos of the scene may pose many challenges to it leaders, especially now that the BYOD wave has just ended and the company's honeymoon period, the security of cloud services itself has sparked widespread skepticism about the popularity of mobile devices.

In the cloud computing development agenda discussion, many experts have said that in addition to security, cloud computing complexity should also be the full attention of enterprise users.

For years, cloud service providers have been able to easily sell their products to human resources, sales, and other business units, but this has upset the IT department. In contrast, it leaders have been striving to strictly control enterprise assets and improve user management.

Now, Richard Dorough, head of legal services at PwC, argues that we have reason to seriously assess the data itself, service level agreements, and cloud service security before deciding to migrate anything to the cloud.

For Scott Blanchette, senior vice president of information and technology services at Pioneer Health Systems, mixed cloud and private cloud deployments are the best way to solve the problem, especially for health and other tightly regulated industries.

Blanchette that the value proposition of cloud services has a significant advantage over the effectiveness, speed, cost, flexibility and security of the Pioneer company. Clearly, security and privacy considerations are the biggest stumbling block for corporate users to hand cloud service providers, he explains. Even the Amazon Web Service, which currently has the highest market share, took four years to qualify for the FedRAMP (the federal Risk and Authorization management program) and meet the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services cloud safety standards.

In addition, we'd better look at cloud computing from a workload perspective, says senior vice president and CTO John Roese of EMC Corporation. "The most unpopular obscure encrypted storage" may become a good partner for the public cloud, he told us. But for data that needs to be analyzed in real time (for example, from Amazon servers to the corporate environment and then to mobile devices), low latency is probably the most important factor to consider.

To solve this problem, we can use the virtual desktop infrastructure to translate mobile devices into a pure data representation layer that can effectively improve latency, Roese said.

Do a good job in IT training

Of course, if a business does not have the talent and it leaders enough to drive data analysis and cloud computing, then the slogan of meeting the needs of the users will be empty.

Because Pioneer is headquartered in Nashville, the "Music City of the United States rather than the city of Technology," the company's data center can only be roamed location in Boston and Silicon Valley, Blanchette said. Pioneer has also recruited a number of technicians from other vertical industries, because IT professionals learn more about health care than the average employee does with high-tech knowledge.

After the entry of professional talents, training becomes the top priority. This means communicating the value proposition of the work content to it people, says Bo Miller. This also means that we need to respond not only to the needs of our users, but also to ways to change our core business processes. Miller concludes that the rewards of a series of construction inputs, such as software and infrastructure, are to be achieved.

Or, as Relich says: "I told my team, ' don't give employees what they want, just take what they really need." ’”