Seven Survival Tips for CIOs

Yaj Malik, Area Vice President, ASEAN, Citrix Systems

What can CIOs do to survive and ride out this economic storm? Here are 7 survival tips that Citrix recommends.

1. The Internet is (almost) free. Use it!

Just at the point in time when cost pressures are at their highest, when the scrutiny and pressure to run as efficiently as possible is at its worst we find there's still massive over-provisioning in these hugely expensive datacenters we've all invested in and nurtured over the years or to put it more bluntly, massive waste. According to a study conducted by Gartner in November 2008, approximately 80% to 90% of server capacity is unused at any one time and this massive over provisioning and wastage has led to C-level management's increased scrutiny on IT costs.

Compare that to "renting" a VM in the cloud on a site like Amazon's EC2 for pennies, best of all, you get to pay only for what you use, when you use it. Zero waste. Economics like this will be so compelling in 2009 that virtually every company out there will begin experimenting with the cloud to get a feel for how it works and where it fits within their IT strategy, especially in areas like test/development, departmental server usage, non-critical applications.

To improve efficiency of their data centers, virtualization should be considered. Besides minimizing over provisioning of server capacities, another key driver for virtualization will be the critical need for IT organizations to reduce total costs of ownership (TCO) as CIOs are forced to cut capital as well as operating expenditures and reign in the management and energy consumption costs of existing IT assets.

2. Be the Cloud (or be gone)

Besides adopting a more open approach in their IT environments, CIOs should also adopt the cloud mentality and act quickly to transform their internal IT organizations to look, act and feel like the cloud. This model will help transform IT services into dynamic delivery centers to provide web-based applications to their end-users on an on-demand basis, with the best performance, security and efficiency, regardless of the application type, network, user scenario and the type of end-point device. By centralizing applications and desktops, the IT resources or energies will be refocused to provide to better SLA in IT support and services.

3. Embrace the "Power of One"

This may well be the most powerful of all when it comes to radically changing the economics of IT. Consolidation also allows CIOs to embrace the "Power of One" as virtualization and cloud computing enable IT organizations to maintain just one copy of each software, application, workload, allocate one password for each user and create only one instance of data.

Not only does this eradicate the hassle of updating and maintaining multiple copies of each software application on numerous machines, it enables the IT organization to roll out new applications and desktops much more quickly as IT executives are not required to rebuild the infrastructure each and every time to take into account new assumptions for security, connections and users' devices. New users can also be easily added onto the networks in minutes, rather than days or weeks.

4. Make it REALLY easy to work from anywhere

The economic storm has renewed and increased the pressure for organizations to re-examine their cost-cutting measures such as cutting on business travel, reducing remote sites or branches and hire-freezes. Essentially, this means that companies will have to do more for less by enhancing productivity of existing employees and resources. Cloud computing and virtualization can help IT organizations create a win-win situation for themselves and end-users. By centralizing, virtualizing and delivering applications and desktops as an on-demand service over any environments or devices, IT organizations will be able to lower its operating costs and promote better productivity of IT personnel as there are far less variables to address.

Increasingly, users are working on the go, and not only just merely on corporate laptops. A Forrester report on enterprise mobile users, conducted in October 2008, revealed that mobile workers who use their personal mobile devices to access corporate applications, are the fastest growing segment and enterprise mobile users will make up 73% of the workforce in 2012. Gartner also predicts that by the end of 2010, 50% of business travelers will prefer to work on their mobile devices. These staggering statistics emphasize the importance for CIOs to explore alternative infrastructure delivery models made possible through cloud computing to enable users to work anywhere, any time and in any environment. With this flexibility, users also become happier and more productive employees

5. Throw a BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer) party. See who shows up.

As more enterprises embrace the concept of cloud computing, IT organizations should get out of the business of owning and managing end point assets and relinquish this responsibility to end-users.   The digital age, users, especially those from the younger generation, get more excited and are happier when working on a device that they love and are more familiar with. Happier users make more productive employees, as they tend to work more and take better care of the devices that they own.  

Citrix has taken the lead and initiated a pilot BYOC project in the US for a start within our own organization.

6. Get hooked on "all-you-can-meet" virtual meetings

Business collaboration still remains necessary for organizations to remain competitive in this difficult economic climate despite cost-cutting, virtual meeting is recommended as alternative solution.

7. Hang out at your local Apple Store. Take notes.

Cloud Computing points to personal technology into the workplace thus means consumer IT products are expecting to use as part of their jobs.  According to Gartner, consumerization of enterprise IT will be the single, biggest trend affecting corporate IT over the next decade. By 2010, end-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and service acquisitions made by IT.

A highly recommended strategy for CIOs heading 2009 is to pay close attention to consumer type businesses and model their best practices for their IT organizations. Rather than allocating more of their limited budget to prevent the introduction of user technologies, it will be more viable, in the long run, for IT organizations to manage user choices through expanding them in a collaborative fashion.

To conclude, these survival tips will enable you to survive and remain agile in a dynamic world and stay ahead of the curve in these challenging times. So get ready to roll!