10 Ways CIOs Can Gear Up for 2024 (Guest blog from Rackspace Technology)

How can CIOs create a more robust, secure and modernised enterprise in 2024? Rackspace Technology experts share 10 of their top tips for the New Year

CIOs, what’s on your list to gear up for the New Year?

To prepare for success in 2024, Rackspace Technologies advises that CIOs should upgrade their infrastructure, operations and security. To hit the mark in workforce planning, their modernisation efforts should focus on adopting hybrid cloud solutions, implementing zero trust security models, and deploying edge computing to enable scalability, resilience, and readiness.

For implementation, CIOs should be thinking about ways to upskill workers, including providing AI training to optimise emerging technologies and infrastructures and drive greater business value.

By exploring edge computing, improving energy efficiency, adopting zero trust security and preparing the workforce for AI, CIOs stand to gain significantly stronger systems, enhanced cybersecurity, vital future skills and a reduced environmental impact.

How can CIO's benefit?

Rackspace Technologies assembled their top ten ways to gear up for 2024 right now.

Modernise your data centers: Take stock of your existing data centers and assess opportunities to modernise them. This could entail implementing hyper-converged infrastructure, for example.
Embrace hybrid cloud solutions: Build a hybrid cloud strategy that integrates your existing on-premises infrastructure with a mix of public and private cloud services. Interconnecting infrastructure delivers the flexibility to optimally deploy workloads, scale on-demand to meet changing needs, and allow efficient computing resource sharing.
Implement software-defined infrastructure: Explore software-defined networking (SDN) and software-defined storage (SDS) solutions. Adopting these software-driven technologies brings increased flexibility and automation to managing infrastructure, improving adaptability and meeting your evolving business needs.
Enhance your network security: Strengthen network security by implementing advanced threat detection capabilities, intrusion prevention systems and encryption protocols. Focus on securing your internal network traffic, not just the perimeter. Taking these measures helps you identify and defend against cyberthreats from both outside and inside the network.
Ensure hybrid business continuity and disaster recovery readiness: Review disaster recovery plans and test backups to build resilience and ensure you can quickly rebound after a crisis. Comply with industry regulations by determining relevant laws, actively updating recovery strategies, and optimizing offsite data storage to ensure you are meeting sector-specific governance standards.
Explore an edge computing infrastructure: Identify use cases for edge computing within your organisation and devote resources to infrastructure that powers edge implementations. Deploying computation and storage closer to data sources through edge computing can actively decrease latency while improving the real-time responsiveness of your applications.
Conduct energy efficiency audits: Audit your data infrastructure's energy use, then actively target upgrades, like consolidated workloads, energy-efficient hardware and renewable sources to reduce environmental impact.
Implement zero trust security model: Transition to a zero trust security model that actively authenticates every access attempt, rather than implicitly trusting users or systems by default. Adopt context-based, strict access controls across devices and environments to dynamically verify every identity and minimize breach risk by granting least-privilege access.
Evaluate AI operations: Adopt an AI and machine learning platforms with robust model deployment, monitoring, and governance to enable streamlined oversight and full lifecycle management that accelerates rollout while safeguarding production.
Plan for evolving workforce and symbiotic roles: Ensure that you create workforce strategies that consider hybrid work models, upskilling initiatives and shifting roles as AI augments more business processes.

With proactive upgrades across operations, Rackspace Technologies showcase how CIOs can drive digital transformation and build organisational resiliency for the evolving technological landscape in 2024.

Learn more about Rackspace Technologies on their website here.

Cloud computing and the path to a more sustainable future

This techUK insights paper highlights the commitment of our members to a sustainable approach to cloud computing and sets out six core best practice principles for a greener future for the tech sector.

Find out more