DQ sets the stage for CIO 'thought exchange'

As complexities continue to increase, Managing IT has become a
nightmare for CIOs. Be it outsourcing trends, or the ever-changing storage and
security technologies. To add to this, the CIO is constantly on the edge with
the management, which fails to understand why IT budgets should go up constantly
or why technology, which was implemented two years ago, is being talked about
again.

DQ did an event in September on Managing IT and tried to provide
a platform to CIOs, vendors and consultants to talk about three key issues of IT-Storage,
Security and IT infrastructure. Like us, the participants agreed that these
three are the lifeline of any organization, and any flaw in any of this could
result in a disaster. Dataquest organized these events in three cities and saw
participation from leading CIOs like Arun Gupta of Pfizer, Sanjay Prasad of
eServe International, Mukt Bihari of ITI, and N Gajapathy of Transworks.

Security: The Challenges to Information

CIOs realize that they have more and more information flowing in. At the same
time they see that they use not even 20% of all the information they store.
Fiscal 2004-05 saw Indian enterprises shift towards network storage in a
big way, and IP SAN also started making its presence felt. However, security
outsourcing yet to excite CIOs and fails to find itself in the 'to do' list
of enterprises. Interestingly, while security is one of the most talked about
subjects for CIOs, they are not talking about emerging technology but are still
grappling with developing a security framework.

Storage: Simplifying as Demand Explodes

CIOs are now increasingly talking about software storage, ILM, storage
virtualization and storage management. However, CIOs are still divided over
whether the purchase should happen from pure-play storage vendors or server
vendors.

IT Infrastructure: Management is the Key

The challenge for CIOs continues in terms of infrastructure management,
ranging from the remote management of desktop to entire network management.
Other pain points for CIOs include managing other key components of IT
infrastructure-applications including basic apps like OS to critical apps like
ERP, CRM and SCM-are also great concern areas for the CIO community.