Muggie van Staden

The new year will offer up several opportunities to businesses that are ready to embrace transformation of infrastructure and whose CIOs are up to the challenge to help businesses use new technology effectively and truly rethink IT.

IT professionals like Muggie van Staden, MD of leading provider of open source technology and services Obsidian Systems, says the new world of everything as-a-service (XaaS) and everything software-defined will replace the traditional ways IT services are consumed.

“We are talking extensively about cloud computing and the variety of services and applications that are now available for users, on-demand and subscription models based on consumption,” said van Staden.

However, this cloud-focused ICT expert and business leader reminds the market that the challenge for the CIO is providing IT in this consumption model for business to consume.

“The best way to take advantage of these trends is to understand them, and to enable business to consume IT in a new and different way without putting the business at risk. Using everything from “traditional” to private, local public and international public cloud options and creating the mechanisms to consume and move workloads between these environments,” van Staden adds.

Engagement is key

According to Obsidian and van Staden the best approach CIOs can take to leverage these trends is to focus on engagement. This means they should engage business, engage providers and engage IT.

The CIO has a critical role to play in helping IT and providers understand how they are enabling business.

“Essentially the CIO has to enable business without introducing risk,” says van Staden.

This will involve breaking out of the traditional mould and meeting several challenges including governance and risk management, and making IT and providers understand what is required to enable business.

The CIO will be at the front end of strategy development and enforcement, and going into 2016 this will involve enabling business, cloud (hybrid), big data, continuous integration and DevOps.