How CIOs are building resilience with digital managed services

If the last few years have taught us anything, it is that life is unpredictable. This perma-crisis of unpredictability is set to continue as we have conflicts, financial instability, and increasing natural disasters. So while CIOs are helping organisations to innovate at pace and scale, it’s never been more important to balance that momentum with risk awareness and resilience. In 2023, the role of the CIO must be to enhance existing capabilities and create new ones while protecting the organisation from continued volatility and increased risk.   

Having a robust security and risk strategy allows CIOs to build resilience that leaves them free to focus their attention on driving continued innovation and service improvement. But it isn’t easy – CIOs report that a lack of skills and a rapidly growing threat landscape make resilience an ongoing challenge.

The Logicalis Global CIO Survey 2023 found over half of CIOs (52%) are increasing spending on risk management and plan to grow their risk management teams this year. 

This makes sense if we consider the expanding number of threats that today’s IT organisations need to mitigate:

• Half (48%) of CIOs believe that malware and ransomware will present a significant risk to their organisation in the year ahead. 
• Other significant threats include data breaches (42%), phishing (37%), malicious insiders (31%) and human error caused by lack of staff awareness (31%).   

The good news is that CIOs are optimistic about technology’s ability to build resilience.   

CIOs are also taking a wider view of resilience, rethinking the way that services are built and delivered to help reduce and manage risk. A third of CIOs already work with Managed Service Providers to deliver digital service and cite security compliance (39%) as one of the main expectations when working with an MSP. 

Logicalis Global CIO Report 2023 found the majority of CIOs (57%) are already moving towards secure cloud-first environments, while 38% are working with MSPs to deliver digital platforms. This shift is being driven by wider strategic priorities around innovation and sustainability: 57% of CIOs say they would work with an MSP to boost digital platform capability, while 48% would be driven by sustainability.  

The benefit of such relationships is clear – half of CIOs say that the right MSP can help to free up resources so that CIOs can focus on core strategic priorities. Meanwhile, 41% say that an MSP can provide better access to skills (41%) and improved visibility of cost and performance (35%).

We generate about 170,000,000 events a month. There is no way our internal security team would be able to review that amount of data without using partners and their threat intelligence to help identify potential threats - Ray Thorpe, Global CISO, ESW

The Logicalis Global CIO Report 2023 has in-depth analysis of how CIOs can build resilience and improve security for their organisations. It also has fascinating data on how they are driving innovation and sustainability in a digital first world. It proves that CIOs are growing their field of influence at board level, and are themselves becoming architects of change.