Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 54 | Page 37

///////////////////////// TALKING business ‘‘ The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging us to instill a new change in our everyday behaviour and engagement model. Local governments are taking proactive measures and implementing controls to respond to this unique situation, including locking down cities, limiting social gatherings and suspending schools. Public sector organisations, corporations, financial institutions, education systems and enterprises are reacting and adapting to those measures. Nevertheless, the wheel of the economy needs to keep rolling. And guess what? Technology is here to help the economy to adapt to the ‘new normal’. Working from home is the new significant change and CIOs are now under pressure to make sure that business services are not affected, nor compromised. Embracing Digital Transformation over recent years has contributed to businesses today having a crucial dependency on technology. Therefore, availability and ongoing improvement of a company’s digital services are required in order to survive, while also continuing to offer services without any performance degradation or availability issues. CIOs today are leading the change and are responsible for ensuring the company can survive during this crisis. The current operational processes and IT capabilities need adjustment and tuning to address the new issues and challenges as a result of the unanticipated amount of load and connection due to the working from home model. Most large enterprises have developed a Business Continuity plan and the process is typically tested every six months to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of the company’s operations during a disaster or a crisis. The CIO should immediately assemble his virtual incident response team to react swiftly and precisely to assess the situation during critical IT incidents or cybersecurity attacks, so they mitigate the damage, respond at speed and make informed decisions about how to move forward. Mohammed Arafat, Presales Director, Micro Focus Emerging Markets “ TECHNOLOGY IS HERE TO HELP THE ECONOMY TO ADAPT TO THE ‘NEW NORMAL’. The administrators and operators of the data centre and on-premise business services will manage the systems remotely and the CIO needs to have end-to-end visibility of the entirety of the services provided to both internal users and the customer-facing applications. The health of the business services and data centre infrastructure components, systems performance and availability are the highest priorities for the CIO in order to maintain excellent levels of user experience and service accessibility for customers and employees. The command and control team should provide the CIO with a single pane of glass dashboard, equipped with the right views. The dashboard will provide real-time visibility on the most critical business applications and their dependencies, as well as network performance and traffic, virtual private www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 37