The 5 Things Every CIO Must Have

I had the opportunity to hear Wendy Pfeiffer, CTO of Nutanix, share her thoughts on how CIO's today can work with their organization, team, and solutions providers to run their workloads in the optimal mix of public and private clouds during their .NEXT 2019 conference. Here's what every CIO needs.

Operational Experts

For decades, on-prem data centers have run like a well-oiled machine. IT organizations know how to:

• Optimize for space, bandwidth, and energy consumption,

• Provide physical and logistical access, and resiliency, V1 (load-balanced and redundant hardware)

• Monitor and provide ongoing management

Over the past decade, IT has also run the large-scale operation on public cloud infrastructure. In public it now optimizes:

• Access to scalable compute and storage resources for variable capacity workloads
• Performance for edge computing requirements
• Resiliency, V2 (fault-tolerant and self-healing code)

Optimizing hybrid operations is IT’s newest challenge. Hybrid cloud requires:

• A detailed, validated description of the total operational environment

• Administrative expertise at the operating system and hypervisor level for all clouds

• Adaptive monitoring and resource management that spans the end-to-end workflow

• People and tools capable of correlating conditions across the hybrid environment and then responding optimally

Expert Architecture

The greatest architects understand physical and aesthetic limitations while striving to realize their higher vision for truly performant hybrid cloud architecture. Truly performant cloud architecture requires:

A single operating system running across all clouds, with the ability to:

• Dynamically use storage, compute, and local network resources (hyper-convergence)
• Create and expand clusters across the entire fabric
• Invoke any infrastructure resource code

A reliable and modern hypervisor capable of:

• Running well and predictably in both public and private clouds
• Making optimal use of hyper-converged resources

Open and available APIs and standards which enable:

• Integration with modern best of breed and legacy applications and tools
• Adaptive and performant use of cybersecurity policies and toolsets across the fabric, across all clouds

True IT Technologists

Absolutely everything that every team member does must be documented in detail and ultimately expressed as code:

• Best-in-class operational processes
• Adaptive health monitoring and incident management
• Integration with other toolsets
• Mundane and unique functionality and service

Every team member must become conversant in both writing code and integrating functions into existing codesets.

“Future proofing” this hybrid cloud requires that every team member have the ability to express and access any service or function that she runs as code.

Thanks to public cloud vendors and many consumer tech companies, ML, NLP, and containerization technologies are production-class today and ready for IT.

Partners Standing By

Even the best core team must have access to specialists who extend the team’s capabilities in these areas:

• Design and planning expertise
• Understanding and application of new technologies
• Implementation, particularly at scale
• Staff augmentation for special projects
• Timely delivery of vendor product shipments

Second and third opinions are priceless, especially when large budgets or key business objectives are at stake. Iron sharpens iron, and even the best teams must consult and train in order to maintain their edge. IT exists to help our companies identify, adopt, and run technology. Partners exist to help IT.

Portfolio Management

To continuously deliver business value, IT MUST have:

• Access to a healthy mix of extensible and adaptive technologies
• The ability to ingest technology via multiple consumption models
• Ubiquitous and efficient supportability
• Application portability
• Specialized skills and resources
• Vendor choice

To support IT’s needs, Vendors MUST:

• Understand they will always be part of a custom ecosystem that IT is ultimately responsible to design, adapt, secure, and run;
• Refrain from draconian licensing practices that seek to “lock in” use over time;
• Ensure design principles and expressed products are capable of supporting IT’s preferred mode of operation: hybrid cloud;
• Provide modern products designed to enable true application portability: the ability to run any service on any hardware, in any cloud.