Software-fuelled shifts in the competitive landscape over the past decade coupled with global disruptions and user demands for secure, always-on digital experiences have significantly impacted CIO roles across all sectors.

Now, as the speed of innovation skyrockets, complexity along application delivery grows, and attack surfaces evolve, executive-level foresight is more critical than ever. And in a world where it takes only one move—right or wrong—to make a significant impact, modern CIOs are at the helm of these weighty decisions. Put bluntly by McKinsey Digital, “There’s no worse time to be an average CIO.”

New Breed of CIO: From IT Leader to Growth Driver

It’s a high-stakes race to develop a winning multi-cloud strategy and attract world-class talent but the chances of gaining ground in the application economy are slim and top CIOs aren’t standing by. Instead, they’re approaching tech-driven growth with an understanding that developer experience (DevEx) and customer experience (CX) are directly correlated and without one, you can’t have the other. As such, a new breed of revenue-generating CIOs are laser-focused on building teams, tools, and processes that raise the bar.

Reaching for the Clouds:

As innovation accelerates, the benefit of multi-cloud is undeniable. No other configuration enables companies to leverage the unique qualities of diverse cloud providers, minimise dependency on any single vendor, scale efficiently, and bolster organisational resilience as effectively.

That said, modern CIOs understand the difficulty of monitoring multi-cloud configurations and embrace platforms that deliver not only real-time health visibility across all clouds—but also monitor and alert to security anomalies across multi-cloud environments. In addition, these tools create shared visibility for development, operations, and security teams that supports collaboration—a key component of DevEx-focused environments.

Innovation on the fly:

CIOs experienced firsthand how disruptive global crises can be, and the need to be prepared has never been more critical now that the world is in the midst of multiple crises on a myriad of geopolitical and health-related fronts. Lessons learned during extraordinary lifts-and-shifts (some good, some catastrophic) stand as a measure of how important it is to build a resilient organisation. In a world forever changed by the forced exodus to remote work, forward-thinking CIOs aren’t focused on getting teams back to the office. They’re doubling down on secure, productivity-boosting, and portable IT environments that seamlessly support anywhere work while partnering with recruitment peers to leverage that aspect to attract and retain top talent across all levels of their technology landscape.

As complexity and security continue to determine the accelerated rate of innovation, CIOs in leading companies are setting new benchmarks for the role. Over the next decade, CIO influence and responsibilities will continue to grow. The rapid tech transformation of enterprise operations over the last few years shows little sign of slowing. CIOs hold the keys to customer engagement, cost efficiencies, revenue and innovation, and can offer the insights and strategic direction their teams need to make pivotal decisions.

Embracing the Multi-Cloud Era

CIOs are also tasked with implementing the infrastructure to support an ever-expanding list of technology expectations from customers and employees—such as market-responsive applications and networking that supports 24/7, secure access to critical systems. To meet these challenges, CIOs are turning to multi-cloud architectures that enable secure remote access, speed application development, and give organisations the ability to scale quickly to meet demand.

Modernising the App Pipeline:

To meet market demand for applications and create a customer-centric app pipeline, CIOs are focused on modernising and streamlining application development and deployment. In order to efficiently modernise their workflows, CIOs agree that a well-managed, multi-cloud environment is important. Creating strategic, multi-cloud architecture can remove or reduce current modernisation barriers such as security concerns, a competitive developer job market, and siloed teams and data.

Managing the Hybrid Workspace:

On top of the need to modernise workflows and applications, today’s enterprises are modernising their entire approach to work. CIOs are tasked with leading their organisations smoothly into the Anywhere Workplace future. Enabling seamless and secure access for employees across the world is imperative not only to empower teams to accelerate innovation and growth—but to attract and retain top talent as remote work becomes a top differentiator.

With so much riding on investing in the right technologies at the right time, CIOs are vital to an organisation’s long-term growth and sustainability, and they should also realise how important it is not only to invest in the right technology solution but also ensure that their staff is highly skilled and up-to-date with the latest knowledge to perform complicated tasks in complex environments and provide them with consistent support and flexible learning modalities along with a comprehensive pathway to choose and assess their learning and development needs.

NextTech Learning is one such comprehensive yet cost-effective Australian home grown and owned corporate training provider offering a wide spectrum of courses and certification which can be delivered through extremely flexible learning modalities. We offer the best in class VMware training courses and certifications to plan, manage and control cloud based deployments.