Hot topics from the 2022 CIO 100 Symposium & Awards

This past August, an intimate group of IT’s biggest influencers celebrated their peers at an exclusive gala on the California coastline. Attendees connected, brainstormed and shared knowledge, experiences and future plans. By all accounts, the event was a huge success, honoring the 100 most influential companies who are reshaping enterprise technology strategy. At Spectrum Enterprise, we were excited to be a sponsor and partner of the 2022 CIO 100 Symposium & Awards.

Senior executives representing a range of industries — from theme parks and manufacturing to legal, financial services, retail, and the public sector — gathered to explore the strategic, operational, financial and technological implications associated with effective network-centric architectures. 

I spoke with Lane Cooper, founder and editorial director, BizTechReports, who was the moderator of a dinner roundtable discussion during CIO 100 2022, and he shared his observations on hot topics discussed during the event.

Andrew Craver: Lane, what would you say was the main focus of the conversations at the dinner roundtable?

Lane Cooper: One key point was that high-performance intelligent enterprise networks have emerged as a key component of technology modernization initiatives. As organizations re-allocate resources across an array of on-premise and multiple cloud resources, business and technology leaders are reassessing the strategic role of local and wide-area networks (wireless and wireline) to deliver the performance, security and productivity necessary for achieving ambitious business transformation objectives.

I’d also note that the fragmentation of enterprise infrastructures is prompting executives to re-evaluate their expectations and requirements of network service providers. They are also reassessing the in-house skillsets and competencies that should be nurtured to achieve sustained success. 

AC: Was there any particular area of focus in the conversation that appeared to resonate across all industries represented at the table?

LC:  Yes, and actually as the conversation unfolded, I found that four categories of consensus emerged. The first was around dependability and redundancy. All agreed that comprehensive connectivity is “king” when meeting most organizations' basic needs across the public and private sectors. Beyond delivering four-nines of reliability, organizations expect their service providers to help design redundancy and contingency plans to ensure continuity of operations. It is not enough to just provide broadband services. Executives increasingly count on service providers to help capture data, insights and intelligence — including predictive analytics — to guarantee that applications and services have the network resources they need to maintain optimal performance levels. Given the rising complexity of network infrastructures that integrate wireless LAN and wireless WAN (5G) elements with fiber, coaxial and other terrestrial broadband services, it is no easy task.

AC: Not surprising that everybody wanted dependability, but redundancy may be a more unexpected area of consensus.

LC: Well, the desire for redundancy was tied into the ability to avoid or recover from outages — be those outages planned, unplanned, or as a result of malicious activity. Secondly, they all wanted transparency and accountability from their connectivity providers. All executives around the table recognized that exponentially rising traffic, complex workloads and persistent cybersecurity attacks inevitably lead to outages. For this reason, executives desire (but rarely get) proactive transparency into primary and backup networks from their service providers. Most participants agreed that the next generation of successful network service providers should improve the ability to recover from incidents that disrupt operations more quickly. Also on their wish list is better insight into what has happened, what is being done to recover, and what can be learned to prevent — and mitigate the impact of  —  similar incidents in the future.

AC:  Was there any discussion around the way enterprises are increasingly offering virtualized functionality to their workforce, in a distributed fashion?

LC: Absolutely, as another area of widespread agreement was that they all sought integration and orchestration of their applications and the network serving them. Intelligent networks should play an increasingly important role in optimizing the performance of applications scattered across on-premise and cloud-based resources. A network should offer a potential window or “single pane of glass” for managing latency, tracking data flows and capturing insights on traffic that can help organizations manage the economics of today’s hybrid environments.

Finally, they all shared similar concerns around flexibility, agility and security. And that’s because computing requirements constantly shift as the business and threat landscapes evolve and new technologies and innovative services are introduced. Enterprise networks are increasingly seen as a common point of management, control and insight that can enable organizations to better respond to new opportunities — or address unfolding threats. 

AC: Lane, thanks for sharing the insights you gleaned at the dinner roundtable. It’s been enlightening.

LC: You’re welcome. I’m always happy to chat about business technology and the latest trends in an ever-evolving field.

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Lane Cooper is founder and editorial director of BizTechReports, an independent reporting agency with offices in the Washington, DC metropolitan area that covers analysts and thought leaders in business technology. BizTechReports is an IDG Content Partner that explores the role technology products and services play in the overall economy and in specific vertical industries.