Risk mitigation is an ever-growing concern in today's globalized, always-on, compliance-driven business environment.
For CIOs, the challenge is to be able to support the enterprise's growth and other goals with infrastructure and services that mitigate that risk. That in turn means minimizing the risks to the IT function itself.
Subba Iyer, director ICT for Frost & Sullivan, says one of the greatest sources of risk to CIOs today is consolidation among technology vendors.
The power between the CIOs and vendors is shifting to the vendor, he says, leaving CIO with fewer choices.
"There is a lot of vendor concentration, and you're just left with a couple of vendors in each of thebig categories," Iyer said. Thus the potential for a CIO to make the wrong decision with "very serious consequences" becomes much higher, he warns.
Paul Gregory, director business development for service provider Cable & Wireless, says the growing number of M&As on the client side is an issue for the CIOs involved.
The benefits of the mergers accrue only if the IT and networks fully integrate, he says.
"To realize synergies from their merger is all about being able to quickly integrate that into their WAN. They can roll out common applications and business process that go with it."
Gregory notes that for regional enterprises, the attitude to risk and service delivered by their managed services provider is changing.
"One of the things that is really important is not the SLA (service level agreement) of 99.999% but continuity, the way in which always-on service is provided," he said.