’Tis the season to be jolly, and for CIOs to worry about all the emerging threats that will threaten their organization in the upcoming year.
The latter months of the year are often regarded as the most wonderful time, but Databricks CIO Naveen Zutshi told IT Brew that for CIOs, it is one of the busiest.
“We are going through the budget, [objectives and key results], establishing key objectives for the next year, [and] making sure we have clarity on the mission and purpose,” he said.
GenAI nightmares. If the stress of wrapping up critical end-of-year tasks and projects isn’t enough, some security decision-makers are thinking about the potential conflicts that remain up ahead for their organizations. IT Brew caught up with around half a dozen CIOs across several industries to discuss what concerns were keeping them up at night as the new year looms. During these chats, one stressor stole the show: GenAI.
Zutshi told IT Brew that during this time last year, there was a lot of excitement around the promises of GenAI. However, this time around, concerns around the tool have trumped that excitement as organizations and leaders struggle with taking AI experiments to the production phase.
Dayforce EVP and Chief Digital Officer Carrie Rasmussen, who takes on the CIO responsibilities within her organization, noted additional areas of focus related to the emerging tool. She said that CIOs are currently lying awake at night thinking about how they can best prepare their environments to support the incoming GenAI wave in the next year.
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“If you don’t have a good content management or knowledge strategy ready and you start to lay down this technology on top of it, you’re going to have drift,” Rasmussen said. “You’re going to have bad results.”
She added that CIOs are also thinking about how they can best implement AI governance to avoid legal problems down the line.
Other notable mentions. While GenAI was a reoccurring theme during conversations with CIOs, industry leaders also pointed to other areas that are triggering apprehension ahead of the new year. Nicholas Kathmann, CISO at LogicGate, told IT Brew that he is always thinking about how to keep his organization resilient in the face of uncertainty.
“How do we continue to operate if a critical vendor goes down, or if a critical piece of software goes down? What order of operations do we have to bring things up? Do we bring up our internal IT systems first?” Kathmann said.
He added that staying within budget as vendors up their costs also remains a large concern.
Meanwhile, Chris Cruz, CIO, public sector, at Tanium, an endpoint security and systems management software company, said that CIOs are thinking ahead on how they can gain better visibility of their data in 2025.
“Oftentimes, CIOs need to brief the board of directors, the supervisors in the county, [and] the city council,” Cruz said. “So, it’s very important that they have maximum invisibility management and control of their environments moving forward to ensure that they sleep better at night.”