CIO watch...

Miami, September 20th, and it’s 90 degrees outside. Luckily I am sitting in an air-conditioned room at the Fairmont Turnberry Isle, for the closed-door panel session of the CIOUS Summit, finding out what challenges the country’s top CIOs are facing in this time of economic, political and technological volatility. Throughout the session, executives from such global firms as Volkswagen Group, McCain, Citigroup, DHL Express, Bank of America, Thompson Reuters, Pfizer and The Weather Channel, revealed their biggest concerns for the coming 12 months.

Unsurprisingly, the increasing use of social media was a hot topic for some. Brian Ackerman, CIO at Adecco Group spoke about how his organization were able to effectively utilize popular social media platforms in order to gain insight into how customer search for jobs. "We were struck by the process by which somebody goes to find a job," he tells me when I catch up with him later in the summit. "They tell all their friends, they look in their own networks, they ask for help; they take somebody out for dinner when they find them a job interview. That behavior is not atypical to what you find in some of the social media activities that are going on today. So, we're struck by that and we're trying to figure out how best to proceed. One of the biggest challenges I think we've found is to do this in such a way that it's a help to our Adecco colleagues, our recruiters, our sales folks in the field and not a diversion. At the end of the day, we have to have more feet on the street helping people to find jobs, not have our social media or electronic means competing with the more traditional channels."

Mobile enterprise and smart devices were also popular discussion points, as the iPad and similar devices have had a chance to let the word of mouth spread and are becoming more prevalent in the market. But it was the imminent arrival cloud computing that stole the show at in Miami, not least because of the calibre of vendors present, all offering innovative solutions to the likely problems a move to the cloud will throw up. Many have been tentative in their approach to a cloud-based technology infrastructure. Atul Jain, SVP of Technology Infrastructure at Citigroup, explains that his organization uses an internal cloud model. "We are providing an internal cloud to all of our businesses within Citigroup," he says, "and that's why I use this word of shared services, so let's take an example of storage. If somebody needs storage, you join Citigroup and you're sitting somewhere in some city, you'll have your desktop, laptop, and then you'll need storage for that. And that storage, we'll provide out of data center. To you, it is transparent where it's coming from. That's an example, but really you can take that example to any level."

Indeed, as Jain outlines, organizations are starting to open up their infrastructure to a cloud-based model. However, there are still a number of issues that make executives nervous to dip their toes in the waters of cloud computing, security being the biggest. "I roll my eyes because privacy and security are huge issues," Buddy Gillespie tells me. Indeed, as the CTO of WellSpan Health, ensuring the complete confidentiality of patient records is the paramount concern. "You really need to investigate it before you jump into it. I mean cloud is like anything else; it's not really a silver bullet. It has some advantages, but then at the same time, it has disadvantages. It's probably not for everybody, but I agree that, in 15 years time, there's going to be a huge amount of cloud usage across healthcare."

John Parkinson, SVP for Global IT at AXIS Capital is able to remain more pragmatic about the situation. "There are issues about how you manage the keys that you use to encrypt and decrypt things," he says. "If you just use the cloud as a repository and you don't want to give anybody else access to what's there, that's relatively easy to do. But if you want to go publish something and protect it and let your customers consume it from the cloud, now you've got more of a challenge, because now you've got to give them an unlock key to the stuff that you locked when you put it out there. The thing that we learned doing this is that everything we run we run in a virtual machine. So a virtual machine in the cloud is a file as far as the cloud's environment is concerned.  So now you have to encrypt your virtual images of your computers as well."

As the three days played out it became clear that the cloud was not only the main concern for all those present, but that it is likely to remain so for a number of years to come.