It is widely reported[1],[2] that the role of a Chief Information Officer (CIO) is experiencing a sea change. IT is now at the center of business strategy as digital technologies power and sustain the global economy. The criticality of IT in every aspect of business has driven CIOs from only filling the tactical role of deploying, operating, and maintaining IT to also focusing on business strategy. CIOs increasingly have a leading role in driving business innovation, aligning IT projects with business goals, digitalizing business operations, and leading corporate organization change programs, for example. This role expansion has made their job more critical and complex.

What has not been as widely reported, however, is that the traditional CIO role of IT service delivery has become more critical and complex as well. After all, a CIO’s impact on business strategy and execution depends on continuous IT service delivery. As shown in the figure below, the success of a CIO is ultimately rooted in a solid foundation of maintaining resilient, secure, and sustainable IT operations. But, in an environment of highly distributed hybrid IT, this becomes harder to do 

known security vulnerabilities. These code updates should be installed or applied as soon as they become available from the vendor. Without an effective DCIM solution, this process requires on-going discipline and action from the operations team.

Also, the security features and settings that were enabled and configured during the initial setup and installation also need to be maintained throughout the life of the infrastructure device, network appliance, or management server/gateway. By minimizing the number of users with the ability to change these settings, you reduce the chances of unintended or non-permitted changes being made. Beyond that, these settings must be checked regularly to ensure they remain set properly over time. This requires additional, on-going discipline and regular action by the ops team.

However, DCIM tools with a security assessment feature can simplify all this work described above significantly, at least, for power and cooling infrastructure devices. These assessments will scan all connected devices across the entire IT portfolio to provide a report highlighting out-of-date firmware and compromised security settings. Some DCIM tools will also automate the updating of firmware and provide a means to perform mass configurations of security settings across multiple devices at once to greatly simplify the process.