CIOs and IT specialists discuss security, cloud

More than 80 of the Kingdom’s most influential CIO and IT specialists attended the final day of the Saudi Arabia CIO Summit 2012 in Jeddah yesterday.
Senior international IT analysts and leading regional thought leaders from some of the world’s most influential ICT vendors delivered presentations, case studies and panel discussions.
Hosted by International Data Corporation (IDC), the summit addressed the topics of greatest importance to CIO and IT decision makers today: technology consumerism, big data analytics, cloud, virtualization, IT security, mobility, managed services, and governance, risk and compliance.
Steven Frantzen, IDC's senior vice president of research for EMEA and managing director for CEMA, said the global ICT industry is in the midst of the sort of technology shift that takes place "once every 20–25 years.
Senior executives from Intel, Saudi Telecommunications Company (STC) and IBM talked in detail about the impact of emerging technology on ICT strategies.
Abdulaziz Al-Noghaither, Intel's general manager of IT, analyzed the key trends shaping the future of IT and their impact, describing Intel’s own internal IT strategy for new technology paradigms.
Hajar Al Badrany, general manager for infrastructure at STC, offered advice on developing a comprehensive services strategy incorporating the benefits of emerging models such as datacenter-based services, managed services and cloud.
Montassar BenMrad, executive partner at IBM Global Business Services, said CEOs are looking beyond the benefits of connected supply chains and integrated back-office systems and shifting their focus to the power of social media and analytics.
Industry experts from Cognizant, Riverbed, Hitachi Data Systems and Citrix joined IDC to discuss cutting-edge strategies to enable organizations to connect and collaborate in real time, leverage the very latest technology solutions to simplify data access and management, embrace mobile work styles while enhancing IT control and implement virtualization, consolidation, cloud computing, and disaster recovery without compromising performance.