It’s always interesting to see what’s currently on the CIO agenda, so I took a couple of days out this week to attend Information Age’s Effective IT Summit at the Vale Hotel in Cardiff.
Gaining alignment with the business and enabling innovation seemed to be the primary concerns. Not much new there. Though it was interesting to hear Paul Colby, CIO of British Airways, explain how he's actually managed to achieve this in practice. Now that's something.
But the big new issue this year is our impact on the environment, especially the need to reduce our energy consumption. Many organisations are developing initiatives and setting targets to reduce their carbon footprints. So what can Security do to help? Well quite a bit actually. We’ve already seen how anti-virus and spam filters can massively reduce incoming email. And many of us have discovered the hidden performance benefits of blocking and removing undesirable content. So let’s start making the business case for tackling this in a more comprehensive way.
We can free up servers, unblock networks, increase productivity keep ourselves out of jail and reduce our electricity costs by getting on top of all the spam, junk mail, viruses, worms, illegal content and unwanted downloads and communications.