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Risk Management in a Cloudy World: Navigating Uncertainty with Confidence

Rapid cloud innovations and emerging security threats are creating unprecedented uncertainty for IT teams all across the industry. The tech landscape is becoming a cloudy world in more ways than one, but that does not mean businesses can afford to slow down their forward march of progress. Managing risk effectively is the key to proceeding with confidence into an uncertain future.

Key Takeaways:

Uncertainty in the current landscape stems from shifts in cloud workload placement and the new nature of work in general.
Corporate leadership bears the responsibility of navigating uncertainty on behalf of an entire organization, so it’s important to nurture leaders appropriately.
With the cloud itself being a source of uncertainty, choosing the right cloud platform to support transforming operations is crucial.

The need for managing uncertainty and risk

The IT industry is currently going through a time of rapid innovation and ongoing paradigm shifts. The future of work is uncertain, as is the future of the cloud. The endless possibilities are exciting but also worrisome for organizations that must quickly adapt or face the risk of falling behind on both business opportunities and security necessities.

Managing uncertainty and risks requires flexibility. Undergoing a digital transformation in the cloud does bring new challenges, but it also provides the means to be more flexible than ever before. Organizations can capitalize on that flexibility and combat uncertainty by:

Promoting a work-from-anywhere approach
Enabling remote IT management
Implementing self-service IT
Hardening app and data resilience
Providing learn-from-anywhere opportunities

While these methods can help with mitigating some uncertainty, they are not necessarily comprehensive solutions. They may even introduce new risks of their own that are impossible to foresee. There is a need for a broadly encompassing strategy for reducing risk that can extend to every aspect of an organization’s operations.

In an article for Forbes, ReadyWorks co-founder Paul Deur highlighted the need for managing uncertainty at the CIO and IT leader level.

“If [technology leaders] weren't already adept at [pivoting quickly] pre-pandemic, the pandemic forced them to learn this lesson the hard way,” Deur explains. “The key is realizing that this was not a one-time thing; it was a paradigm shift. Those who understand that flexibility and agility are now fundamental principles for successful businesses moving forward should thrive in the ‘new normal.’”

Investing in leadership

Deur’s insights touch on the importance of corporate leadership when it comes to navigating uncertainty in the cloud. During times of risk and turbulence, a company’s stabilization comes from the top. “Now's the time to fully understand your assets, where you can cut costs without destroying production, and how to leverage technology to, once again, do more with less,” says Deur.

When security threats are on the rise and many organizations are making dramatic shifts toward data-driven cloud computing models, IT teams look to their leaders and key decision-makers within the company to pave the way to a successful future. That’s why it is so important for organizations to invest in leadership talent capable of managing uncertainty on a personal level.

However, quelling uncertainty throughout an organization requires a certain amount of “leadership currency” and good faith among the populace of the company. In an interview hosted by Nutanix, Ford Motor Company’s Manager of Global Trends & Futuring Sheryl Connelly asserted, “Good leadership starts with listening and learning.”

Furthermore, Connelly explains her philosophy that listening and learning are just two steps that leaders must follow. According to her, leaders must also coach along the way and advocate for the people who work for them. “If you deliver on all four, then you have the right to lead,” Connelly says.

Even the best of leaders may struggle to make their voices heard in times of uncertainty, though. Those who can take calculated risks, build meaningful relationships, and leverage a keen power of perception in the workplace are the ones best suited for managing risk. If the company can invest in opportunities for these proven leaders, the entire organization can blaze a trail forward with confidence.

Finding the right IT platform to clear the way

The cloud is a landscape marked by partnerships between organizations and the cloud service providers that operate the platforms where data and cloud workloads reside. With that in mind, the entity best positioned to help IT decision-makers with navigating cloud uncertainty is a reliable cloud platform itself.

The Nutanix Cloud Platform(NCP) is reliable and resilient by design. Simplicity is also a priority for NCP, making it possible for organizations to migrate their workloads to the platform and operate them with push-button ease. By equipping IT leaders with easy-to-understand tools for controlling a cloud environment themselves, NCP ensures that managing uncertainty is a matter of fact rather than a vague goal.

Competing platforms exist in a mire of uncertainty, whether due to a lack of guaranteed support or inconsistent pricing. To counter this, Nutanix adheres to our commitment of providing excellent support and ongoing innovation. We make it possible for cloud customers to build reliable risk management strategies even as other entities in the industry breed uncertainty by going through turbulent acquisitions in an already transformative time.

Resilient risk management features are a baseline requirement for modern organizations, especially those that are navigating cloud uncertainty for the first time. Nutanix provides risk management options including, but not limited to:

Log shipping
Forensics
Two-factor authentication
Cluster lockdown
Disk encryption

Managing uncertainty and risk is simply part of what the Nutanix Cloud Platform does.

In one example use case, an insurance provider faced economic uncertainty upon realizing that they needed to fully migrate from traditional infrastructure to a more future-proof solution. As professionals in a risk-management-oriented field, this provider recognized that Nutanix was a suitable partner for tackling such a major transformation that would otherwise bring about great uncertainty.

Choose Nutanix for managing uncertainty and risk

The IT landscape is changing rapidly, and the breakneck pace of innovation makes it unlikely that those changes will slow down. Boldly overcoming the ensuing uncertainty requires company-wide flexibility and a strong example set by trustworthy leadership.

In the case of confusion stemming from the cloud itself, though, choosing the right platform is just as important. Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure on NCP lays the groundwork for cloud architecture that is sufficiently secure, resilient, and flexible enough to overcome new risks emerging in the cloud-native world.

Managing uncertainty and risk with a simplified approach is part of the Nutanix philosophy. Contact us today to discuss how to build resilience into your digital transformation.

Learn more about what it means to adopt a true hybrid multicloud ecosystem and other ways to plan for datacenter risk management.

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