Walk in the Cloud podcast

CEOs who think of cloud simply as technology and relegate it to their tech teams are doomed to failure, argues Accenture’s Strategy & Consulting lead Rachel Barton. Rachel talks about the three categories of CEO she tends to see when relating to cloud and the challenges facing each. Nobody is finding it easy, but those who think transformation first, then explore cloud’s potential to support their vision, are on the right track. She offers examples from clients she’s worked with. The desire for the UK to build back better after COVID-19 and Brexit makes this episode particularly relevant.

Chief information security officers (CISOs) may seem the champions of anxiety when it comes to cloud, but they have a point. As with any business tool, cloud comes with its own distinctive risks. CISOs play an invaluable role in spotting and mitigating those risks to the rest of the organisation can get on with building the dream. Cyber security guru Jane Frankland explains how the best do it, while bringing up some hidden threats they may be missing. Amongst them: a worrying lack of women in the field which may leave doors open to targeted fraud.

Which came first, the cloud transformation or the data? We’ll let you ponder that in your own time, but Applied Intelligence (AI) leader Vikas Sindwani makes a persuasive argument that the best cloud transformations start with innovative dreamers who spot the potential in vast lakes of data, then dream up business-changing things to do with them. Chief Data Officers (CDOs) are becoming increasingly common around the nation’s boardroom tables, and their enterprise data strategies are driving a new breed of super-responsive, super-flexible organisations. Vikas explains how they do it.