CIO Cloud Transformation Summit – taking the digital enterprise to new heights

For the conference keynote, Foundry (formerly IDG Communications) welcomes Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at the Duckbill Group, where he speaks with Scott Carey on innovation and cost – the ability to have your cake and expense it too. Corey hosts the podcast “Screaming in the Cloud” and “AWS Morning Brief” podcasts; and curates “Last Week in AWS,” a weekly newsletter summarising the latest in AWS news, blogs, and tools, sprinkled with snark and thoughtful analysis in equal measure.

Following the opening keynote, Roxane Heaton, CIO at Macmillan, Dean Garvey-North, technology officer at Places for People and Sanjay Patel, group CIO at Tate and Lyle discuss ‘what will happen now?’ as we look at how IT leaders move beyond the ‘quick wins’ of COVID-19 cloud investments to something more tangible for the organisation.

Matt George, director of enterprise transformation at Equinix, will then share his insight in how to effectively deliver that all-encompassing IT strategy, supporting the demands of increasing digitisation and optimising costs to the balance sheet, while delivering organisational agility and resilience.

Back by popular demand, The CIO Boardroom sessions will host discussions throughout the two-day summit. Join the roundtable on day one where we will look at avoiding the increase in complexity of integrated solutions ‘too large to manage’ alone, what is the best approach to multi-partner solutions to maximise and optimise the options of digital as well as enhanced environmental and social sustainability.

In the afternoon, Georgina Owens, CTO of Liberis, and Katie Nykanen, group CTO of QA Ltd join a panel looking at what cloud platforms and tools are required to keep our teams happy and talent in-house. This follows the statistic shared by IDC, where the worldwide shortage of full-time developers will increase from 1.4 million in 2021 to 4 million by 2025.

Day two of the CIO Cloud Transformation looks at the wider business strategy and where investment in cloud technologies is starting to see success. Dave McCarthy, research VP for cloud infrastructures at IDC, will report on the IDC’s FutureScape research highlighting worldwide cloud predictions for 2022.

The CIO Boardroom will delve into what successful cloud strategies look like. By 2023, 40% of the Forbes Global 2000 say they will reset their cloud selection processes to focus on business outcomes rather than IT requirements. This requires a completely different cloud strategy, one which primarily focuses on picking the best tool for the job. The discussion will focus on why a cloud strategy should focus on business outcomes, not technology choices, and how to report the success of the move to cloud back to the wider business.

Michelle Kearns, head of IT at Boots Ireland, joins a panel moderated by Charlotte Trueman on New Ways vs Old Habits which will look at the new reliance on cloud-based tools, how to protect them and what to do when something goes wrong.

In the afternoon, Antony Walker, deputy CEO at techUK, hosts a panel with Karen McDonagh Reynolds, global transformation and acceleration director at Willis Tower Watson, and others on overcoming the resistance to the cloud and upskilling talent. Mahesh Desai from Rackspace Technology also shares his insight on How to Make Your Data Work Harder, looking at how to harness data insights to help transform the customer experience, create market differentiation and accelerate growth.

Other sessions include a focus on cloud-native security, the future of cloud trends from Foundry editors and what technologies to work with when developing your cloud strategy.

There is still time to register for the event, which you can do here, and you can reach out to the Foundry UK Events Team with any questions you have and to find out more about future speaking opportunities and security events planned for 2022.