Transcript: Managing risk to deliver successful cloud transformation

Transcript

Ele Bruni:
For most of my clients, it’s really important that they identify those risks and threats.

Ellie Taylor:
Is now the right time to start exploring where this might bring in more risk?

Ellie:
With all the work that you do and the clients that you work with, how are you seeing the role of technology investment making an impact on how clients need to manage their risk profile?

Ele:
Technology offers a huge potential to organisations to really improve the efficiency of their processes.The introduction of AI solutions, a more agile cloud model as well as the use of analytics. But undoubtedly this has an impact in the risk profile of the organisation because new technology introduces new risks, as well as also changing the existing risk posture of the organisation.

For most of my clients, it's really important that they identify those risks and threats upfront to be able to introduce measures to mitigate those risks and ensuring they can maintain and build resilience long term.

Ellie:
What I'm seeing with some of my clients is, the rate of change being so fast, how you manage the risk in a really agile approach so that you can manage it, but also you stay on top of innovation and what are you seeing with that?

Ele:
So it's essential. So there are some key steps that an organisation needs to take.

And as I said, the identification of the risk upfront is important. At the same time it is important that the organisation considers other aspects, for example, the change that is going to impact their people. So obviously you want to have people that have the right skills and knowledge to be able to operate in the cloud, and at the same time, that they really are embedded in this cloud transformation.

As technology evolves and organisations embrace technology, there is a clear change in how the organisations approaches the market. But at the same time that allows the organisation to have a real competitive advantage. But this is usually achieved by having this by adopting an enterprise-wide resilience.

Ellie:
Yeah. And you mentioned the operating model changes that need to happen and definitely from a skills and working with third parties must be quite different. Like what are you seeing in terms of how companies can manage that change?

Ele:
So that, I have to admit the shared responsibility model during cloud transformation is one of the most challenging aspects of this transformation. It involves people, and at the same time it involves a third party. What I've seen working really well is having a continuous and transparent communication between the third-party provider and the organisation. There is a clear definition of the accountability and responsibility. And then within the organisation it's essential that your people are a part of the journey.

So really making your people involved in this transformation, making them accountable and really trying to explain the risks related to the cloud, but at the same time, how those can be mitigated together. That is usually very powerful because employees really feel part of this transformation.

Ellie:
And slightly, you know, clicking into a topic is AI, and obviously there's so much opportunity to go for, but also there's some some parallel risks associated with that, we're seeing lots of questions about do I need to go now? Do I need to test it now? Is now the right time to start exploring where this might bring in more risk?

Ele:
It is essential to start now, but it's how you start and it's important to have a journey, right and perhaps starting with some pilot in some area. You need to ensure that everything that you want to adopt and you want to do, it has been, in a way, tested. But you can't avoid not adopting AI because you will really lose the competitive advantage, which means having a defined plan is the same in a cloud transformation, right. I've seen many organisations failing during cloud transformation because it has not been planned appropriately.

Ellie:
Whether it's cloud transformation or AI or, you know, there's lots going on. What are your key tips to develop a very solid but agile strategy for risk management?

Ele:
It's very important to identify the risks upfront and be able and define the measure to be implemented as you go along in the journey. Most of the time I've seen organisations that they adopt new technology without even having thought about which are the risks that they are taking by adopting that technology. But if I have to say like specific action, that organisations have taken is, as a start, is obviously a risk assessment of the pitfalls and vulnerabilities.

The second thing is a clear governance framework because it's important that the split between roles and responsibility within the organisation, but also with your third party providers, are clear and defined.

Thirdly, it's important to have robust security measures to ensure the organisation can mitigate any risk related to data and security, but at the same time, also a solid backup and recovery strategy. And lastly, it's important that the organisation have some contingency plan and also a safe change management process.