Top 8 Challenges for CIOs and How to Deal With Them

The role of the сhief information officer (CIO) has transformed over the years, extending beyond traditional technical responsibilities. Currently, CIOs are facing numerous issues, such as widely distributed workforces, economic hurdles, and adopting cutting-edge technologies.

In this article, we’ll cover these and other challenges facing CIOs today, and measures you can take to navigate them.

What are the biggest challenges for CIOs today?

The CIO is a key leader in an organization responsible for managing and overseeing its information technology strategy and infrastructure. CIOs play a vital role in aligning technology initiatives with business objectives and ensuring that technology supports and advances the organization’s overall goals.

However, the following 8 challenges for CIOs may become major obstacles preventing them from effectively carrying out their duties:

In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at each of these top challenges facing CIOs and provide handy ways to deal with them.

1. Economic uncertainty

Organizations nowadays are increasing their IT budgets. Foundry’s State of the CIO 2024 report showed that 89% of CIOs anticipated their IT budgets to either increase or stay the same in 2024. Regardless, it’s still challenging for CIOs to effectively manage IT budget spending because of economic uncertainty.

The current stagnation in economic growth significantly increases financial risks. The World Economic Outlook by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts that the world economy will continue growing at 3.2% during 2024 and 2025. However, that growth is expected to hover around 3% until 2029, making it the lowest in decades. 

The global economy may also be influenced by the high inflation rates in many countries, ongoing wars and geopolitical conflicts, or technological disruptions.

One possible way to overcome the challenge:

Create budgets for various scenarios. When planning your yearly IT budget, make sure to remain flexible. You might need to take into account the dynamic nature of economic conditions. Thus, instead of sticking to a single rigid budget, you can create various budget scenarios for best-case, worst-case, and intermediate situations that can be adjusted according to the state of the economy.

2. High expectations of the board

According to Gartner’s CIO Agenda 2023, more than half of digital initiatives fail to meet CEOs’ and other executives’ expectations. This can potentially strain collaboration between the CIO and the executive board.

There are several possible reasons for this. First of all, CEOs and CIOs may prioritize different initiatives. While the CEO is waiting for the results of one initiative, the CIO may work harder on the other.

Secondly, CEOs may not understand how much time a certain initiative requires. This problem can arise when CEOs and CIOs haven’t properly communicated the timeline of an initiative and its interdependencies with other initiatives.

Last but not least, CIOs may lack the talent to complete a certain initiative on time. For instance, organizations might fail to recruit the required specialists or they may lose employees with the requisite qualifications to see the initiative through.

When the executive board members don’t see the results they expect, they may become less willing to fund the CIO’s initiatives.

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Recognize priorities. Pay close attention to what senior leaders discuss and narrow down the areas they’re concerned about the most. Identify specific financial and business outcomes the board of executives desires and prioritize digital initiatives that align with those objectives.

Set realistic expectations. Collaborate closely with senior management to set achievable expectations before launching digital initiatives. This requires transparent communication of information security to executives — CIOs need to clearly define project timelines, milestones, and anticipated results. It’s important to impress upon the board that implementing digital initiatives is a long-term endeavor that rarely yields quick business outcomes.

Find allies. Try working on digital initiatives together with other executives. In its CIO Agenda 2024 report, Gartner states that CIOs who adopt a franchise approach to digital initiatives are twice as likely to meet or exceed their digital transformation goals. This approach suggests CIOs and other executives should become equal partners in the delivery of digital technologies and share digital leadership responsibilities. When implementing a franchise approach to your organization’s digital initiatives, divide efforts between IT and other departments based on on:

• Technological proficiency of other executives and their subordinates
• Resources dedicated to technology work in various departments, including IT
• Enterprise culture
• Compliance requirements
• CEO sponsorship

3. Hybrid workplaces

Unfortunately, many employers still fail to fulfill the technological demands of their hybrid employees. According to the study by Unisys, From Surviving to Thriving in Hybrid Work [PDF], 49% of employees report spending one to five hours per week resolving IT issues, negatively impacting their productivity. In addition, hybrid workers often encounter inconsistent access to the organization’s data and systems, communication gaps, and collaboration difficulties.

At the same time, accommodating employees across different work environments is one of the biggest challenges faced by CIOs. First, you need to make company resources easily accessible to employees while protecting them from malicious intruders. Second, you may lack visibility into the remote workforce’s activity, contributing to security risks.

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Implement proactive IT support. You might need to rethink your approach to IT support. Instead of reacting to issues as they arise, consider implementing a proactive data-driven IT support model. This means using data from the applications employees use to anticipate and prevent IT problems rather than simply addressing them when employees report them.

Create digital workflows. Consider creating digital processes and workflows available to all distributed teams. Before anything else, we suggest providing workflows for facilitating remote access and connectivity, enabling employees to connect to the corporate network and access resources from anywhere. This includes using virtual private networks (VPNs), remote desktop solutions, or cloud-based platforms.

Additionally, focus on streamlining processes that facilitate communication and both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. This might require implementing unified platforms that bring together messaging, video conferencing, document sharing, and project management tools.

Adopt IAM and UAM. To secure your organization’s data assets and systems, consider deploying identity and access management (IAM) tools, including two-factor authentication (2FA) and secondary authentication. In turn, user activity monitoring (UAM) and RDP session recording tools can help you enhance visibility into remote workers’ activity and spot risky behavior in a timely manner.

4. Purposeful AI adoption

Foundry’s annual State of the CIO survey shows that 80% of CIOs expect to be working with AI and machine learning in the next year, a 25% increase from 2023’s predictions. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a disruptive technology that most organizations will be adopting sooner or later. While AI’s potential is undeniable, many organizations have rushed to implement AI tools more out of the fear of missing out than well-thought-out planning. The pressure to adopt AI is intense, but organizations would do well to use AI judiciously and only when it will deliver substantive benefits. 

The challenge for CIOs is figuring out whether and how AI can enhance organizational processes. Not all companies can immediately deploy AI and reap tremendous business benefits. For instance, AI can be useful in analyzing vast data sets but may offer limited value in companies with scarce data. 

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Develop a clear AI strategy. Create a comprehensive AI strategy aligned with your organization’s goals and values. This strategy should outline specific use cases where AI could deliver the most value, taking into account potential ROI, feasibility, and alignment with business objectives. Collaborate with other departments to identify pain points that AI could address and prioritize projects accordingly.

Choose the right AI architecture and associated data governance. Select an AI architecture that fits your organization’s needs. Consider factors like scalability, flexibility, and integration capabilities with your existing systems. Implement a data governance framework to ensure data quality, security, and compliance with the relevant regulations. This includes establishing clear data ownership, implementing data quality controls, and ensuring proper data management.

5. AI-related data leaks and breaches

Increasing adoption of generative AI exposes organizations to confidential data leaks. When employees input your organization’s sensitive data into generative AI tools, there’s a risk that your data will be used to generate responses for people outside your organization. At the same time, when using generative AI, you risk infringing upon someone else’s intellectual property. This may entail legal risks, such as copyright violation or trade secret misappropriation. 

Another aspect of this challenge is the potential for compromise of AI systems, leading to breaches of the data they have access to. As users load AI models with more data, ensuring data integrity and security becomes increasingly complex. 

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Establish comprehensive guidelines on the use of AI. Create policies for employees on what information they can and cannot load into AI tools. It may be especially useful to teach employees how to use generative AI responsibly during the onboarding process and regular cybersecurity awareness training.

Implement data anonymization. To reduce the risk of data exposure, CIOs should ensure that data is anonymized before anyone can input it into AI models. This helps protect sensitive personal information while still enabling AI to produce useful output. 

To further safeguard the ways your organization uses AI, refer to the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework [PDF] developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

6. Talent acquisition and retention

Having the right amount of IT talent in an organization is crucial for CIOs to complete digital initiatives successfully. There’s a large demand for highly-skilled roles like systems architects, cybersecurity specialists, and AI specialists. According to Indeed, 70% of tech workers had more than one offer to choose from when they secured their last job. Many companies, including technical giants like Google and Microsoft, are looking for workers with these talents, making it harder for smaller organizations to win over the most desirable candidates.

Retaining tech talent is also challenging. A recent survey by Gartner found that IT employees are more likely to quit their jobs than non-IT employees. 

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Set priorities. Define the job roles you need to fill the most. These are the positions that have the biggest influence on the successful implementation of your digital initiatives. Make sure to cooperate with the HR department to analyze candidates’ needs for these roles and develop strategies to position your organization as an appealing workplace.

We suggest improving your organizational culture, reconsidering compensation packages, and providing learning opportunities and more flexible work options.

Hire candidates inclined to stay. Retention efforts start at the earliest stages of hiring. During the application process and candidate screening, try to weed out job-hoppers.

Deliver for your employees. Review your employees’ compensation packages regularly to ensure they’re fair and competitive. Your employees’ needs may change over time, so make sure you are aware of those changes and address them.

7. Regulatory compliance

Compliance with IT security requirements is a persistent and daunting challenge for organizations. CIOs are often responsible for compliance or share responsibilities with chief compliance officers or data protection officers.

CIOs need to keep up with changes to regulations currently in effect and ones that will soon take effect. This is especially tough for organizations that operate in multiple regions or industries since they have more laws, standards, and regulations to comply with.

Factors such as the use of personal devices by employees, an extensive supply chain, and the utilization of IoT systems in an organization can complicate the compliance process even further.

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Map applicable regulations. We suggest determining the full scope of laws, standards, and regulations your organization must adhere to, as well as those that are advisable to follow. You may need to consult lawyers and cybersecurity officers to determine what requirements apply to your organization.

Identify and close security gaps. Conduct a self-audit to identify vulnerable areas in your organization’s security. For your self-audit, you can utilize official IT compliance audit checklists, guidelines, and questionnaires: 

• HIPAA compliance checklist
• GDPR checklist
• PCI DSS self-assessment questionnaire
• NIST-recommended assessment & auditing resources

Once you know what security controls are lacking to meet compliance requirements, you can take action to implement them.

Leverage software solutions to aid in compliance. Dedicated technology can enhance your compliance efforts while reducing overhead. With solutions like Syteca, you can:

• Monitor the activity of regular and privileged users
• Anonymize users’ personal data
• Manage privileged access
• Secure passwords
• Generate reports
• Automate incident response

With the help of these functionalities, you can streamline the implementation of numerous security controls required by industry laws, regulations, and standards.

8. Evolving cybersecurity threats

Many would agree that organizational cybersecurity is the responsibility of CISOs rather than CIOs. However, in many organizations CIOs and CISOs tend to work together to enhance risk management efforts. 

With hybrid work, companies tend to have more complex infrastructures than before since employees need to connect to corporate networks from various locations and need more resources to be productive. The more complex the infrastructure, the harder it is to maintain strong cybersecurity and defend the organization against attacks by outsiders. As businesses integrate generative AI into their systems, it creates new entry points for hackers, who can target critical infrastructure through data poisoning, prompt injection, model inversion, perturbation, and more.

In addition, social engineering techniques like vishing and CEO fraud could become more dangerous as AI develops. IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2024 states that phishing is at the top of the list of reasons cybercriminals invest in AI. Malicious actors can target your organization’s employees with AI-enhanced phishing attacks, triggering insider threats. Moreover, your employees can pose security risks to your organization, either intentionally or unintentionally.

Possible ways to overcome the challenge:

Secure access to corporate resources. Implement security best practices, such as establishing a zero-trust architecture or continuous adaptive trust framework, and leveraging two-factor authentication (2FA) or passwordless authentication [PDF] to prevent unauthorized access to the corporate network. 

Develop comprehensive policies. Create and enforce clear policies on secure remote connections and the usage of the organization’s resources, especially cloud services. Define how often your IT team should perform patch management to protect systems, including AI, from vulnerability exploits. Conduct regular cybersecurity awareness training to ensure that \ employees understand evolving threats and follow your policies. 

Deploy advanced threat management tools. You can significantly strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity with the help of technological solutions. For instance, RDP monitoring software can help you establish safe remote access, and incident response solutions allow you to promptly identify and contain cybersecurity threats. For AI-driven security risks, consider investing in security tools that can monitor AI algorithms, detect anomalies, and prevent the malicious manipulation of data.

How can Syteca assist CIOs?

Syteca is a cybersecurity platform that can enhance your corporate IT infrastructure’s integrity and address many of the information technology challenges faced by CIOs. Syteca’s wide selection of security features allows you to streamline and boost your organization’s efforts in meeting IT security requirements, securing hybrid work environments, and managing cybersecurity threats.

By leveraging Syteca’s rich functionality, you can successfully:

• Manage identities and authenticate users with 2FA
• Granularly manage user access permissions 
• Monitor user activity of employees and third-party vendors
• Securely store passwords and share them within teams
• Manage access and monitor the activity of administrators and other privileged users
• Watch live and recorded RDP user sessions
• Anonymize monitored data for user privacy
• Configure alerts and automatic responses to suspicious activity
• Generate informative reports on user activity 
• Investigate security incidents

Conclusion

Challenges for CIOs in today’s IT environment may leave you feeling overwhelmed and uncertain about where to start to overcome them. In this article, we’ve covered measures and best practices to help you in your role as CIO.

By embracing the measures discussed and deploying technological solutions to automate tasks, you can efficiently deal with and overcome the majority of obstacles in implementing your IT strategy. Syteca is a cybersecurity platform that helps you handle many of the biggest IT-related challenges CIOs face in order to enhance the protection of your organization’s cybersecurity infrastructure.