With a business to run and protect, CIOs need to think about security first—minimizing risk and protecting data. Discover why CIOs have embraced the cloud, a more reliable and economically sustainable option.
Innovation is what fuels the future of our companies. Grow or die is the name of the game in modern economies. But, with a business to run and protect, CIOs need to think about security first and foremost. Before embarking on a strategy of market disruption or business transformation, the CIO must first seek to minimize risk and protect enterprise data.
In the past, IT professionals clung—sometimes for good reason—to the notion that proximity equals security, and that you need to physically see and manage servers to deploy security measures. But now, cloud applications dominate the enterprise landscape, as they provide a more reliable and economically sustainable option, and proximity is no longer a factor in security or data availability. This realization about the trustworthiness of the cloud has opened the door to other advantages that enterprise cloud applications deliver. Namely: Data protection and digital business growth.
Speaking with Workday customers and prospective customers, I often find myself hitting the same themes about how our secure cloud drives competitive advantage. As our community grows and interest from IT organizations increases, I think it’s important to share these insights. Let’s explore some of the reasons that CIOs have embraced the cloud:
Legacy systems were built well before the cloud and were designed for on-premise implementations. These systems have difficulty adapting to modern security threats. Compare that with Workday’s single security model for all data, transactions, processing, and applications—built specifically for the cloud, this model provides always-on auditing, encryption, and is configurable to customer needs. This agile model is an integral part of Workday’s system architecture and is pervasive across applications, business processes, and different configurations. It evolves and changes as customer needs change.
Workday applications have one version of code and one operating model. This provides tremendous economies of scale for security. By focusing on protecting one platform, codeline, and technology stack, security doesn’t require resources to support different versions of applications and disparate technology architectures hampered by pigeon-holed customizations and untenable maintenance schedules. This also means that security fixes and features are released for all cloud customers at the same time. Each customer, no matter how large or small, gains from this collective security model.
By virtue of widespread adoption, applications designed specifically for the cloud, like Workday, have proven that they can meet the requirements of companies in the most heavily regulated and risk adverse industries worldwide. Inherent in Workday’s model is a continuous innovation and development process that allows us to assimilate industry leaders’ best practices and know-how and incorporate them into our platform, for the benefit of all our users.
The cloud is not constrained by national or jurisdictional boundaries. Enterprise cloud applications like Workday Financial Management and Human Capital Management have been designed from the ground up to help meet the international regulations and compliance requirements of customers. We meet compliance standards such as SOC I, SOC II (all Trust principles), ISO 27001, and ISO 27018, and also provide self-service cloud features to empower customers to manage their own regulatory requirements.
CIOs need to continually innovate so their companies can be viable for long-term success. Doing so requires an understanding of things outside the purview of just the IT department. Business requirements, market trends, economic factors; all these things need the attention of the CIO. CIOs can leverage the cloud to provide the up-to-date technology, regulatory, and security platform that is required by their organization, while also devoting more time to evaluating and developing solutions to help them stay current and competitive.
As CIOs are increasingly being called to pair technology and business goals into a unified strategy, they are championing the notion that cloud security is a key business differentiator and enabler.
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