A group of business leaders at the helm of information technology (IT) at their organisations looked back at an unprecedented year and discussed the challenges of the future during a virtual conference on Friday.

Manik Paul. File picture

The INFOCOM CIO Connect Roundtable Presented by NTT-Netmagic saw five chief information officers share their thoughts on the digital initiatives that enabled their organisations to survive unprecedented challenges in 2020, when Covid-19 emerged as the biggest disruptor globally, affecting individuals, enterprises and the economy.

Jayanta Bhowmik. File picture

The theme of the session — CIO Bucket List 2021.

Manik Paul, CIO, Century Plyboards; Jayanta Bhowmik, CIO, Kesoram Industries; Abhijit Chatterjee, CIO, Vikram Solar; Subhamoy Chakraborti, CIO, ABP Pvt. Ltd; and Seema Ambastha, senior executive VP — head India and global — sales and business development and solutions engineering, NTT-Netmagic, were the panellists at the nearly 90-minute session, moderated by Harish Agarwal, managing partner for Calcutta and Bangladesh, Ernst & Young LLP and COO of Ernst & Young India Consulting.

Abhijit Chatterjee. File picture

“Enterprises are now exploring hybrid IT to optimise cost, to be flexible and to cater to the changing workforce. Cloud environments are being deployed rapidly…. With the ever-increasing sophistication of hacking and the rising criticality of data, cloud security and normal cyber security is something all enterprises need to focus on,” Agarwal said at the outset.

Seema Ambastha

“Management using a single pane of glass (a model based on a singular control point for managing all cloud applications) and making it easy by having innovation around it, a lot of focus on business resiliency and a unified security across the hybrid cloud system” are going to be on priority list of CIOs in the coming days, said Ambastha, who is based in Mumbai.

Around 30 CIOs in and around Calcutta were part of the interactive session. The speakers took questions from some of the participants after the panel discussion.