I was talking to an old[1] friend yesterday and he mentioned his concern, shared by board members (he talks to many), about the level of technical/technology debt or deficit owned by many organizations, large and small.
There are many different definitions of the term, but he was referring to the fact that the technology deployed by many organizations is lacking in agility, responsiveness, and downright functionality.
In these times of dynamic volatility, organizations need the right information at their fingertips to make informed and intelligent decisions.
They need systems that can adapt at speed to changes in business and customer needs.
Yet, many remain legacy systems that are hard to maintain. Changes to the more modern replacements take time, a limited resource and one that may be insufficient to deliver the needed changed or new functionality.
The CIOs of these organizations usually know about this, but they are constrained by budget limitations.
They may also be challenged by the demand to allocate much of that budget to cyber and information security.
While the demands for cyber budget may be justified, they are not usually supported by risk analyses that indicate the level of risk in business terms. So we can’t be sure. The justification for investments in cyber cannot readily be compared to the…
