Donnie Slavens, Vice President and Infrastructure Manager at First Financial Bank

What are the top 2 challenges facing IT organizations this year? What are the top 2 opportunities? 

CHALLENGE 1

“Cybersecurity has become a major focus in any industry, because of all the vulnerabilities, viruses, ransomware attacks and sites going down. There are a lot more things to think about when we put things in place now, than we had ten years ago. We have sharpened our focus. We have to be compliant as a financial institution, so we have an ‘Office of Enterprise Security’ whose main focus is cybersecurity. If we put up a website, we need to do vulnerability and load testing against it and we need to make sure the code is safely encrypted; all of which has evolved over time and has a significant cost behind it. It costs a lot to be safe; to put end points and infrastructure in place to make sure that data is secure.”

CHALLENGE 2

“Just staying up to speed with everything going on in IT. There is always something new in IT; a new software, tons of start-ups and the latest technology. A concept that has been around for a while now called ‘Dev-Opps’ is growing. The tool set around making IT more automated and efficient is just mind blowing. I can barely wrap my head around how many tools and open source there is. The challenge is bringing open source into an environment and then putting standards and policies around it when it is not supported by an enterprise agreement.”

OPPORTUNITY

“More now than ever, there is fertile ground for companies to take advantage of technology. Going to the cloud is very easy and cloud technology has come a long way too. Financial institutions were usually the last ones to go there, because of what they need to store. Security questions focused around cloud tech; is my data safe, where is it going to live, is it going to be strategic across the US or will it span into other countries? A lot of that has been organized and standardized now, so that even a small IT organization can have a very enterprise-class infrastructure that can live in the cloud, rather than have to rent data center space somewhere, build the server architecture and network infrastructure, etc. And these new technologies are also increasing a company’s speed-to-market.”