Due to economic pressures on the South African mining and manufacturing sectors, many of these organisations are merging or introducing cost-cutting policies, thus impacting on their respective IT providers.
As these industries start adopting more efficient and accessible technologies for everyday IT management, the knock-on effect will be an appetite for consuming and understanding the analytics components that come with improved data management.
This is according to Christelle Hicklin, customer experience director at Mimecast, who notes that taking unstructured data and turning it into valuable business analytics is a steeper challenge.
She believes that, for these reasons, it is critical that CIOs hone their strategies in order to target key IT requirements and this involves the optimisation of technologies and data within the IT environment.
The first step, where many companies are now, is understanding the usage patterns in order to identify business needs and plan and optimise IT spend accordingly, she explains.
"Another key asset that can help companies in these industries survive is a set of flexible and innovative partners who are willing to work with their customer towards solutions. This is what the CIO should be asking when evaluating different options that are put forward in order to enable the organisation going forward," adds Hicklin.
Hicklin notes that the CIO in a mining house needs to be a strategist too, with an understanding of the needs of an extremely diverse user base, each with different requirements.
With cost cutting, she says, comes optimisation. "Where is the best place that I can consolidate technologies in order to get as many of the features that I need from as few vendors as possible?
She says optimisation lowers complexity and gives the CIO quicker and more flexible control of the IT environment.
The ability to work remotely also presents a challenge. "In mining, many of your skilled resources need to be mobile and need remote accessibility across various sites. Investment in cloud technologies can assist, and removes the reliance on further capital investment in costly on-premise solutions that need continuous investment to maintain."
Hicklin argues that following on from this, is continuity of service, as solutions must be accessible 'from any Internet breakout' so that business is not dependent on a sole ISP.
Compliance in a regulated and much observed industry is another challenge the mines are grappling with, she adds. Challenges such as safe record keeping in a virtual environment that is negotiation- and merger-heavy.
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