| | June 20188CIOReviewTHE BALANCING ACT: NETWORK SECURITY AND CONNECTIVITYBy Whitney Kellett, CIO, Aqua American today's ever-changing digital world, utility cus-tomers expect providers to be as connected as streaming television ser-vices and email accounts. But, like a lot of industrial business-es, utilities tend not to be the earliest adopters of new technology. New technologies promise easier and faster ways to accomplish important tasks, but taking the time to account for strengths, weaknesses, risks and longevity associated with each new offering is best-practice.Every decision to upgrade or implement a new system needs to benefit employees and stakehold-ers, while ensuring the security of customer information and company financial data. Because of this, it is essential that CIOs continually work to redefine their corporate strategies to fully embrace updated or new technological offerings and ensure that they are balancing this with their company investment and every potential security risk.For many industrial and utility businesses, the technological trends being adopted are not on the cutting edge of development, but rather, they are important for information technology and operations technolo-gy systems. Cloud-based computing, the proliferation of mobile devices and the importance of cybersecu-rity are just a few key advancements that need to be carefully implement-ed in strategic plans. I encourage CIOs, and all tech leaders across all industries, to be proactive, strate-gic and forward-thinking for each technology decision. Cloud-based ComputingWhile not a new concept, cloud-based computing has recently be-come more popular in the utility and industrial space. For many com-panies, the ability to store company and client information in a secure internet-based location creates a new, convenient way for employees to connect to and access data. At its core, cloud computing pre-sents security risks and many com-panies, Aqua included, were initially concerned with storing confidential and important company informa-tion on the cloud. As IT profession-als learned more about the architec-ture of the cloud, how web-enabled services could be integrated into ex-isting systems and how secure data would be stored, more companies began implementing or forecasting for cloud based computing in their strategic plans. It can be argued that in today's business landscape, cloud avoid-ance is a choice companies cannot afford to make. Many IT product development companies are invest-ing the majority of their resources into the cloud, making it a more secure, up-to-date system. In fact, if a company is not in the process of integrating the cloud or does not plan to do so, they will soon be considered obsolete.For companies like Aqua that are working to improve legacy systems and processes, it can be overwhelm-ing to begin to transfer information and policies to the cloud. This pro-cess requires a strong strategic plan for product use and the migration of information. Technology leaders have an obligation to understand the impact the change in systems and IWhitney KellettIN MY OPINION
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