Technology as a Competitive Advantage - Not a Cost
By Gina Yacone | Advisory CISO Mountain States Region
With so much to choose from in today’s market, it can be tricky to know if you’re on the right path when it comes to technology investments. As economic pressures become top of mind for more and more business leaders, my focus as of late has zeroed in on ensuring clients are investing in the right digital initiatives. “Doing more with less” has been the theme for the past few years, making strategic investments that allow our clients to maintain their competitive advantage.
Below are some additional themes that we are seeing in Trace3’s Mountain State Region:
Our skillful security engineers collaborate with our clients through workshops to:
With so much to choose from in today’s market, it can be tricky to know if you’re on the right path when it comes to technology investments. As economic pressures become top of mind for more and more business leaders, my focus as of late has zeroed in on ensuring clients are investing in the right digital initiatives. “Doing more with less” has been the theme for the past few years, making strategic investments that allow our clients to maintain their competitive advantage.
Below are some additional themes that we are seeing in Trace3’s Mountain State Region:
Tools Rationalization
When IT leaders are making investment or divestment decisions, many times they will look at what technology solutions their company is using to determine what should be retained, retired, or reconfigured. On average, our clients leverage 80+ tools in their environment, many of which are either overlapping in capabilities or duplicates due to organizational silos. Rationalization of IT portfolios is healthy, and an important lever in helping the organization with its IT modernization.Our skillful security engineers collaborate with our clients through workshops to:
- Determine where overlap exists for cost saving measures
- Uncover if any solutions pose security gaps
- Verify that compliance needs are met
- Ensure your organization is meeting industry standards
- Save the organization on costs
One of our infrastructure clients had four solutions that were somewhat solving the same use case. A dedicated Trace3 Security Engineer worked with the client to determine their business needs, reviewed their technology stack and architecture, and went to work. Our engineer determined which solution offered the most complete coverage while finding complementary, lower cost solutions to ensure there were no breaks in coverage. The client went from four solutions to two, saving the company money and increasing operational efficiency.
Speed Dating
Trace3 has saved our customers hundreds of research hours by matching our clients with potential partners. Trace3 ensures our customers get targeted, non-salesy information from a curated list of potential partners during vendor briefings.As a vendor matchmaker, we streamline the vendor selection process by having a team of Trace3-ers:
- Develop and/or verify business requirements
- Create a list of partners for our clients to “date”
- Conduct vendor due-diligence research
- Attend pre-meetings and demo vendor solutions to ensure a proper fit
- Create structured discussion topics to ensure partners focus on the client’s business requirements and not the marketing fluff
- Capture key information offered by potential partners and their solution offerings
Key stakeholders find value in this process because their man-hours are focused solely as consulting colleagues, ensuring team consensus and focus on contract objectives and deliverables.
Our clients in the Mountain States Region are seeing this process prove to be very effective, and our Innovation Team is ready to help you maximize your time during the vendor selection process.
Cloud Optimization
Due to the chaos of the pandemic, inflation, supply chain shortages, and limited talent, our clients have seen an increase in their cloud spend and growing inefficiencies in cloud performance. We have seen that many organizations are overly provisioned in their production environment, having over-utilized CPUs, memory, and VMs.No organization wants to limit its digital transformation journey because due to overspending on cloud. In the past year, we have helped customers identify unused resources and automate processes by performing a cloud optimization assessment. These assessments save our customers money and increase employee engagement – a win, win. By putting time and money back into our customers’ hands, they can refocus on their core business objectives or reallocate funds into future IT initiatives.
One of my favorite success stories comes from our cloud team, who helped a startup company save $1,000 per month on its cloud spend. Previously, I worked for a startup, and understand how money can be tight at times. The CEO relied on Trace3’s weekly cloud and trend analysis, as well as our subject matter expertise, to provide him the peace of mind that his cloud environment was being monitored when his team does not have the time or resources to do so.
Staff Augmentation
We are still seeing the phenomenon of the Great Resignation that began in 2021, and many clients cannot fill their full-time technical positions. As such, they are reaching out to Trace3 to help with staff augmentation to reinforce their in-house teams.Over the years, Trace3 has cultivated a Rolodex of elite talent. After working with a client to determine role requirements and goals, our team taps into its network to find potential candidates. Team members then screen candidates with the goal of finding a high-quality technical staff who are also a culture fit for the organization. After hire, our team facilitates check-ins with both the company and the professional to ensure proper placement and employee retention.
Over the past few months, I have been invited by some of our largest clients to help screen candidates for security positions. These positions are for security operation center (SOC) analysts, security engineers, and governance, risk, and compliance roles. In terms of time saved, the Trace3 team reviewed hundreds of resumes, prescreened talent, and narrowed the focus of candidates to two or three. This gives our clients time to focus on the outcome and not the recruitment process.
We are in an ever-changing world. Over the past two years, we have seen a pandemic, the Great Resignation, wars, and economic woes! Everyone is learning how to navigate and define what is the new normal. Trace3 is uniquely qualified to advise you on the current technical and market trends as we have served thousands of our clients. When selecting a business partner, know that Trace3 is genuinely interested in earning your business. We view ourselves as a strategic technology partner focused on your success. Let Trace3’s engineers find ways to creatively save you and your clients time and money while helping improve your security resilience.
https://www.trace3.com/security-solutions