New data reveals the competing – and sometimes conflicting – challenges and priorities of IT leaders from 2020 that are shaping IT’s agenda for 2021 when it comes to managing risk. According to a new global survey, 72% of IT leaders and 52% of employees agreed that security is the biggest issue when it comes to unaccounted for and unmanaged technology. It seems that IT’s continuous efforts to reinforce security best practices may finally be paying off. But there is a lower level of awareness for additional issues, especially among employees, with 16% believing unaccounted for and unmanaged technologies do not cause any business problems whatsoever. Snow Software CIO Alastair Pooley joins me on Tech Talks Daily to dive deeper into the findings. On joining Snow, Alastair championed the idea of launching SaaS services and established both a hosting and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) function to support such growth. This provides the infrastructure and Support for over 200 customers who have adopted such services and provided a path to future growth for the business.

By adopting a SaaS/IaaS approach to IT services Snow has managed to pass $100M of ARR with barely any owned infrastructure. Over 90% of Snow’s IT lives either with a SaaS provider or in the public cloud. This is achieved on a zero-trust design which focuses on building single sign on capabilities with strong cybersecurity controls. Alastair also initiated, and now oversees, the cybersecurity function at Snow to provide a central risk and compliance function for the business.