Benefits of a Virtual CIO

Akins IT • April 8, 2016
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Many companies find that bringing on a CIO is not feasible and instead the responsibilities that would typically be assigned to a CIO find their way to the CEO or CFO’s plate. These tasks often include assessing and reviewing the strength of current systems and disaster recovery plans and developing budgets for future IT expenditures. Often these companies turn to a virtual CIO offering to help offload these tasks. Further, having an internal IT manager take on these tasks is usually not possible. These managers are often bombarded with service ticket requests, or are putting out a variety of fires whether it’s an issue with a server, a virus, or setting up a desktop for a new employee. These tasks can be extremely time consuming and tasks like planning and budgeting for IT growth get pushed off. These managers also become burned out and overloaded with the number of tasks.


What is a Virtual CIO?


A CIO’s job responsibilities include developing a strategic plan that uses technology as a tool to accomplish overall business objectives. A virtual CIO takes on the same responsibilities but is generally outsourced to a trusted outside company.

Benefits of a virtual CIO include:



  • Knowledge and Expertise: Outsourcing the role of a CIO to an outside company means that the company is focused on developing a strategic roadmap for your company. It also generally brings unique experience and insight from working with companies similar to yours.
  • Reducing costs: Hiring a CIO is expensive. These salaries are usually well over six figures. Outsourcing allows the company receive the benefits of planning and budgeting without the high overhead.
  • Developing a technology roadmap: IT is not a cost of doing business. Rather, it should be viewed as a tool that can and should be used to further overall business objectives. A virtual CIO can adopt an IT strategy to promote business growth and goals.
  • Creating a plan for security and disaster recovery: Unfortunately, plans for security and disaster recovery are often not thought of until a disaster has already occurred or security been breached. A virtual CIO gets in front of these possibilities by developing and implementing a preventative plan.

AWS stumbled this morning. Here’s why multi‑cloud keeps you moving.

By Shawn Akins • October 20, 2025
October 20, 2025 — Early today, Amazon Web Services experienced a major incident centered in its US‑EAST‑1 (N. Virginia) region. AWS reports the event began around 12:11 a.m. PT and tied back to DNS resolution affecting DynamoDB , with mitigation within a couple of hours and recovery continuing thereafter. As the outage rippled, popular services like Snapchat, Venmo, Ring, Roblox, Fortnite , and even some Amazon properties saw disruptions before recovering. If your apps or data are anchored to a single cloud, a morning like this can turn into a help‑desk fire drill. A multi‑cloud or cloud‑smart approach helps you ride through these moments with minimal end‑user impact. What happened (and why it matters) Single‑region fragility: US‑EAST‑1 is massive—and when it sneezes, the internet catches a cold. Incidents here have a history of wide blast radius. Shared dependencies: DNS issues to core services (like DynamoDB endpoints) can cascade across workloads that never directly “touch” that service. Multi‑cloud: practical resilience, not buzzwords For mid‑sized orgs, schools, and local government, multi‑cloud doesn’t have to mean “every app in every cloud.” It means thoughtful redundancy where it counts : Multi‑region or multi‑provider failover for critical apps Run active/standby across AWS and Azure (or another provider), or at least across two AWS regions with automated failover. Start with citizen‑facing portals, SIS/LMS access, emergency comms, and payment gateways. Portable platforms Use Kubernetes and containers, keep state externalized, and standardize infra with Terraform/Ansible so you can redeploy fast when a region (or a provider) wobbles. (Today’s DNS hiccup is exactly the kind of scenario this protects against.) Resilient data layers Replicate data asynchronously across clouds/regions; choose databases with cross‑region failover and test RPO/RTO quarterly. If you rely on a managed database tied to one region, design an escape hatch. Traffic and identity that float Use global traffic managers/DNS to shift users automatically; keep identity (MFA/SSO) highly available and not hard‑wired to a single provider’s control plane. Run the playbook Document health checks, automated cutover, and comms templates. Then practice —tabletops and live failovers. Many services today recovered within hours, but only teams with rehearsed playbooks avoided user‑visible downtime. The bottom line Cloud concentration risk is real. Outages will happen—what matters is whether your constituents, students, and staff feel it. A pragmatic multi‑cloud stance limits the blast radius and keeps your mission‑critical services online when one provider has a bad day. Need a resilience check? Akins IT can help you prioritize which systems should be multi‑cloud, design the right level of redundancy, and validate your failover plan—without overspending. Let’s start with a quick, 30‑minute review of your most critical services and RPO/RTO targets. (No slideware, just actionable next steps.)

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