Digital Transformation is no longer an option, it's a must in the Covid-19 era

Covid-19 and the nationwide lockdown came as an acid test for every individual and business to ensure business continuity and relevance in the new world. Organizations that had taken the lead to build their digital presence had the advantage to sustain business as they were digitally connected with their stakeholders and employees to operate from anywhere and continue their business operations.

Digital transformation leveraging Social, Machine Learning, Analytics and Hybrid Cloud popularly named as SMAC has been in demand during the last few years. Many established and leading organizations have embraced SMAC offerings to add more relevance and resilience to their business in recent times. The majority have also reimagined their business in the internet and mobile era through Digital transformation to enhance the relevance and sustain profitable growth.

Majority of the business which did not embrace digital transformation were suddenly left high and dry in the locked-down world where people were physically confined to where ever they were and the only way for them to connect was through web/apps to manage their official and personal life.

Even many of the larger and industry-leading organizations that had implemented digital transformation for their customers were found in the lurch since some of their backend and internal process were not ready for WFH in a secure and scalable way along with necessary compliance to serve their customer needs.

In social media, we did have humor around who expedited digital transformation adoption with Covid-19 scoring higher credit than CXOs and boards.

Hence the key learning from Covid-19 era for business of all sizes and shape are:

-Ensure all applications are in the hybrid cloud model and not just the key ones since WFH became the only way to operate for months together.

-Assess applications for availability, scalability and security along with underlying network infrastructure and the data which is the real asset with these applications.

-Review all process and ensure WFH is baked-in with safety, security, and scalability – internal and external for all stakeholders.

-Review stakeholder contracts to check privacy and compliance needs for WFH scenario and take pro-active approvals as a special business continuity/disaster recovery need. Invest additional security tools to extend privacy and compliance needs even for WFH model.

-Ensure safety, security, and scalability of all the applications for on-premise and WFH scenario for the whole organization. Many did have this capability but for a limited percentage of the employees and thus had a lot of operational challenge during the lockdown.

-Migrate to a hybrid cloud model to have the flexibility to move workloads between private and public clouds and between multiple public clouds based on load and cost needs of business for optimizing costs.

-Leverage analytics to get business insights in real-time for right business decisions to survive and thrive in these challenging times.

-With threat landscape taking advantage of WFH scenario, ensure secured access of all application and data with VPN, encryption, multi-factor authentication, endpoint security, DLP across web/email and endpoint, secured backup/archive of endpoints, regular vulnerability assessments, etc.

-Reimagine endpoint security as it’s no longer inside the perimeter with all the protections like FW, IPS/IDS, web security, email security, SIEM and network DLP.

-Stay ahead of the threat with new-age security such as – Big Data & IoT solutions, Cloud-Edge securities, Defense-in-depth securities with Zero Trust Framework, Network Forensics, prescriptive & predictive maintenance, User & Entity Behaviour Analysis, etc.

-With demand taking time to pick up to pre-Covid era, look at robotic process automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to automate repetitive/routine tasks so that humans can be leveraged for higher value add work. These also help in enhancing agility with zero errors and learning more tasks with time. This will help in reducing costs and enhancing TAT with scalability over the years.

The strategic goal needs to be always-on with the flexibility to manage the business operations from anywhere in a secured and scalable way, mitigating evolving threats and meeting all the compliance needs.

Digital transformation is no longer an option but a basic business infrastructure needed to ensure business continuity for all business size and types. The sooner we embrace the better are our chances to survive initially and then thrive when the economy recovers. 

The article is authored by  S Sriram, Chief Strategy Officer, iValue InfoSolutions