Disruptive digitalisation demands transformation

Over the past few years, decentralised working away from offices and company headquarters has become commonplace. The COVID-19 pandemic has acted as an inevitable catalyst for this shift, forcing a vast number of companies within varying industries to facilitate working from home for all members of staff. This has been made possible by the use of public cloud services, which has become standard practice in recent years. With this implemented throughout almost every organisation, the transition to remote working has not been as difficult as it may have been just a few years ago. In fact, according to the State of Digital Transformation EMEA 2020  report, more than half of employees working in the companies surveyed no longer have a fixed workspace or desk at their company’s office. 

Throughout every organisation, this workplace transformation requires ongoing support from the IT department. It is a widely acknowledged fact that many employees will not be returning to their desks after the pandemic, meaning businesses need to adopt a hybrid workplace model. This will make switching between home and office-based environments easier, as it becomes increasingly normalised. That being said, there can be less agreement on this from the decision makers, who need to find a suitable and efficient way to incorporate a long-term change into the organisations’ IT infrastructure. 

Remote working driving digitisation

When members of staff access applications remotely, they should experience the same functionalities as they do when they are in the office. Wherever they may work from, employees will require seamless and secure access, the same as what they might experience in their personal lives outside of work. Organisations should ensure the technologies which provide access to applications in the office, can be utilised for remote access without impeding the user experience. As many applications move to multi-cloud environments, complexity is increasing, and IT teams are required to manage multiple systems in different places at the same time.

The past year has been revolutionary when it comes to remote working and employers need to ensure there is no longer a distinction between office-based and remote access. The shift to remote working imposed by the pandemic has proven that employees can work productively from any location, meaning this will now be standard practice for a lot of businesses. The main priority for many organisations now is to give employees seamless and secure connectivity regardless of their location. This huge transition throughout society has proven that technology is a key component within every business. To ensure they move with the times, organisations need to give IT teams the required digital tools to successfully move forward, which involves embracing digital transformation. 

As advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things become rapidly deployed and familiarised, organisations have no choice but to embrace digital transformation. It is expected that every successful organisation will utilise the technologies available to stay competitive and manage customers’ ever-changing expectations. In fact, many organisations today work across technical environments, meaning it is more expensive to use traditional approaches.

Although many organisations believe they are currently undergoing digital transformation, it requires radical change. This means that instead of simply replacing certain applications, decision makers need to find the courage to question existing processes, knowledge, and architectures, which may have been in place for a long period of time. As well as this, they need to be willing to make fundamental changes to the company’s infrastructure. Organisations that are not already doing this are still a long way off from achieving real transformation – in the best-case scenario, they will have made a transition without implementing any fundamental changes. 

Transitional solutions do not add value

Companies that adopt transition strategies are not doing themselves any favours. They often take a half-hearted approach to their cloudification projects and end up making tiny adjustments here and there, rather than enacting real change. During transitions, the old technology is replaced with a next generation device with enhanced functionalities. Another example of a transition is when an organisation migrates to a service provider with different service level agreements, which generally produces a manageable level of change. However, they eventually come to realise that this kind of change does not tackle the problem at its root, and therefore does not add any true value for the business. Additionally, a major sticking point with this kind of approach is the lack of a clear initial definition of the benefits the company wants to gain from a new solution.

When companies delay implementing long-term, disruptive change, all they are doing is temporarily shifting their problems around the organisation. Instead of evaluating processes and infrastructures as a whole and breaking away from old patterns, they simply replace one generation of technology with another. In the long term, the consequences of this approach will be unsatisfactory, and that is before they consider the vast amount of work involved. For example, in many companies, the move from standard Office packages to the SaaS (software-as-a-service) option, Microsoft 365 is viewed as a self-contained transformation project which has already been ticked off the to-do list. However, the challenges become clear when users start to complain about the poor user experience when accessing applications in the cloud. This is due to the aspects of connectivity and security not being considered during the transition.

Radical change happens holistically

When considering transformation initiatives, decision makers must not shy away from disruptive changes which can impact the entire ecosystem of the company’s infrastructure. Real transformation cannot be achieved by rolling out a new generation of devices with a better specification; it requires all parts of the organisation to work together to restructure architectures. All of those involved must take an objective, distanced look at the established methods and view the need to innovate as a driving force for the entire business model.

Disruptive transformation does not happen by trying to replicate old-fashioned network infrastructures for the new, cloud-based business world. If an organisation requires high-performance access to applications in the cloud and to the datacentre at the same time, it will have to rethink its connectivity and security models. Rather than continuing with the classic perimeters of network access, application access must be redefined for cloud environments with an architecture that enables Zero Trust. In such a model, access rights to applications are defined on the least privilege principle, which involves providing access through microtunnels based on granular policies and creates the smallest vector of attack. At the same time this direct access to applications provides a higher level of security, as it is decoupled from traditional network access. Additionally, the direct access route boosts user-friendliness by providing high-performance access to applications, regardless of whether these are hosted in data centres or cloud environments and regardless of where the user is working from.

Companies that adopt a strategy of transition by opting to switch security providers or update to a new generation of technologies will not be able to use long-term, sustainable transformation to lay the foundation for the future. Real change is about more than a few tiny adjustments here and there, it will inevitably bring all kinds of challenges. Digital transformation requires organisations to implement holistic change. If the business is to reap the benefits of a digitalisation strategy, there must not be any apprehension around change. Instead, organisations need to welcome this transition with open arms and look at what it can provide for employees and the business as a whole in the long-term.