Even as the global pandemic subsides, enterprises continue to contend with their long-term repercussions, which include, to name a few, inflation, supply chain challenges, labor shortages, and increasing demand for remote work initiatives. To mitigate the impact of these challenges, firms must accelerate their digital transformation timelines.
According to a recent IDC forecast, spending on digital transformation in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa would more than double between 2021 and 2026. The reasons for this exponential increase are clear – when executed correctly, digital transformation offers numerous benefits to businesses, including strengthened network infrastructure, improved data collecting, better resource management, improved customer experience, increased revenues, reduced expenses, and higher return on investment.
Regardless of the benefits that digital transformation can provide, it is critical to acknowledge that a digital-first world requires a renewed focus on service availability, quality, delivery, and cybersecurity.
Always-on connectivity
Understanding what always-connected applications and processes mean for a business is the best way to analyze the potential risks presented by digital transformation. Taking e-commerce as an example, while it may appear easy to focus on the fact that e-commerce is a 24/7 activity, it is critical to grasp what this actually entails in terms of connectivity.
For starters, it necessitates consistent, dependable connectivity that is both quick and error-free. It also requires a high level of confidence from users and customers, who provide personal information with the expectation it will be secure from threat actors. E-commerce customers also expect sites to be straightforward and fast, and they quickly lose interest and abandon shopping carts when they are irritated, disrupted, or distracted.
Digital transformation also emphasises the need for businesses to focus on both service quality and cybersecurity, balancing the user’s digital experience with the technical restrictions that a secure service necessitates. The example of remote workers exemplifies this balance. Every IT business that enabled remote work during the pandemic was put to the test.
User experience was suddenly prioritised for IT firms that needed to offer a great digital experience to support the productivity and effectiveness of workers and workflows. Furthermore, the push to deliver exceptional digital experiences was not limited to employees; customers, vendors, and partners all anticipated stellar digital experiences, and that expectation hasn’t diminished with the easing of pandemic restrictions.
Measuring user experience was challenging enough for many businesses. The network visibility required to identify what percentage of an enterprise’s employees was effectively accessing critical collaboration apps became considerably more difficult when those users began accessing those apps from their home networks all over the world.
Employees now rely on enterprise internet connections in corporate offices to access business applications and services. Threat actors are aware of this, and their distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks may prohibit workers at home from accessing services they require.
Even simple security methods like multifactor authentication may be damaging to those user experience metrics. Adding more stages and load time between employees and their inboxes, or between customers and the “Place Order” button, makes the experience more secure but also more difficult. Balancing these aspects correctly necessitates a greater understanding of the network through visibility.
However, poor network performance and insufficient security can have far-reaching consequences beyond lost revenue and disgruntled staff. Therefore, it is critical to balance security and user experience. Because of the complexity of digital infrastructures, businesses must focus on how digital experiences are measured, monitored, and controlled. Similarly, it is critical to realise that doing so is critical to both business and IT success.
Mitigating risks with zero trust
To successfully overcome the business risks associated with digital transformation, businesses must first recognise the potential risks and the means to mitigate them. Next-generation workloads, for example, are distributed, modular, and stateless, allowing for both speed and scale. Developers are keen to capitalise on these new application development and delivery methods.
Threat actors, on the other hand, are aware of the security implications of these technologies and, as a result, target them for new attack avenues. As a result, organisations must safeguard their existing infrastructure with modern defenses capable of absorbing new threats and protecting against attacks today, and into the future.
Digital business models also allow firms to migrate applications and data to the cloud, where they may leverage technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT). However, attackers are fully aware of these technologies’ vulnerabilities, and are increasingly targeting them with sophisticated DDoS attacks.
For many organisations, the most effective way to manage these concerns is to collaborate with a partner whose single focus is assuring the safety and security of enterprise networks. To address many of the issues described above, businesses and governments have begun to implement “zero trust” concepts and expand the use of scalable deep packet inspection. Working together, zero trust and scalable DPI assist avoid data breaches. In the event of a breach, the ability to limit lateral movement and data exfiltration, as well as the capacity to analyse data both in real time and retrospectively, is critical to restoring services and returning to normal operations.
