With the increasing demand for digitization across the globe, let’s have a look at what the present trends of digital transformation are and what the future holds for it.

Digital transformation has been on the organizations’ radar for a long time and the time period between 2018 to 2020 is expected to be a critical moment for business leaders to prepare for and execute it across the industry.

Senior executives are aware of the fact that digital technology’s position is changing – from driving incremental productivity to being a force for creativity and disruption. This suggests that a variety of choices need to be taken in the coming years to prevent falling prey to rivals and disruptors.

With digital transformation, however, being the watchword of the first half of the 21st century, the company needs to go through a sort of digital transformation or your competitors will leave you behind. It takes solid intelligence to keep the digital transformation train going without any detrimental effects.

The Competitive Advantage of Digital Transformation

Revenue growth is one of the main advantages of a digitally transformed market process.

According to a book on digital transformation written by Westerman and Bonnet titled “Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation”, the authors recognize certain organizations as “masters” of digital. While evaluating how digital transformation performs under the guidance of those masters, they found that those companies were “26 percent more profitable than their average industry competitors.”

However, digital transformation is still a challenge, even with those statistics. A McKinsey survey found that only 12 percent of respondents deemed IT “very effective” in leading their company’s digital transformation.

New Technologies and Trends

It needs a thorough understanding of the process itself as well as of the available technology to decide to digitize a process. New technology applicants and methodologies constantly come on board, and decision-makers need to keep up-to-date with these.

There are many sectors that are being introduced to simplify and streamline business processes:

Blockchain

Blockchain has been one of the most disruptive technologies since the inception of the internet. In the next few years, Blockchain is expected by IDC to be one of the main transformative technologies. Supply chain management is one of the areas of focus of blockchain. IDC has projected cost savings in the range of 35 percent by using blockchain-enabled supply chains.

Smart Contracts

Out of the distributed ledger technology of the blockchain come smart contracts. A smart contract is a program that executes when a condition is fulfilled. In the construction industry, the Institute of Civil Engineering (ICE) has investigated the use of smart contracts. They understand the advantages of using smart contracts in many respects, including the accuracy of contractual cooperation, enforcement, and risk management.

DevOps

The lubricant of digital transformation is the discipline that blends creation and operations. This partnership between the two business fields, which are typically separate, helps systems to be converted more smoothly.

Cloud Computing

The cloud is starting to develop and an increasingly remote workforce is pushing it. This, in turn, fuels the need for more online networking platforms and encourages a more versatile working life.

Artificial Intelligence

A lot of data is generated by emerging transformative technology and this data provides the knowledge required to drive digital technology’s transformative nature. Artificial Intelligence and it’s and its subcategories, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are used to simplify business processes and collaborate with human beings to increase efficiencies.

Privacy

Companies need to protect their sensitive data from data breaches and cyberattacks in today’s technologically transformed environment, all while maintaining privacy issues in mind. Privacy obligations such as GDPR, CCPA, and PIPEDA have forced organizations to step up their privacy game and show compliance with detection, monitoring, and record-keeping of mandated privacy violations.

In line with the increasingly emerging philosophy of digital transformation, the concepts of “privacy by design” and “security by design” would need to be kept in mind by organizations.

The Risk Landscape and Digital Transformation

The digitally transforming aspect of these emerging technologies not only offers commercial opportunities but also opportunities for cybercriminals.

New tools are analogous to new risks and vulnerabilities attacking a revamped environment. Such risks have significant repercussions for the prosperity of our digitally transformed industries. Cybersecurity and socio-technical elements are the challenges that could hamper our digital transition.

Data Breaches

As enterprise technology becomes more and more available to allow online cooperation, vulnerabilities also open-up.

Many of the recent data violations, such as the Capital One breach, have been triggered by the misconfiguration of cloud servers. We need to lock down our applications securely while we transform our working environments, open up our enterprise to cloud apps, and free up data flow.

Also Read: Cybersecurity: Everything You Need to Know

Consumer Push-Back

Data is a vital aspect of our organizations’ digital transformation. Often these details are extremely sensitive and unique. Consumers and laws such as GDPR are fighting back on breaches of data protection.

We need to be cognizant of customer preferences and regulatory imperatives in addition to locking down our structures and resources. If not, it is accompanied by substantial fines and decreased public interest.

Critical Infrastructure Attacks

Essential infrastructures, such as electricity and water, are now being digitally converted systems that were closed once are hyper-connected now. The very networking on which digital business depends also requires essential infrastructures. Attacks on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) are also on the rise.

Remote Access and Cloud Apps

The use of web applications such as communication hubs includes the digital integration of corporate working processes. An International Data Group (IDG) study showed that there is at least one cloud app for 73 percent of enterprises. More than one-third of companies are under pressure to completely move to the cloud. This move is fuelled by cost savings, operational efficiencies, remote connectivity, and inter-company cooperation. The downside is that the attack surface is increased by cloud applications. In a 2019 Thales report, 49% of respondents thought that a cyberattack posed the greatest danger to cloud software.

Conclusion

The train for digital transformation has hit the rails and is steaming along. Missing the train puts a business at risk of slipping behind the market.

Digital business process automation provides increased efficiencies, more cost-effective approaches to use data, greater customer experience, and can also provide better working conditions for the workers. However,  It also opens fresh outlets for cyber-attacks. We must be mindful of the security risks and the possibility of using innovative ways of operating as we try to embark on a new system and improve the way we operate.

Change is never easy, and digital transformation carries both risk and reward. Managing these threats is as much a part of the process of digital change as getting emerging technology on board.