Future legislations may affect innovation
Innovation and adoption of digital transformation technologies has been proved to be a competitive advantage for businesses. As we begin to move into the middle of the decade, information technology and business decision makers need to work together to determine the future direction of the business.
Many great ideas that can affect a business may not be feasible due to global technology limitations and regional data privacy laws. In fact, we recently have seen some businesses exit geolocations for exactly these reasons. The business had a great idea, but the technology, security, and legal teams could not continue to meet the business objectives due to regional regulatory governance.
Therefore, in order for a digital transformation initiative to continue to be a business advantage, technology staff and business decision makers need to work together, from the beginning, in order to ensure that any initiative can be deployed legally and sustained in the future.
The net collaborative effect will benefit the business without the unnecessary pressure on one group or another to produce something that could be a future liability.
Information technology and business decision makers can give back to the community simply by engaging in non-profit and free educational services. If professionals gave a small portion of their time to educating new team members or engaging in mentorship programmes, then their ultimate replacements will be more suited to assume roles as older generations retire.
In the last 24 months, organisations have embraced digital transformation strategies to accommodate a work from anywhere world and modern attack vectors that can be an unprecedented disruption to a business. While this trend has enabled IT and technology decision makers to be flexible with solutions, the risks, cost, and maintenance have caused some concern for organisations.
If you consider that technology is no longer solely on-premises; may be based on a subscription pricing model; and follows an agile development and release process that may not be compatible with your change control methodology; adoption may require changes in your overall business and is not just reserved to the selection of a product.
In addition, cyber security concerns for the new solution and the privileges and access required to make it operate, can violate existing security and data privacy controls. All of these need to be consider by IT and technology decision makers before selecting the next solution to meet the evolution of the business.
Businesses now have an opportunity to expand operations and manage work from anywhere, overhead, business complexity, and automation in 2022.
Modern technology is changing the IT landscape. With the rapid evolution of AI, automation, and the cloud, there is a need to revisit the traditional organisational structure of information technology and information security teams.
A preferred organisational structure compartmentalises disciplines to on-premises, cloud, solution, and technology but leverages the same solution with role-based access data sets for each team. This requires using the same solutions as a SEIM for the entire company and standardising on tools like MDR, Vulnerability Management, Log Management, that correlates data from every source for a holistic perspective.
Each team therefore has visibility into their area of concern but can draw from related information in order to look for indicators of compromise or performance metrics. When new technology like AI is applied on top, all the teams’ benefit, and the results are more accurate because data is inspected from the entire enterprise and not just one departmental perspective. This change needs to occur not only in people but technology too in order to be effective.
Principal challenges for decision makers
- How to manage office space that may be vacant as the work from anywhere workforce continues post-pandemic
- How to simplify the end user experience by leveraging the cloud for applications and services while working from anywhere
- What a zero-trust architecture could mean for a common office environment as organisations become less dependent on traditional firewalls and office-based intrusion prevention solutions
- What technology can help mitigate the risks and bandwidth restrictions of users working from anywhere including local ISP outages
- What do traditional IT services like backup and recovery look like and cost while users operate outside of the office environment
- What sensitive assets need to have additional security controls when data, including personally identifiable information PII, is available outside of the traditional office network
- What are the costs of supplying mobile hardware to all employees versus allowing Bring Your Own Device for non-sensitive work
Key Takeaways
- Collaborative effects will benefit the business without the unnecessary pressure on one group or another to produce that could be a future liability.
- Decision makers can give back to the community by engaging in non-profit and free educational services.
- If professionals gave a small portion of their time to new team members or mentorship then their replacements will be more suited to assume roles.
- Adoption of technology may require changes in overall business and is not just reserved to the selection of a product.
- Modern technology is changing the IT landscape.
- With the rapid evolution of automation, and cloud, there is a need to revisit traditional organisational structure of information technology and information security teams.
- A preferred organisational structure compartmentalises disciplines to on-premises, cloud, solution, and technology.
Many great ideas that can power a business to new heights, may not be feasible due to global technology limitations and regional data privacy laws.
