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Chief Information Officers now need to drive deeper cultural and technological transformation for effective hybrid work and powerful business growth (Raconteur, 2021)....
4 mins read
The last 15 months have significantly altered the digital transformation journey for most organisations. In this blog, Genius Wong, Chief Technology Officer, Tata Communications, explores how organisations are strategising on aspects of business continuity and digitalisation to ensure the productivity of a remote and distributed workforce.
As you move forward, besides continuity and resilience, the ability to offer high-quality digital-first experiences for your employees, customers, and partners will become the cornerstone for digital investments. This is increasingly a critical need; as highlighted in a recent survey of over 750 executives commissioned by Tata Communications, only 46% of CEOs and COOs believed that their organisations were strong at offering a high-quality user experience across their value chain. Taking this a step further, many global organisations now recognise the need to transform their conventional networks, which have been operating on a hub-and-spoke model, to now cater for emerging dynamic business requirements. Nearly half of surveyed respondents stated that their firms’ productivity decreased during the crisis due to connection problems. By contrast, Digital Trailblazers have achieved a productivity boost of 67% since the pandemic began. In this blog, I explore some of the common areas that you could be wrestling with in the new hybrid world as well as the transition to deliver quality digital experiences for employees and customers.- Transitioning to Cloud First and Internet First
There is also the added complexity of managing multi-internet service providers across the globe and navigating the varying geographic regulations, which can quickly become a major overhead with a global distributed workforce and set of offices."You need to ensure you can deliver secure and seamless remote access to core enterprise applications over untrusted networks and strike the right balance between ensuring security and not making access too difficult."
- Embedding more intelligence
We also use ML to carry out a lot of predictive and proactive management of the network, looking at data and trends to take preventive measures quickly. These will be key industry trends and will continue to evolve as we move into 2022."At Tata Communications, in our own use case, we are starting to provide this along with associated data analytics to help simplify service and network management."
- Optimising and building a new hybrid network for efficiency and productivity
This new network architecture, embracing internet, cloud, and intelligence, will need to support both the new digital business model and the new hybrid work environment. Solutions need to reduce cost but also provide consistent user performance, a uniform SLA, and complete visibility. One example of a use case is that of a global bank looking to achieve superior site-to-site communications and accelerate cloud adoption, and to enable this we would see it adopt a strategy that provides internet connections to all its different branches across India from a public cloud provider. This would help it not only reduce cost but also optimise performance. Similarly, with a pharmaceutical company that is perhaps migrating its global network from pure MPLS to a hybrid environment – combining both MPLS and internet would help achieve cost savings and provide a ‘single pane of glass’, giving greater visibility and control across all networks. In each of these scenarios, these businesses save money as well as gaining a flexible network, required for a productive hybrid workplace.
- Building an agile network architecture
- where the traffic comes from and how to redirect it such that the access gateways are not congested
- how much should be on the internet
- how much can be ‘burstable’ and how much can be stopped? For example, one country could be in the midst of a lockdown while another country could be seeing workers going back to the office
- ultimately, how you can dynamically sense and shift traffic around.
- Protecting your business from the new risks that are exposed in this new model
Security is key in enabling your hybrid workplace, moving from a perimeter-based security model with IP addresses and locations to an adaptive access-policy approach using integrated identity endpoint management and security tools. This approach allows you to evaluate the risk based on user identity and device trust. It’s about enabling a continuous complete risk assessment of the endpoints or unified endpoint management.
Using AI and ML, this provisioning could be automated – the activation and downgrading capacity all taken care of without human intervention. To conclude, no longer are the internal network and external network two separate worlds. You need an integrated policy across both, which means you can start to deploy new technology and reap the rewards. It’s time to create a truly dynamic network for an unpredictable hybrid world. For more information on this, read our eBook Accelerate Your Workplace Evolution. [1] SECURE NETWORK TRANSFORMATION TO TURBOCHARGE YOUR DIGITAL JOURNEY. An IDC InfoBrief, September 2020 [2] SECURE NETWORK TRANSFORMATION TO TURBOCHARGE YOUR DIGITAL JOURNEY. An IDC InfoBrief, September 2020"True agility will be network on demand; dynamically moving connectivity up and down with an assured SLA."
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