Stephen McNulty, president, Asia Pacific, Micro Focus
1. Achieving digital transformation nirvana just got easier
Despite ‘digital transformation’ being a buzzword and a key priority on business leaders’ agenda for half a decade now, a 2018 survey of IT professionals revealed that only 8% of enterprises consider themselves fully digitally transformed and 23% are still in the early stages of their ‘digital transformation’. Many organisations are still struggling to achieve their digital business ideals.
2019 is the year when we will see a concerted shift from broad-based enterprise efforts to a more practical and step-by-step transformation plans, with incremental changes made to operations. Businesses will be more strategic in adopting a utilitarian approach towards embracing a digital-first mindset – particularly so for companies with legacy business models and IT architectures. For such companies, digital transformation is an urgent business mandate. Enterprises must not only adopt a clear digital strategy that incorporates emerging, innovative technologies, but also undertake initiatives to modernise their legacy applications.
2. Innovation will be about bridging the old and new
With innovation moving at a rapid pace and businesses moving towards embracing complete transformation in the coming year, there is a great temptation to bring in new solutions – removing legacy ecosystems and replace them with solutions that bring the promise of agility, speed and increased revenue. However, legacy systems remain critical to day-to-day operations for many organisations. The strength and maturity of existing infrastructure organisations can provide a solid foundation for integrating new technologies. In many cases, replacing the whole ecosystem would be counterproductive.
In 2019, what’s needed is a pragmatic approach that leverages the value of current IT systems but embraces the future needs. In order to be able to accommodate emerging technologies, companies must be able to make adjustments to their legacy infrastructure accordingly – analysing how the old and the new technologies can coexist.
3. Refining cloud strategies will now be a business imperative
With up to 80 percent of enterprises having adopted multicloud, such environments are set to dominate enterprises’ digital transformation ideals in 2019. That being said, in today’s rapidly evolving ecosystem, many businesses remain undecided on their cloud strategy.
In line with IDC’s recent survey, 60% of IT decision makers indicate that they have a largely unintegrated multicloud environment. With a lack of overview surrounding the cloud landscape, enterprises must gain an understanding of how they can manage their services across different providers and models amid more complex and dynamic multicloud environments in 2019. To do so, enterprises will hone in on a concrete strategy and define management processes in order to stay nimble and agile in an evolving environment. One crucial aspect of this will be learning how to apply consistent security and management policies across all their platforms, without letting performance take a hit.
4. Companies will continue to ensure solutions have inbuilt privacy and security by design features
Developers in today’s fast-paced DevOps-centric worlds do not have time to think about risks – hence data-security and privacy controls should be built and embedded into their systems by default, rather than added as an afterthought.
2018 revealed the importance of consumer privacy and data protection, with the implementation of regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) bringing “privacy by design” to the fore. As numerous data breach incidents have shown, organisations must have a complete overview of the data collection processes – what is being collected, how it is being utilised, stored and encrypted – or risk bearing the brunt of losing stakeholders’ trust.
Consistent data security should be centrally managed, so developers will not have to worry about policy and can get on with advancing the business with innovation and insight. 2019 will be the year where businesses will shift towards data-level security solutions such as analytics and machine learning – coupled with a unified, uncompromising approach towards implementing such solutions as part of the core business and consumer engagement strategy.
