By CR Srinivasan, Executive Vice President: Cloud and Cybersecurity Services & Chief Digital Officer, Tata Communications
2022 has been a transformational year for many businesses. The year started off with more unexpected challenges — surging inflation, recession fears, and geopolitical woes — forcing business leaders to rethink their strategies on productivity and growth.
According to Gartner, most (89%) board of directors report that digital is embedded across all business growth strategies. Yet only 35% say they have achieved or are on track to achieving their digital transformation goals. So, it is high time that businesses accelerate their digital transformation to effectively address the changing economic landscape.
However, rapid digital transformation is not without its challenges. Businesses need to address cybersecurity threats (39% of UK businesses identified a cyberattack in 2022, according to Cyber Security Breaches Survey by Ipsos) and the complexity in managing multi-cloud systems (four out of five businesses now use more than one public or private cloud system, according to HashiCorp report 2022 State of Cloud Strategy Survey) besides ensuring that they keep pace with constant changes in technology and business needs.
Businesses are having to leverage emerging technologies to make data-driven decisions, remain productive and drive competitiveness. And as they continue to increase digital adoption, business leaders must also find ways to overcome the challenges they encounter along the way to ensure lasting business agility and growth.
In this piece, I will explore the top trends that will govern how businesses approach their digital infrastructure in 2023 and suggest ways businesses can level up to achieve operational excellence and business goals.
1. Digital Ecosystems
Digital transformation continues to be a core objective for businesses today. And as they modernise their infrastructure and create operational visibility to build trust with customers, critical applications will not only need to be available 24/7 but will also need to have real-time connectedness with the business’ ecosystem. This digital ecosystem of partners, suppliers, governments, and institutions are necessary to deliver value across the board.
These developments will enable businesses to provide their customers with exceptional digital experiences while enhancing productivity and fuelling business growth. This is an inevitable change considering that the hyperconnected world of the future – with its billions of connected devices – will alter the way businesses and individuals alike interact and engage with technology.
However, the integration of diverse technologies and platforms remains a complex task for businesses. To accelerate digital adoption across your value chain, maximise value from data, save costs and grow your revenue, there is a need to collaborate with the right technology service provider.
As such, it is critical to partner with a provider that has the expertise and experience to continuously manage your ecosystem securely and cost effectively while ensuring multiple systems are integrated efficiently.
When done right, digital ecosystems will allow organisations to move closer to customers and focus on their needs while speeding up business innovation.
2. Hyper Customer Focus
Today, businesses can seamlessly connect, communicate, and collaborate with people and technologies alike. And the availability of digital technologies 24/7 have transformed consumer habits.
Consumers now expect relevant content to be available to them at anytime, anywhere, and in the format and on the device of their choosing. It’s this always connected customer journey that dictates business strategy – driving the need for more analytics and customer behaviour metrics. These valuable insights can be effectively used to get closer to the customer, deliver hyper-localised services and immersive digital experiences to meet their needs.
With an increase in the use of IoT devices and the need to elevate omnichannel customer experiences, computing is moving from a centralised cloud architecture to the edge (bringing services closer to the customer). The edge computing market is estimated to be worth $155.90 billion by 2030, according to a recent report by Million Insights.
As businesses continue to grow, edge computing will complement cloud computing by delivering immersive interactions, real-time value, and intelligence solutions to customers.
3. Reinvent Innovation
With acceleration in digital connectedness, businesses will prefer most of their services to be cloud delivered and cloud assured. They can leverage the as-a-service model to consume as few or as many resources as needed. This helps to manage each business’ cloud usage and cost effectiveness considering most (89%) businesses already report having a multi-cloud strategy, according to Flexera.
With the as-a-service model providing the foundation for technology on-demand, organisations can focus more on their business objectives and ability to compete effectively in the marketplace.
As a result, the ability to rapidly innovate new products and services will no longer be a ‘nice to have’ but rather, a ‘must have’ if businesses are to maintain market share and enhance growth.
4. Digital Trust
A cloud delivered and cloud assured model increases the amount of data being generated exponentially. This large sum of data becomes attractive to cyber adversaries who see as it as a target of economic value. And as such, these businesses become more vulnerable to cyberattacks. One-third of global businesses were breached more than seven times in 2022, according to Trend Micro’s and the Ponemon Institute’s semi-annual Cyber Risk Index (CRI) report. So, in an increasingly distributed digital business, leaders must prioritise data security to maintain trust with their customers.
Also, new regulations such as the Personal Data Protection (PDP) bill in India, CSA guidelines in Singapore, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) guidelines in the US, are leading to greater accountability and compliance.
As a result, the demand for technologies and services to protect data will continue to grow. Gartner predicts that cloud security will have the strongest growth over the next two years, and spending on information security and risk management products and services will grow by 11.3% to reach more than $188.3 billion in 2023.
Digital trust is important. By seeking a trusted managed security services partner and shoring up defences, businesses can protect their reputation while ensuring business continuity.
5. Sustainability
As we move closer to 2030, the UN’s Sustainability Development Goals and the Paris Agreement targets are top of mind for most business leaders wanting to play their part in reducing global warming. According to Gartner, CEOs say environmental and social changes are now a top three priority for investors, after profit and revenue.
This means sustainable practises will be embedded in digital transformation strategies to grow with a green footprint. Thinking big and thinking sustainably are core to the promise of digital technologies and the transformation they enable. After all, digital transformation is an engine for new processes, innovations and business models that do more with less.
Also, more businesses will start to measure the benefits of their sustainability decisions and how it is making an impact on their overall business objectives. Investing in technologies like traceability, analytics, renewable energy, and AI will help businesses achieve their sustainability goals.
Conclusion
Global digital transformation spending is forecast to reach $3.4 trillion in 2026, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Digital Transformation Spending Guide. In 2023, we’ll see more businesses take bold strides towards modernising their digital ecosystem, elevating customer and employee experiences while being more sustainable and resilient. A hyperconnected world of the future will change the way we interact, engage, and coexist with technology
