Now in the third year of the pandemic, the top priority for most CIOs will shift to supporting their remote workforce. To achieve this, CIOs are migrating more infrastructure to cloud-based workloads, but this digital transformation effort is especially difficult for midsize businesses that lack budgetary resources and IT talent. The process of digital transformation can be complex and costly. As a result, many midsize businesses are looking for ways to digitally transform without breaking the bank.
As the business landscape continues to change at a rapid pace Midsize enterprises are under pressure to digitally transform to stay ahead of the curve or risk losing market share to agile startups. Many midsize enterprises are turning to Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to lead digital transformation initiatives. CIOs must develop digital transformation strategies that align with business objectives and enable midsize enterprises to compete in the digital economy. There is no one-size-fits-all digital transformation strategy for midsize enterprises. CIOs must tailor digital transformation strategies to the specific needs of their organization. However, there are some common digital transformation strategies that CIOs can use to drive digital transformation in their midsize enterprises.
There are a number of factors that CIOs must consider when developing a digital transformation strategy, including the specific needs of their business, the available resources, and the ever-changing technology landscape. With careful planning and execution, midsize enterprises can successfully navigate the digital transformation journey and emerge as leaders in their industries.
With this in mind, the following key strategies can help SMB executives drive digital transformation strategies.
Consider “out of the box” security and cyber insurance
A lack of adequate security policies, governance, and cybersecurity insurance can leave businesses vulnerable to lawsuits, resulting in irreparable reputational damage and even outright bankruptcy.
While many “turnkey” or “out-of-the-box” security and compliance deployments tend to be complex, SMBs can take advantage of features like two-factor authentication to make themselves more accessible than others that may not already have this capability. Advantage.
In addition, such deployments can help companies mitigate the rising cost of cybersecurity insurance, which can become prohibitively expensive if companies do not provide adequate protection against growing cyber threats such as ransomware attacks.
Increase investment to fight ransomware and other risks
A large ransomware attack can slow down business operations until it forces the victim enterprise to stop working entirely. Reasons for this include a lack of proper backup data, an inefficient and outdated enterprise infrastructure, or a complete breakdown of the supply chain.
When this dire situation occurs, many CIOs are always thinking “why don’t business leaders think it’s worth investing an extra 10% to harden their infrastructure against such threats?” Clearly, the money is definitely spent worth it.
Deploy a central dashboard for network access
Most IT managers want to work in a single pane of glass to facilitate managing privileged access. To do this, they should deploy a portal that easily lets users in and out, and without creating too much friction, adheres to the principle of “least access” and grant employees only the necessary permissions to do their jobs. Improving network security awareness among its employees should be a priority.
Create a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy
In the modern business world, data is constantly flowing between employees and external companies. Without an effective data loss prevention strategy, it can be difficult for businesses to track and control data. Therefore, another important priority is to create a data loss prevention policy, which can help companies achieve 3 main functions: comply with relevant regulations to send, receive and store protected data; protect intellectual property and trade secrets; collect information about employees, customers and Insights into how stakeholders access and interact with enterprise data.
To achieve these goals, CIOs need to rigorously classify all data so that people can trust that people are only viewing the information they should have access to while preventing them from accessing other sensitive or business-critical data. They should classify, index, and label all data in a compliant manner.
Consider mobile device management for remote workers
Mobile device management is another key area for enabling remote workers to have a better experience on their mobile devices. The reality is that these mobile systems must be tied to a single source of truth.
Going forward, we should also expect to see greater use of blockchain, containers, and microservices at the software layer to make computing and application resources more accessible to users. These technologies are not yet fully adopted by the market, but they will become more common over time as they help companies adapt to this rapidly evolving world.
More steps toward digital transformation
To start the journey of digital transformation, CIOs of midsize companies should first conduct a SWOT analysis to identify their strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O) and threats (T) to help the business better, to more accurately decide which problems should be addressed first.
Assuming there are 10 priorities to address, but the budget can only support 5 of them, running a SWOT analysis can also provide business leaders with visual visibility into this gap, potentially convincing them to increase their IT budget.
Clearly, technology is no longer just to support business, it is the main engine of business development. For this reason, the start of any digital transformation initiative should begin with business and IT leaders defining their projects, goals, and roadmaps for the next few years. Both parties must understand the other’s underlying business processes and agree on key performance indicators (KPIs). Then, work on turning those ideal KPIs into practical solutions in terms of technology.
All in all, this digital transformation challenge is not based on a future vision of market dynamics, which is the onerous problem everyone faces today. In this regard, any midsize business that lacks a coherent digital transformation strategy could face obsolescence.
