Digital technologies have spurred innovation and brought a sweeping transformation in the way businesses and government organizations administrate day-to-day operations. It’s altering our lives, bringing people closer whilst it has opened up new avenues for today’s organizations to add value to business, increase productivity, and grow at a faster pace. According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), new technologies spend was expected to increase by 13% compound annual growth rate to $2.4 trillion per year between 2016 and 2020, led by 42% in the IOTs of the total spend. That’s not surprising. Investments in digital technologies raise productivity. In the 2018 report, Digital Transformation Initiative, Maximizing the Return on Digital Investments, co-written by Accenture and the World Economic Forum, the research highlights that the productivity of organizations investing in new technologies is three times higher.

The CEO and CIOs are all engrossed to the digital journey

It’s fascinating to find out how a modern-day CIO and the CEO is ever so deeply engrossed in nurturing a nimble digital ecosystem. With technology advancements offering vivid possibilities in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data analytics, IOT, cloud computing, blockchain to name a few, the C-level managers, across the world, have upped the ante in the pursuit of building a concomitant digital ecosystem. Business efficiency is at the core as the CIO and CEO seek to deliver robust business models and improve customer and employee experience.

Why are organizations building a digitalized ecosystem?

We live in a much interconnected world, where data flows like water between humans to machines and machines to machines interactions. As this data traverses through a network of devices and applications, endless opportunities have emerged for modern enterprises to transform themselves into a more agile, efficient, innovative business ecosystem. This is possible due to digitalization. With massive streams of data created on a daily basis, the Digital ecosystem has helped businesses to build disruptive business models and overcome one of the biggest business barriers — lack of real-time business information. Indeed, AI, Machine Learning, Big Data analytics, cloud computing, IIOTs, open-data platforms have opened several possibilities for businesses and government organizations to make wiser, better and faster decisions by converting raw-data into more actionable input. It would be fair to say that digital technologies have metamorphosed data into a new-economy fuel.

Digital Ecosystems are revitalizing business enablers

Innovation — Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning crunches and interprets a huge volume of structured and unstructured data from various sources to provide real-time business insights

Efficiency and flexibility– Cloud computing offers scalability to support IT infra and datacenter’s ever-growing requirement for an on-demand capacity

Automation and Cost reduction: Robotic Process Automation enables the business to automate day-to-day tasks and processes, increases accuracy/reduce human error, and saves time

Predictability: AI is enabling new-age organizations to assess social media trends and buying patterns to foretell accurate demand

Agility: Payment gateways, aggregator apps, and e-commerce applications incentivize trade and commerce by bringing together buyers and sellers whilst offering a customized platform.

Managing digital trust is at the core of the digital economy

Things that looked surreal a few years ago are now a reality thanks to the new-age digital economy. Digital technology advancements, in turn, have enabled businesses, communities, government organizations to clock rapid economic growth and prosperity. Further, digital social channels have allowed leaders, brands, communities to forge and blossom personal and professional relationships. Center to all these developments, innovations, and creativity is an availability of real-time data. It’s the data that enables us to make intelligent and quick decisions whilst it has removed the information disequilibrium. Several business models are centered around personal data. It is for this very reason, ensuring the integrity, privacy and sagacity of data will be the cornerstone for managing digital trust.

Digital transformation necessities revitalizing the security fabric

The digital transformation which encapsulates Machine to Machine interactions and process automation of day-to-day tasks is fraught with perils though. With stacks of interconnected devices, sensors, nodes and consoles gyrating inside the digital ecosystem, the pervasive threat to digital infrastructure arising due to inadequate authentication and authorization has also amplified. Needless to mention that the digital journey can stumble if security and risk management leaders and the CIO’s objectives don’t resonate to revitalize the security fabric of the digital ecosystem.

Adopting Digitalization Responsibly by Protecting the Digital Identities

When an organization embraces a gamut of digital initiatives, one notable challenge that transpires is both the number of technology platforms and endpoints with which they interact begins to multiply. The expanding digital infrastructure widens the risk surface. The complexities arise as the end-users and automated processes built to enable the digital journey necessitates the creation of identity types. These identities are then provisioned for a variety of services and functions. However, if there is no scrutinizing of what these digital identities have been doing with the transmitted data inside the digital ecosystem, the very purpose of building a digital experience will never fructify. A seamless digitalization transformation commands data governance, data privacy and data integrity.

Protecting privileged identities is an answer for an uninterrupted digital transformation

In the digital age, the security of digital identity, more importantly, Privileged Identity must be sacrosanct. As these identities are spread across multiple layers of end-users, applications and devices, the sanctity of data could be compromised easily in the absence of adequate security safeguards. Undeniably, securing Privileged Identities are at the core of the Information Security framework. However, there is a growing disconnect between the way organizations scale IT infrastructure amidst the rising pace of digitalization. With ever so high number of data breaches surfacing every year due to compromise of identities, it is quite evident that enterprise security and risk management teams struggle to manage and protect the rising number of privileged identities. This growing disconnect has sparked off a fresh round of debates among security leaders for addressing one of the most burning issues from an IT security standpoint: How to protect privileged identities in a heterogeneous digital ecosystem? As a result, Privileged Access Management, a practice to monitor, control and manage privileged identities is fast gaining prominence to build a robust security framework. A robust security solution like ARCON Privileged Access Management easily integrates with a wide variety of technologies to build a fortress around digital identities. It provides a Unified Governance framework with a secure gateway that ensures every access to critical systems happens only on ‘need-to-know’ and ‘need-to-do-basis’ and implements the principle of least privilege.

ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behaviour Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real-time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.