In recent years, digital transformation has become prevalent almost every industry, changing the way how organizations deliver services and value to their customers. Digital transformation requires cross-departmental collaboration in combining business-centric ideas with rapid application development models. Typically, digital transformation marks a thorough consideration of how a business leverages technology, people and processes to essentially change business performance.

There are a much less number of companies that don’t rely on digital applications as most organizations across diverse industries have some kind of digital transformation initiative in place. That is driving the adoption of cloud infrastructures and application services. Now, with advanced technologies, companies are entering the next wave of digital transformation by automating most of their networks’ parts.

While IT and business advanced initiatives like agile and DevOps to improve speed to market, security considerations were often left behind. Gartner expected that 60 percent of digital businesses would suffer major service failures by 2020 due to the inability of security teams to manage digital risk.

Also, the race to digital transformation has made companies’ cybersecurity challenge even more daunting. Fortunately, modern cybersecurity can assist in stimulating digital transformation. However, to understand the right balance between digital transformation and security, which is critical, IT professionals must first comprehend the elements of digital transformation that create both opportunity and risk.

Cybersecurity for Digital Transformation

According to IDC which predicts a digitized economy, by 2022, where over 60 percent of global GDP will be digitized by and growth in every industry will be driven by digitally advanced offerings. Thus, in order to operate effectively, business leaders are making interpretations of how the future digitized state of their organizations will look like and how their business models will evolve over the next few years.

It is significant to make such kind of strategic planning with must involving decisions like building and shifting certain applications to the cloud, streamlining on-premises IT, upgrading supply chains to be more automated and autonomous, and adapting the corporate culture to be more digitally native and responsive. Digital transformation initiatives should also focus on the cybersecurity approach strategically.

In a survey of 1,500 executives by Marsh & McLennan, most of them, 79 percent, reported cyberattacks and threats as one of their organization’s highest risk management priorities in 2020.

So, businesses must place cybersecurity as strategic precedence, if the foundation of the business is established on digital technologies, the customer experience is shaped by digital interaction and employee productivity is a result of omnipresent access to applications and data.

Automation Paves Ways for Digital Transformation

While the primary purpose of any digital transformation process is to boost workplace productivity, automation takes center stage and can make a big difference for businesses. Automation is not just about replacing humans with robots but it is about making the tasks easier that humans carry out so that they can focus on other purposeful work, optimizing workplace productivity eventually.

However, most organizations grapple with a proliferation of AI, machine learning, and automation tools to choose from, while simultaneously wrestling with a complicated, rapidly changing technology landscape. In this way, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools have continued to evolve, and performance has significantly improved. Despite these, there is still a great deal of hype and misperception on its actual capabilities in driving digital transformation for organizations.

In its recent report, application delivery vendor F5 Networks observed more consistent use of automation in the deployment pipeline than in previous years. Automation of application infrastructure, network, application services, and security is nearly equal across the board at nearly 40 percent for survey respondents, the report found. It also revealed that most companies are choosing open source and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools for automation over proprietary vendor solutions.