The last few months have shown us that it is possible to accelerate digital transformation significantly. The COVID-19 crisis has forced companies to move extremely fast on everything from online collaboration tools to secure remote access for their manufacturing facilities. In fact, in Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report to Wall Street, the CEO stated that they’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. Their customers are embracing “remote everything” to adapt and continue operations.
The ability to move fast drives competitive advantage and can have significant impact on your company’s bottom line. However, in conversations with CISOs and CIOs we’ve seen a huge disparity in levels of preparedness and the ability to adjust operations, depending on where companies fall on the spectrum of digital transformation. For example, companies in the manufacturing sector that had already started moving to the cloud and SaaS applications and had secure remote access in place were able to pivot faster. Employees who had previously worked onsite could continue to make changes to production lines and manufacturing processes while working remotely. Vendors who provide services like asset performance management – collecting and analyzing data from physical assets within the manufacturing ecosystem for predictive forecasting, condition monitoring, and reliability maintenance, all through some sort of cloud connectivity – could continue to deliver those services irrespective of their employees’ work location.
On the other hand, companies who still relied primarily on entirely on-premise IT infrastructure faced a much more complex task, in both maintaining the infrastructure and enabling employees to do their jobs efficiently. They quickly realized they were operating in an environment that was not sustainable. Forced into a new reality without the advantage of proper systems arch ..
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