New techs, new challenges

As digital technologies work to transform business processes, they give rise to new security and compliance issues that must be addressed on the fly

India’s enterprise space is undergoing a digital transformation and this process is likely to further increase in the coming year. Digital transformation combines individual digital technologies such as social, mobile, realtime 360-degree analytics capabilities and cloud to deliver integrated business solutions.

With the forever dropping smartphone prices and the launch of mobile broadband technologies like 3G and 4G, it is but obvious that the business services will also undergo a paradigm shift. The service providers have now started to introduce newer and innovative services and products to cater to the evolving demands and requirements of the enterprise segments.

Today, the segment is dominated by four key technology trends, which are likely to influence customers’ ICT investments in the next few years. Thanks to the growing acceptance of bring-yourown-device, the enterprises have to become more open for devices brought by employees into the system. While there are obvious benefits like faster responsiveness of the workforce and hence the organization itself, enterprises do need to take additional steps to address information security issues that arise out of these developments.

Technology Trends

Possibly the biggest trend in the industry is that it is witnessing a convergence of IT and mobile applications as more and more employees want to access business applications on their mobile devices as well. It is a well-recognized fact that BYOD goes a long way in enhancing the produc- tivity of employees, especially that of the mobile workforce. It also leads to an increase in responsiveness of the employee to end customer and partners. Nearly 52 percent of the Indian CIO-respondents in an Ernst & Young survey, for example, state that they are considering mobility as a platform to enhance portability by capturing data in real time. However, as noted, while BYOD brings in agility, it also opens up new security challenges.

Secondly, businesses in India are finally beginning to see the value of social media in engaging with customers, seeking feedback and also in developing new ideas for services. Some large enterprises have also started using social media to engage with their employees, who are spread across multiple locations.

Enterprises have also been warming up to cloud. More and more businesses