How Digital Transformation Has Impacted Security and How to Minimize Risk
While digital transformation is having a significant impact on technology—from data-driven decision-making to cloud adoption, mobility, and the explosion in Internet-of-Things (IoT)—it goes beyond just deploying new solutions. Organizations must also re-examine established business models and processes to drive innovation and better business outcomes. It’s the combined application of digital technologies and data processes to re-imagine the business for new growth that is key.
This is no easy task. Effective transformation requires a collaborative effort across departments involving partners, customers, and other stakeholders. Digital transformation imperatives increase the workload of already strained IT teams struggling to keep pace with business needs, security challenges, and compliance requirements. The integration of business systems, information technology, and operational technology that enables data-driven decision-making also poses new security challenges because these newly connected systems can also accelerate the speed and damage of attacks across enterprise networks. Going forward, security must be integral, holistic, and automated from the outset rather than pieced together over time.
To help businesses of all sizes better understand the security issues of digital transformation, Fortinet has released its 2018 Security Implications of Digital Transformation Report. This research surveyed 300 CISO/CSOs from a variety of industries across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia about their digital transformation.
What Are the Business Goals of Digital Transformation?
According to that data, a majority of organizations have already begun the digital transformation process, with 67 percent of respondents stating that their organizations started this process more than a year ago. And yet, many are still struggling to protect their infrastructure adequately.
Ultimately, digital transformation comes down to using technology and data to drive innovation and better business outcomes. Participants identified four key business goals they plan to achieve through digital transformation including, enhanced business agility, customer insights, operational efficiencies, and increased market share. To bring these changes about, organizations are looking at four key technologies:
Significantly, each of these technologies was rated by CISOs as having a “somewhat” or “extremely large” impact on business.
As organizations pursue digital transformation and adopt new technologies and business processes, security issues are on the rise. In fact, 85 percent of CISOs said security issues during digital transformation had a “somewhat” to “extremely large” business impact. Likewise, the rapid adoption of new technologies, especially IoT and multi-cloud environments, has dramatically increased the attack surface and the number of entryways into a network.
