| |FEBRUARY 20219by groceries and food deliveries etc. With customers moving to the virtual world more traditional busi-nesses like kirana stores and heavy industries (capital goods) too have now a digital front for their business-es. Living under the lockdown also helped us realise the potential of digital healthcare where medical consultations can continue online. We have already witnessed the significance of digital tools in our dai-ly lives and it will only have incremental impact go-ing forward, but in order to create a differentiating factor for organisations, the key would be master the ability to choose and make the right investments in technology. Business leaders and CIOs in particular, have a significant role to play where they will have to create a clear road map to leverage the return on investments and to ably use their skilled talent. The digital transformation impacting all walks of life also means that we will have to create a new skills ecosystem to meet this new demand. By some esti-mates these unlocking of the digital economy could create up to 65 million new jobs by 2025. It would be paramount to have a macro and core understanding of the latest in technology. Artificial Intelligence is gaining semblance and looks to be ready to evolve further into mainstream usage. Having your busi-ness servers and storages on cloud already looks like a thing of the past as cloud native architecture gains further steam. A deep understanding of evolving technologies such as blockchain, edge, networking option, sensors etc. will be critical as they gain more focus and business usage. Staying current and rele-vant is very important. Skills that were once niche are becoming mainstream and more importantly the shelf-life of these skills are much shorter and there-fore need constant upgrading. The fact is technologi-cal learning and upgrading of skills will be a contin-uous process in 2021 as it was before and during the pandemic and among these few IT skills will remain crucial in the coming years. With the new normal setting in and most of the workforce working from home, IT landscape is sus-ceptible to the ever-rising cyber-attacks. This is a real concern not just because of the typical business vul-nerabilities, a successful infiltration from a cyber-criminal could shut down a plant's operations or start making equipment produce faulty products without the knowledge of managers, among other things. Business leaders not only have to invest in secure products but people who have the skill to anticipate and identify such threats and act with agility to pro-tect the organisation from unforeseen cyber-attacks. We believe, both ethical hackers and traditional cyber security specialists with expertise in Security Infor-mation & Event Management, Security Orchestra-tion, Automation and Response, Cloud Access Securi-ty Broker etc. will have a role to play.Data is one of the most critical aspects in today's business environment and thus, ensuring its correct usage becomes paramount. More and more compa-nies are aspiring to enable swift & remote decision making. Data capture, its storage and judicial usage in carrying out data analysis for gaining accurate business insights is paramount to succeeding in the new normal. It is important to have a robust IT Infra-structure to generate incremental amounts of data and use it such that a single version of truth prevails for everyone in the organisation. Identifying the right kind of skills is one thing, but building an ecosystem that produces a large pool of skilled workforce is a much bigger challenge. The significance of this is not lost on today's business leaders. For example, we are seeing a sizable growth in resources allocated to build the right skills within large and small organisations across all sectors. Training and retraining of the workforce are also get-ting the necessary support within the HR function. The importance of industry-academia collaboration to sustain the flow of skilled workforce is also getting mainstreamed which is vital to ensure we wedge the demand-supply gap in quick time. We already know that the technology workforce is moving from back-seat to the front seat in almost every sector. Acknowl-edging and investing in this shift is going to make all the difference in 2021 and beyond. THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IMPACTING ALL WALKS OF LIFE ALSO MEANS THAT WE WILL HAVE TO CREATE A NEW SKILLS ECOSYSTEM TO MEET THIS NEW DEMAND
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