| |September 20189transformation. Beyond cosmetic designation redesign the new age Chief Digital office (CDO)/Chief Innovation officer (CIO) drives, digital transformation as a cen-tral biz transformation program -mostly deployed with a direct CEO level sponsorship.Given that, there now exists a strong strategy for digital trans-formation, have you thought of the strategy of implementing it? Or is this still a piece-meal, budget constrained environment that, the CIO/CDO is forced to adopt - part of cloud, some of mobility, a little of analytics and so on. Under the inevitable time constraints to deliver the business outcomes, the short-cuts may create a more com-plex infrastructure, application and data spread problems that are difficult to handle and control in the long run. This might be in addition, to business island's di-rectly taking the decision of pro-curing and adopting applications (like a packaged SaaS product) with limited oversight of techni-cal product and lifecycle support long term considerations.Well, all said and done, it must be the CIO/CDO who has to imple-ment the technology adoption in a way that business operations and continuity is ensured, not with-standing the complexities in environment (as depicted the previous para). The planning of digital transformation requires certain key additional ingredi-ents to consider in order to ensure business continuity. With the adoption of tech-nology, the collateral of cyber threat surface increases and con-sequently means larger vulnera-bility. It is a well-known fact that as digital adoption in enterprises explodes - data compromises at some point of time and loss due to cyber-attacks and ransomware with gigantic balance sheet neg-ative impacts. This loss is in ad-dition to the loss of brand image and customer churn. Hence, all digital transformation initiatives today have to, by design, build in an on-going resilient risk man-agement and mitigation plan for this.Creating a technology road-map which includes failure of IT resources and recovery is a must for all CIO/ CDO's. The ability to recover from a failure without im-pacting business majorly is resil-ience. As the digital transforma-tion drives business outcome, an IT resiliency plan is a fundamen-tal ingredient to transformation plan. For example, recovering to the minutes before a ransomware attack state is what IT resilience is meant. Or what if the primary site has a partial outage, will it be possible to bring up the busi-ness system in minutes or hours. What if AWS, Azure has a failure (which happens), right? Do you still use tape, cartridge and ro-botic arms for backup with a fire-proof safe at remote place? Are you keeping the backup of your enterprise mobility devices? How much big data adoption increases your application availability and storage need? In an IoT imple-mentation, in case the controllers require regular feed to/from cen-tral server, have you thought of resilience otherwise, it could be catastrophic? Are you doing edge intelligence or centralized intelli-gence? And there are several more questions you should be answer-ing and validating your digital transformation plans in face of IT resilience.In summary, unless you have the IT resilience included in your digital transformation plan, the digital transformation will be a dangerous endeavour to take on. It takes a minute to sink the whole organization and CIO/CDO will be held responsible by the business. By investing in IT resilience plan, a CIO/CDO is making secure busi-ness insurance along with your digital transformation journey against both natural disaster and cyber break downs calamities. It is an assurance of business conti-nuity while ensuring biz trans-formation in digital times. WITH THE ADOPTION OF TECHNOLOGY, THE COLLATERAL OF CYBER THREAT SURFACE INCREASES AND CONSEQUENTLY MEANS LARGER VULNERABILITYAmajit Gupta
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