Last week I had the pleasure to hear Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella share his thoughts about the power of digital technology both for business transformation and business resilience. This was the opening session at Envision, which is a new series of leadership gatherings where Microsoft, Accenture and Avanade are bringing together global business leaders to discuss and share perspectives on digital disruption and digital transformation.

In one of the sessions presented by Microsoft and Accenture, a phrase was used that totally resonated with me and the work that I do, “digital fortification makes businesses more resilient”. I love this, and it is a foundation block in the digital transformational thinking which I want to expand upon.

Many people are talking about how much digital transformation they have implemented in the last year, much of it forced upon them by Covid, for example Christophe Beck President of EcoLab said in one of the sessions that they had achieved two years of transformation in just two quarters. This is fantastic, after all, every organisation’s greatest asset is their people and technology is truly transforming the way people work.

I am also aware of many organisations who rapidly deployed staff to work from home due to the pandemic and now think that they have ticked the digital transformation box! Clearly there is more to it than that and now is a time for businesses to harness all the benefits that our new ways of working are delivering, and to continue on the journey, ensuring that things are done properly and with appropriate advice, the right tools and of course appropriate security.

Digital fortification means that we all need to enhance our CyberSecurity, however the challenges are around how to safeguard our data and our digital assets and how to react quickly to security breaches in an increasingly distributed working environment. Raise the question in your boardroom, “How are we protecting ourselves from bad actors?” what answers do you think you’ll get?

Security is a major question for us all and Covid has not slowed down the bad actors (if anything it is the reverse). As you digitise working environments, whether that be remote workers or operations that include customer interactions, the potential for vulnerabilities and the CyberSecurity threat gap widens. Security has to be the foundation in all of this, from the device endpoints, the methods of identification, or the cloud-based apps you deploy, your ability to manage events and incidents in a clear and concise way is intrinsic so that you can respond quickly, manage the situation, and mitigate disruption.

Microsoft invest $1bn a year on CyberSecurity, they have 3500 engineers that monitor 8 trillion events every single day. Some of those numbers are hard to put into perspective, but in my own 70-person business the Microsoft Azure Sentinel platform dealt with 10.2m events in the last 7 days and raised 21 actionable alerts for our security team.

When it comes to industry leading security solutions there is no singular vendor that can help you with 100% of your security and it is important to remember that everyone’s business environment is different, but the Microsoft 365 security platform is very impressive, and it integrates with on premise technology too.

There are three key things to think about with your Security posture:

1) There are vulnerabilities in not being on leading edge technology – your on-premise technology stack is vulnerable, so it is important to consider the cost from a security perspective of not investing in digital transformation.

2) There are vulnerabilities of not transforming the ways you work, and it is essential that in all new systems and processes you fully embrace security by design. Your teams need the right tech capability, the right ways to work and it has to be secure. Security cannot be a separate thought; it has to be baked into everything that everyone does in your business.

3) Your CyberSecurity hygiene factor is critical – you need to have the right hygiene factors in the way people operate, the systems they use and the places they work from.

A key to resilience in your organisation is the ability for everyone to work freely, from anywhere, whilst staying secure. I was delighted to see the inter-related threads talked about in Envision where the technology and tools available are clearly allowing us to transform, to increase productivity and to meet today’s business needs whilst intelligently enhancing CyberSecurity capabilities.

Rob May

The Envision series will continue into 2021, the next episodes are on February 16, April 20, and June 15. You can join the conversation with other global business and thought leaders from across the globe by registering here: https://envision.eventcore.com/

Written in paid partnership with Microsoft.