The future is now
Turn Disruption Into Opportunity With Digital Resiliency
By Jen Felch, CIO & Chief Digital Officer, Dell Technologies
Something notable, but not wholly unexpected, happened during this last year of immense change. Organizations that were already undergoing digital transformation found that their ability to quickly pivot to a new working structure was accelerated by the digital foundation they had already laid. What would normally take years to accomplish was handled in a few short months, and CIOs saw how a digital-first approach not only allowed them to handle disruption more adeptly but also take advantage of new opportunities.
While we all hope to never see the likes of a global pandemic again in our lifetimes, the reality is we have no idea what to expect. But no matter what the next wave of change brings, the best-prepared organizations are already thinking digital-first and reimagining how to differentiate with technology.
The CIO is the Tip of the Spear
The CIO plays a crucial role in this journey as they are the digital navigator that guides the adoption of new and more efficient technologies to increase agility and reduce cost. Moving forward, they will continue to support increasingly digital workspaces at scale, create ongoing data-driven value, and deliver new capabilities and customer experiences that drive better business outcomes.
Now is the time for organizations to optimize for ongoing success – specifically by increasing agility with hybrid cloud flexibility and enabling teams to work and learn from anywhere. The CIO is at the tip of the spear that is trailblazing digital transformation. They are responsible for guiding organizations to embrace agile and hyper-efficient models that make it possible to keep up with these rapidly changing business requirements.
When a company leads with a digital-first strategy, they have the ability to react more quickly, strategically, and at a lower cost to turn the unexpected into opportunity, and it’s the CIO’s job to help position the organization for success and whatever comes next.
Building Digital Resiliency
To build digital resiliency, organizations must work and learn from anywhere with a digital workplace, increase agility with hybrid cloud flexibility, create new value by innovating with data, and achieve cyber resilience with intrinsic security.
Creating a digital workplace that enables users to work and learn from virtually anywhere with the productivity, personalization, and security they need is vital to digital resiliency. User experience and productivity must remain top of mind as users expect faster, more secure, easier-to-use devices, collaboration, and access to all the tools they need to get their jobs done. The new reality of work is that IT is managing more dispersed people and applications than ever before, and the need for modern devices and a flexible and responsive IT environment cannot be overstated.
Hybrid cloud flexibility gives organizations more choice, flexibility, and predictability in their technology consumption. It provides a consistent experience across public and private cloud and the edge with infrastructure optimization, and it enables the business to scale up or down as needed for capacity changes – for unexpected events like new technology, growth, or even what we’ve experienced in this last year. Hybrid cloud flexibility allows an organization to consume technology in a way that’s simple, aligned to the needs of the business, and consistent across all clouds and edges.
Innovating with data gives organizations a competitive advantage. Those who can more rapidly turn raw data into business insights and create better customer experiences are better able to adapt in these uncertain times. Organizations must be able to accommodate the exploding amounts of data in hyper-distributed locations by laying the technological foundation to set them up for success. Companies need relevant, complete, and real-time data to win and retain customers, streamline supply chains, and thrive.
Achieving cyber resiliency with intrinsic security can also enable and accelerate innovation. As data becomes more dispersed, the potential attack surface of an organization also increases. Most traditional security approaches with multi-point solutions bolted on for each security challenge are simply too complex to scale to massively distributed architectures. Security must be embedded into everything an organization does. When the underlying technology is designed with security built in, the need for quick fix “band-aids” decreases while organization’s security posture increases to be more proactive, efficient, and seamless.
Diving Deeper at Dell Technologies World
Now is not the time to get hung up on getting back to “normal.” It’s time to embrace the accelerated opportunity before us to become digital-first organizations. While what’s next is never clear, organizations can confidently say that IT will be central to their digital transformation and the CIO will be at the helm. I invite you to join me for the online Dell Technologies World session Building Digital Resiliency During Times of Constant Change on Wednesday, May 5, from 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM CT, where I’ll talk more specifically about what organizations need to focus on to be ready for the digital future, as well as discuss how organizations can partner with Dell on their digital journey. I hope to see you there.
