Security, seamless connectivity key to building a digital-first business

The coronavirus pandemic has forced all organizations to fast-track their digital transformation journey. As a hybrid model for work seems to be the future, with employees working remotely and from office, using digital tools to make the interface seamless for them as well as the customers is key.

The fifth episode of a paneldiscussion on Virtual workplace 2.0‘Building a secure, digitally-connected workspace: An office without boundaries’, organized by Tata Communications Ltd, looks at how business owners can harness the power of technology to ensure a secure environment and quality performance from their teams.

Today, every company realizes that a digital-first business must be top priority. An integrated multi-service platform allows you to look at the security and connectivity from one dashboard to bring about the best solution for your organization. “The building blocks for a digital-first business are agility, harnessing data to create a new competitive advantage, establishing digital models for every part of the value chain, creating a framework for 360 degree security. Each one of these steps are interlinked,” said Kaartick Ramasubramanian, regional lead, solutions engineering, Tata Communications.

A secure business environment is indispensable as organizations prioritize remote work, but building standards for it is challenging. “After the pandemic, we all know that remote working is going to be a reality now. The BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sector needs to very carefully identify processes that can be handled remotely, come up with standards and protocols to set up remote workstations and invest in multi-factor authentication for security,” said Khursheed Muzaffar, chief information security officer, Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd.

The other major roadblock is the network, which could be different even within a city. “Now, when we have a crunch in network which everyone is using, you will have to prioritize providing internet connectivity for employees, standardization of network and ensure that the bandwidth is being put to the right use,” said Vishwa Ratna Nigam, head-innovation and chief digital officer, Equitas Bank.

Under the hybrid model of work, technology can be used to enable a productive and secure work environment so that the worker can become a part of this digital change. “The initial drive in the first few months of the pandemic was to get the workforce do what they were supposed to and the emphasis was on business continuity. But as the idea of work-anywhere is settling in, CIOs and CSOs are aware that this situation is not going to change. You need to have both a secure infrastructure and an application architecture. There is a huge demand for applications to move to the Cloud,” said Pramod Agrawal, chief technical officer, Automation Anywhere.

For organizations looking to enhance employee engagement and productivity, a major obstacle is to embrace this new work culture and not go back to pre-covid times. “First, we need to realize that work from anywhere is actually good for us. In the last few months, levels of productivity have witnessed an increase and employee retention has gone up. Work-life balance has improved, impacting efficiency and cost of operations, making it a fantastic option,” said Naveen Gullapalli, head, global operation, Novartis.

An increasing number of organizations are looking at making work-from-anywhere a permanent feature. At Novartis, for example, the estimate is that over 50% of its workforce is expected to take the option. This model also allows companies to attract talent from anywhere, which is great for companies as well as employees.

Organizations must ensure good customer experience even when employees are working remotely, which can be another challenge in sectors like banking and financial services where the customer is at the core of operations. “One big change is that people have started interacting with screens more than people. This will help standardize service delivery to a large extent for customer service,” Nigam of Equitas Bank said.

“When a banking customer looks at me, he can see a fan or some lights in the background, which create an impression on the customer and that needs to be controlled using technology, say, with a virtual background,” said Muzaffar.

So, what constitutes an ideal virtual workplace? “Cloud, business continuity and a workforce which is empowered for this are the main takeaways from the past year,” said Agrawal.

“As a community there have been a lot of learnings from this. We have the technologies, but the experience across softwares and devices needs to be seamless. Despite everything, we still have drops and reliability issues with virtual working,” Gullapalli added.

In the new workplace where we are so reliant on technology, the way forward is connection and simplification.

“The lens through which we look at technology has changed. But we are still talking about access as an issue. It is all about simplification and the right connect with people and teams over remote collaboration. You do not want employees to be using five different tools for five different things. Can you make it with one tool from a collaboration perspective? That’s the kind of thing you must ask,” said Ramasubramanian.