*By Francisco Camargo
If we can learn a lesson from the pandemic, this would be reinvention. In a scenario in which the new Coronavirus has greatly affected the entire society, with major changes in habits by the population, with employees working at home, and with the market changing a lot, companies needed to transform very quickly. In this scenario, technology dependence has intensified.
And, in fact, the companies that supply IT products, with their tools, allowed a real leap in the accelerated process of Digital Transformation of the Society.
With the new normal, from small businesses, which have been digitalized to serve their customers over the internet and social networks and guarantee the delivery of their products, to large companies that, overnight, had to keep their employees at home and providing secure access and infrastructure to continue their business, have reinvented themselves. And so the digital transformation has been accelerated in a way never seen before.
After a year of pandemic and the phase of adaptation of companies and society has passed, what we saw were increasing numbers of the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing; IT infrastructure and information security and data protection solutions. According to Thales' Data Threat Report 2020, made by IDC, 47% of corporate data in Brazil is in the cloud. But we are still far from a genuine and complete digital transformation.
Data security, for example, still has a long way to go. The Thales report points out that only 53% of data in the cloud is encrypted and only 41% is tokenized. What is more alarming is that 44% of respondents said that their organizations have already suffered some kind of violation.
With the health crisis on our heels, the home office is likely to last for a long time to come - and when the pandemic has cooled down, a hybrid model should probably be introduced. Human contact with their exchange of experiences, body language, is lacking in any organization, so this year, we can expect the continued increase in demand for information security solutions, notably network ones, such as new concepts such as Zero Trust , Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, to achieve a rigorous identity verification process, an environment where only authenticated and authorized users and devices can access applications and data.
Companies, with the LGPD with its heavy fines, administered by the new National Data Protection Authority, can no longer afford to be hacked and criminals leak their data.
The digital transformation needs to continue. In addition to the migration to Cloud computing, investments in infrastructure and information and data security, the demand for artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics solutions should increase a lot. In a world dependent on the internet and networks, understanding the behavior of everything - devices, people and systems - is crucial to security. These technologies also empower companies that need to enrich customer relationships and create increasingly incredible digital experiences. And getting to know them is the only way.
With the new normal, now, not even that new, there are still many challenges. As is well known, a company is not only made of technologies, the human factor, one of the most affected by the Covid-19 crisis, does not believe much in the concern of its employers for its well-being. Research from the IBM Institute for Business Value shows that there is a huge gap between what executives think they are offering their employees and how those employees perceive it. According to the results, 22% of the people have been temporarily dismissed or permanently dismissed since the start of the pandemic.
Another point addressed by the study is that the corporate priorities of cost containment, end up leading to greater investment in technology and eventual reduction of human resources. The IBM Institute also says that increased automation, the adoption of AI and the emergence of other “contactless” activities reduce the number of people needed to get the job done.
What we can think about, in the last year, is that, yes, there has been an acceleration in the digital transformation of all organizations, which have reinvented their business models, but it is still necessary to connect these innovations to their general strategies in order to advance. And look beyond the simple adoption of essential technologies.
From the crisis what stands out is our ability to reinvent ourselves, our flexibility and our resilience.
* Francisco Camargo is founder and CEO of CLM and chairman of the Board of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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