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Today’s consumers are accustomed to smooth, frictionless online shopping – and they increasingly expect the same kind of digital experiences from their banks. Insider Intelligence found that 89% of U.S. consumers use mobile banking channels, and 70% said mobile banking is now their primary way of accessing their accounts.  

“Most people do not want to go into a bank to do banking. They want to be able to do everything on a mobile phone or a smart portal,” says Nilendu Pattanaik, Global Head of Business Applications Practice, Microsoft Business Unit, at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).  

Once they open an app, customers expect an intuitive UI rendering smooth capabilities, an interactive, immersive experience that understands their preferences, and seamless connectivity between services, whether they’re checking a balance or applying for a new mortgage or a credit line/card. One of the key priorities of the modern payment sector is to build an e-payments society with seamless interoperability among e-wallets. 

Creating a first-rate, secure digital customer experience is a top goal for leaders across the financial services spectrum, from retail banking to commercial lending, investment banking, and wealth management. But achieving success isn’t easy in a highly regulated industry saddled with legacy technology and applications. 

“Most banks have very old infrastructure that doesn’t produce the data they need, to effectively engage with customers,” Nilendu says. In addition, banks struggle to maintain customer data privacy, security, and compliance amid changing regulatory requirements.  

By moving services to the digital platform and offering the whole nine yards of end-to-end fabric of data, process, AI, apps, and industry solutions on Microsoft Cloud with native persistency and interoperability, financial organizations can analyze customer data in one place and quickly develop the responsive capabilities their clients are looking for. 

At the same time, financial institutions must maintain secure and compliant environments while preventing fraud, giving bankers more time to focus on customer needs. According to a recent Microsoft blog, organizations can use identity, security, and compliance solutions in Microsoft 365 to have visibility into their threat landscape and leverage built-in AI and machine learning in Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud to proactively manage threats and reduce alert fatigue.  

Modernization priorities 

Since legacy technology is often spread throughout the organization, bank leaders need to prioritize their goals and develop a rollout schedule for digital services. One quick win, Nilendu says, is digitizing as many paper processes as possible. Another priority involves improving services for retail customers, whose churn rate is often high. Delivering differentiated and customized services to customers is a key need for financial services institutions; AI enables this capability effectively with proactive analysis and feeds of behavioral trends monitored through machine learning algorithms. Banks can give customers a hyper-personalized experience by embedding AI into consumer applications. For example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, the world’s first copilot in both CRM and ERP, brings next-generation AI to every line of business.

“As they analyze customer data, chatbots are becoming more intelligent and capable. AI-enabled Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help financial services institutions enable faster and accurate processing of large volumes of data powered with predictability for market sentiments and better investment options or portfolio rationalization for investors,” Nilendu says.   

In addition to responding to questions with information geared to customer preferences, today’s AI-enabled apps can initiate processes, such as opening or closing an account, credit card applications, etc., during online interactions. They can also assist bankers on phone calls, analyzing customer conversational data in real-time and recommending appropriate products and services. Some banks have added an app feature that allows clients to videochat with a live relationship advisor with the press of a button. Services like these can reduce churn, decrease human error, and provide real-time guidance for the lines of businesses. 

With the help of TCS and Microsoft Cloud, financial services organizations can develop these and other digital capabilities with low-code tools, quickly rolling them out across services. 

“Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and AI-enabled apps of Microsoft Dynamics 365 powered with Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Fraud Protection allow financial services organizations to efficiently build new applications and AI services and scale them across their customer relationship management and sales platforms,” Nilendu says. “AI-enabled smart banking services are revolutionizing fraud detection and risk assessment in financial services institutions by checking financial status, document verification, and risk-related activities of the borrower, and significantly reduce the non-performing assets by enabling early detection of possible non-payment of loans.” 

Microsoft Cloud also provides robust security controls and helps financial organizations manage compliance in an industry where local rules are proliferating and frequently evolving. 

“For regional regulations, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act or the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the platform’s applications are intelligent enough to understand which specific documents and contracts are impacted and recommend actions proactively” Nilendu says.  

By securely developing the right digital capabilities, financial services organizations can provide better service to more customers, enhancing their reputation and gaining a competitive edge. Working together, TCS and Microsoft can help CIOs select and implement the technologies their organizations need for success. 

“TCS is partnering with Microsoft to create secure and compliant next-generation solutions on Microsoft Cloud catering to the needs of financial services institutions across all segments of businesses globally,” Nilendu says. 

Learn how FSIs benefit from digital transformation on Microsoft Cloud led by TCS. 

Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Financial Services Industry

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By Anand Oswal, Senior Vice President and GM at cyber security leader Palo Alto Networks

While mobile technology has been around for decades, the current generation, 5G, is increasingly being recognized for the exciting new benefits it brings to enterprises, SMBs, and public sector organizations. Specifically, when properly secured, 5G capabilities such as ultra-high speeds, high availability, massive network capacity, and ultra-low latency will support breakthroughs in digital transformation for new use cases such as private networks, network slice, and multi-access edge computing (MEC).

Organizations are drawn to 5G because of these new levels of reliability, performance, and connectivity. However, as 5G becomes how enterprises get work done, it places a greater emphasis on securing networks at all layers of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. For network operators, service providers, and equipment and solution providers, it’s no longer enough to secure voice and data across Layer 3 (network layer) and Layer 4 (transport layer) of the pipe. We must secure up to and including Layer 7 (the application layer) to ensure that business continues on in this 24/7 environment. 5G is designed to go places. Security needs to keep up.

As this technology becomes pervasive across the globe, PwC has forecast that the global economic impact of 5G will exceed $1.3 trillion by 2030.1 As organizations move to the next generation of connectivity, they will also need to confront potential new security risks. It’s critical for any organization moving to 5G to integrate security as part of the deployment from the outset—understanding that 5G networks are the business today and not simply an enabler.

Why protecting 5G is hard

5G is a major transformational technology that enables digital transformation of entire industry sectors and underpins entire economies. The proliferation of devices, the vast increase in intelligence at the network edge, and the aggregation of critical functionality at the network core bring challenges that together contribute to a perfect storm of security risk in 5G deployments.

Security for previous generations of mobile technology was not focused on detecting and preventing attacks on all layers, all locations/interfaces, all attack vectors, and all software lifecycle stages. Because 5G finds its way into mission-critical applications that affect every aspect of public and private life, it’s imperative to make sure that 5G deployments are protected by pervasive security that looks at all layers of the attack surface and provides controls to help mitigate risks. Enterprise-grade security enables organizations to take a Zero Trust approach to their 5G networks, including applying security on every level—down to the identification of every device, subscriber, and network slice.

Where are the emerging threats from 5G coming from?

Threats against 5G are likely to come from a few different vectors as attackers look to find the weakest link to gain access. 5G infrastructure involves multiple components, each of which represents an area where there is potential risk:

Virtualized infrastructure: 5G services will run on virtual machines (VMs) as well as Kubernetes-based container infrastructure in the cloud and in data centers. Threats against virtualization include denial-of-service attacks as well as misconfigurations, among others. There is also a risk of side-channel attacks, whereby an attacker is able to gain access to one piece of a virtualized infrastructure stack and then move laterally to exploit other connected elements.Network and management interfaces: At the network layer, there is a risk from attacks against signaling and data interfaces. Attacks against these interfaces can include address spoofing, message tampering, and potential meddler-in-the-middle eavesdropping attacks.Application and service threats: There are also risks from specific threats for applications and services. This includes advanced malware, command-and-control botnets, code injection, and application vulnerabilities.Radio rogues. 5G is a wireless protocol and there is risk from rogue base stations in the radio access network (RAN) that can be used to attack the network.

As for emerging threats, we see the dataplane as a potential battlefield. In the past, much of the security focus has centered on the signaling plane. However, given the expanded attack surface, it is becoming easier for adversaries to exploit vulnerabilities, API manipulation, and access controls, among others, on the dataplane, as well.

How leaders can improve 5G security

While there are emerging threats that organizations will face with 5G, there are also steps that can be taken to mitigate the risk.

Adopt Zero Trust: With a Zero Trust architecture, there is no notion of implied trust for the growing volume of devices and use cases on 5G. Instead, all devices and users are continuously validated in an approach that enforces least privilege across all the layers of the 5G stack.Embrace automation and AI: The complexity of 5G deployments and the massive device connectivity will require faster and more repeatable approaches to deploying security. 5G security will be best served with an AI-powered approach that can identify devices and enable automated policy-driven approaches to reducing risk.Take a platform approach: 5G is one part of a larger stack that organizations will deploy to enable applications. It’s critical to take a unified approach to security that considers all attack vectors. A platform approach should also provide granular application identification policies and protection against advanced threats wherever they come from.

Designing our safe and secure journeys together

5G represents a paradigm shift as organizations expand connectivity options to enable new capabilities. It also expands the attack surface with new interfaces and side-channel attack threats against virtualized network infrastructure. It’s critical to consider the risks as part of a 5G initiative and integrate security as part of the deployment from the outset.

As organizations move to the next generation of connectivity, security can’t be an afterthought. It’s imperative to build security into 5G networks from the ground up. 5G security should be deployable on any cloud platform—private or public, across multicloud and multivendor environments, as well as on the service provider’s 5G core network or at the MEC.

Advances like 5G can help us all go to places we’ve only dreamed of, but only if we work together to build in the safety and cybersecurity that will support that ride. Let’s prepare for the journey together.

1. “Health and social care to gain the most from 5G productivity and efficiency gains, which will add US$1.3 trillion to global GDP by 2030,” PwC Global, February 2, 2021

About Anand Oswal:

Anand Oswal serves as senior vice president and GM at cyber security leader Palo Alto Networks. Prior to this Anand, was senior vice president of engineering for Cisco’s Intent-Based Networking Group. At Cisco he was responsible for building the complete set of platforms and solutions for the Cisco enterprise networking portfolio. The portfolio spans enterprise products across routing, access switching, IoT connectivity, wireless, and network and cloud services deployed for customers worldwide.

Anand is a dynamic leader, building strong, diverse, and motivated teams that continually excel through a relentless focus on execution. He holds more than 50 U.S. patents and is focused on innovation and inspiring his team to build awesome products and solutions.

Data and Information Security, IT Leadership

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With the most advanced tier IV data center in Spain, and one of the most advanced in Europe, KIO Networks Spain provides a diverse array of private-sector and public-sector enterprises with Infrastructure-as-a-Service for mission-critical systems and applications. The company also offers a diverse array of cloud solutions and services.

Some of the many offerings in its growing portfolio include Disaster Recover-as-a-Service, Backup-as-a-Service, a fully dedicated private cloud based on VMware technology in a maximum-security data center, and Platform-as-a-Service offerings designed for Kubernetes-based environments. KIO Networks Spain even provides cloud services designed specifically for Software-as-a-Service companies.

On joining the VMware Zero Carbon Committed initiative, Javier Jarilla, director general of KIO Networks Spain, says he believes it has never been more important for sustainability efforts to be genuine.

Jarilla notes that high-performance is a hallmark of KIO Networks Spain, which includes a high-touch approach in which the company’s engineers are personally involved in all phases of a customer’s cloud deployment, from planning and design to data migration and post deployment support.

“The effectiveness of our approach can be seen in the number of clients who outsource 100% of their IT systems to us,” he explains.

He adds that the organization’s efforts now include a genuine and steadfast effort to do business in a sustainable way. One among many actions we are taking is operating data centers powered by renewable resources.

“It was important to all of us at KIO Networks Spain to join VMware’s Zero Carbon Committed initiative for a number of reasons,” says Jarilla. “We were one of the first data center companies in our region to achieve VMware Cloud Verified status. That was an important accomplishment not only because of our long relationship with VMware, but also because so many of our cloud offerings are based on VMware technology. The Zero Carbon Committed initiative is important to us because we believe that awareness of climate change and taking actionable steps to protect the environment and positively impact the future of the planet should be intrinsic in business.”

With this in mind, KIO’s engineers and data center experts are focused on five fundamental outputs in all data center projects, including the use of 100% renewable power as required in VMware Zero Carbon Committed. Additional goals include zero water input to combat water stress, the use of natural refrigerants in cooling systems, reuse of waste heat that is generated to supply local heating systems, and investment in environmental projects to offset any of the minimal carbon footprint that will be created through these efforts.

Jarilla stresses that these efforts have not gone unnoticed and that the intersection between sustainability efforts and business is increasingly visible, as evidenced by several long-term customers who have requested tangible sustainability targets they can apply to their own efforts.

“Our immediate goal is to be the most sustainable provider of cloud services and solutions on the Iberian Peninsula. More broadly, we want to provide enterprises in Spain with a partner who not only has made a genuine commitment to achieve zero carbon emissions in our data center operations, but who can also make those same measurable, auditable, and verifiable gains available to them. We all win when we create an ecosystem of companies intent to achieve real sustainability.”

It’s an effort Jarilla says will impact how vendors and providers are viewed. He believes that in the near future the commitment to doing what’s right for the environment will be another factor in the evaluation of vendors, their hiring, and renewals.

“In that sense,” he concludes, “the very definition of high-performance will increasingly include a commitment to be achieving zero carbon emissions.”

Learn more about KIO Networks Spain and its partnership with VMware here.

Cloud Management, Green IT, IT Leadership

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Bayer is using drones to collect farming data across 80 million acres and satellite data to predict soil moisture down to the square meter. These are just two examples in a transformation that is impacting every part of the business and all 100,000 employees, as undertaken under the helm of Bijoy Sagar, the multinational’s chief information technology and digital transformation officer.

I recently had a chance to discuss Bayer’s tiered approach to digital transformation with Sagar, as well as the IT chief’s thoughts on ramping up digital literacy in the C-suite and the determining the right time to disrupt your legacy business. On the heels of one of the largest cloud transformations in Europe, Sagar has Bayer on track for a highly digital future. Following are excerpts from that conversation.

Martha Heller: How would you describe Bayer’s digital transformation?

Bijoy Sagar: We have three tiers of digital transformation. The first is building new business models. For example, we have a new digital farming business with drones that cover 80 million acres and collect a tremendous amount of data. We have our own access to satellite data, so we can predict within one square meter the moisture and content of soil, and we use those algorithms to plant crops.

We are also collaborating with Microsoft to build an open platform marketplace in the crop world. This will allow us to develop new solutions for farming operations, manufacturing, supply chain, and sustainable sourcing,

The second tier is digitizing our internal processes, and transforming HR, finance, and R&D to support our new digital platform businesses. We have hundreds of data scientists embedded in the company, who are working on algorithms to automate internal processes. This work is directly tied to our Global Business Services strategy so that we get maximum leverage out of our scale.

The third tier, which might be the least glamorous, is to create the infrastructure to support these new digital businesses and processes. This quarter, we are kicking off an all-cloud SAP 4/HANA implementation that will bring more than 100 ERP instances down to two.

In addition to the all-cloud ERP, what architectural decisions are you making?

We are driving an architecture strategy to move everything to one single middleware platform, and we are creating an API-first ecosystem, because new digital businesses cannot run on old plumbing.

With cybersecurity, we are implementing zero trust across the board. Countries are changing their rules on personal data, and I believe the internet is heading to ‘splinternet.’ How do you build a network architecture that works in the splinternet? These architectural elements are a part of our digital transformation journey.

How is the digital business different from the legacy business?

We have disrupted our traditional supply chain model by moving it online and changing it to a subscription model. The new model is more predictable and has healthier margins. But to make a platform business model work, you must be a market leader. If you are building a platform business in undifferentiated product areas, the consumer will not be interested enough. You need to establish market primacy before you disrupt your traditional business.

What was your playbook for developing these digital businesses?

The first was getting our leadership to speak the same digital language. We partnered with a business school to take our leaders through a three-week course, so that we could have productive, collaborative discussions about digital risk and opportunity. That was playbook rule number one, and it took some time.

The second was defining the business model. Should it be a brand-new direct-to-consumer business, or should we provide digital support to our current business model? We spent a fair amount of experimentation time to figure this out.

The third rule in the playbook is to have patience. While we wanted everyone on board right way, we learned that it can take some time before digital risk and opportunity become real and relevant for people. This is where skepticism can creep in. People will think, ‘We all agreed to this strategy, but where is the return on that investment?’

Bayer just completed one of the largest cloud transformations in Europe. What advice do you have for CIOs moving from an on-prem to a cloud infrastructure?

The first is to do your homework before you start the program. If you are at a company with dozens of years of technical debt, you must transform those processes and middleware before you move to the cloud. If you don’t change your processes ahead of time, your journey to the cloud will be constantly interrupted because you will be cleaning up the mess as you go.

Second, have a clear roadmap for the older systems that will not move to the cloud. Some can be containerized and isolated, but others cannot. If you don’t have a clear plan — and this happened to us — you start to move to the cloud and then realize there were additional interfaces that you needed to clean.

Third, have a very strong relationship with your hyperscaler partners, because you will need them to solve problems along the way.

Fourth, have a very good data lifecycle management strategy. Older companies tend to have a lot of data, so they need a long-term strategy for different data types. How much time, for example, do you need to keep data for regulatory compliance and algorithm training?

And then of course, we would not have been successful in any of this without a dedicated, hard-working, and professional team.

What attributes do you look for in your senior team?

Transparency, honesty, integrity, and credibility. When they say something, will people believe them? Are they putting the agenda of the company ahead of their personal agenda? I also look for the ability to create followership, because a leader without followers is just a person going for a walk.

My senior leaders also need a strategic mindset. Are they looking at the next quarter or a three-year horizon? As you move up in in the organization, your horizon needs to expand. Finally, I hire people who are very different from me; I hire against my weakness.

What advice do you have for CIOs driving transformation?

Transformation is not about technology; it is about change. Paint the picture. Why would anyone make this difficult journey? What’s on the other end? If you don’t paint the picture, people will see only the pain in front of them, because no transformation is painless.

Also, keep in mind the ethical use of all these technologies. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Finally, remember that your biggest stakeholder is your employee base. Make sure all of those employees are excited to go on the journey with you. Convincing the board and the external world can be easier than convincing the employee base. We engineers don’t always focus on the people part of change, so we need to consciously adjust our focus.

Digital Transformation, IT Leadership

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Journey Beyond, a part of Hornblower Group, is Australia’s leading experiential tourism group. Headquartered in Adelaide, it operates 13 brands and experiences spanning the country. The company’s overall strategy is to “have a customer experience that’s second-to-none — from the moment they first engage with the company to plan their experience, to when they return home at the end of their travels — regardless of what Journey Beyond adventure you are booking.”

However, the company’s disparate technology systems were proving to be a hinderance in its commitment to consistently deliver unmatched services and experiences to customers. As its business diversified, including its own acquisition by Hornblower Group in early 2022, Journey Beyond inherited a range of disparate technology systems, including six different phone systems and an outdated contact center that was only servicing Journey Beyond’s rail journeys. The remaining brands in the company’s portfolio were using basic phone functionality for customer enquiries and reservations.

Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond

istock

“The different communication solutions were unable to provide an integrated 360-degree customer view, which made it difficult to ensure a consistent, unrivalled customer experience across all 13 tourism ventures, and any other brands Journey Beyond may add to its portfolio in the future. The absence of advanced contact center features and analytics further prevented us from driving exceptional customer experience. Besides, we couldn’t enable work-from-anywhere, on any device capability, for employees,” says Madhumita Mazumdar, GM of information and communications technology at Journey Beyond.  

These challenges forced the company to transition to a modern cloud-based communication platform.

Multiple communication solutions cause multiple challenges

Because Beyond Journey operates in the experiential tourism market, providing a personalized, seamless customer experience is essential — something its previous communications systems lacked, Mazumdar says.

“For instance, our train journeys get sold out a year prior to their launch. Therefore, when we launch a new season, there is a huge volume of calls from our customers and agents. The existing system lacked callback mechanism, leading to callers waiting in queue for as long as 40 minutes, which adversely impacted their experience,” she says, adding that there was also no way to prioritize certain calls over others.

The existing system also lacked analytical capability to provide any customer insights and it wasn’t integrated with Beyond Journey’s CRM. As a result, representatives interacting with a customer didn’t know whether the customer had traveled with the company before. “The communication between us and the customer was transactional instead of being personalized,” Mazumdar says.

Since the existing systems were very old, they couldn’t be managed remotely. In case of an outage, the company had to send a local person to rectify the on-site phone system, which could take a couple of hours. During this time, customers were unable to call Journey Beyond.

“The IVR was also not standardized across the company. As the IVRs were recorded in voices of employees from different business units, a caller had no idea they were part of the same business,” says Mazumdar.

Incoming calls to Beyond Journey’s toll-free numbers were also adding to the operational cost. “We paid per-minute on the calls received to our toll-free numbers. The high call volumes meant huge costs for us. Even if the call was hanging in the queue, it was costing us every minute,” she says.

Implementing a consolidated communications platform

To overcome the bottlenecks and drive customer engagement to the next level, Journey Beyond launched a contact center transformation, the first step of which was to establish a common unified communications (UC) platform across the business and integrate it with a new contact center (CC) solution. After evaluating several UC and CC solutions, Journey Beyond chose RingCentral’s integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platforms — RingCentral MVP and Contact Center.

“We started evaluating multiple vendors in the first quarter of 2021. The software evaluation process took three to five months after which the implementation started in August 2021. We went live in October 2021,” Mazumdar says. The entire SaaS solution was hosted on AWS.

The company took this opportunity to shift to soft phones and headsets by getting rid of all physical phones. “We purchased good quality noise-cancelling headsets, which was the only hardware we invested in significantly,” says Mazumdar. “Although we had premium support from RingCentral, we decided to learn everything about the solution and take full control over it. So, while the integration and prebuild was completely done by RingCentral, over time we trained multiple people in the team on the solution. In hindsight, this was the best thing we did,” says Mazumdar, who brought in two dedicated IT resources with phone system background for the new solution.

“Different business units within the company work differently. For instance, the peak hours for one business could be different from those of another business, which impacts how you set up the call flows. It’s not one basic standard rule that could be set up for all businesses across the company. With in-house understanding of the solution, we had full control over the solution and were able to make changes, refinements, and complex prioritization rules to it ourselves without depending on the solution provider,” she says.

Cloud-based solution delivers customer visibility and value

Connecting multiple businesses with a common communications platform to deliver consistent customer service across the group has yielded compelling business benefits to Journey Beyond.

A key advantage of the tight integration between UC and CC is the customer service operation’s accessibility for the entire Journey Beyond team.

“At a national integrated level, we now have subject matter experts in each of our experiences available to deliver unrivalled customer experience, with economies of scale. So, if one team is under duress in terms of call volumes, the call can be overflowed and picked up quickly by a consultant with secondary expertise in that brand,” says Mazumdar.

Journey Beyond is supporting its customer experience drive by integrating the CC solution with its CRM to develop omni-channel CX capabilities and build towards a 360-degree view of the customer.

“We are building up our ‘Know You Customer’ strategy, which starts with our customer service agents knowing who you are when you call any of our Journey Beyond brands,” says Mazumdar. “Callers who have travelled with us before, have their phone number in our CRM. When they call, their records pop up. The executive can look at the customer’s history with the company and the communication between them becomes a lot more personalized. The integrated view of the customer also helps to cross sell. For instance, if a person is booking a train journey from Adelaide but our executive knows that he is coming from Sydney, he can sell him another trip in Sydney.”

The other major advantage is the scalability and remote capabilities of the cloud-based platform. The solution allows Journey Beyond to run operations 24×7 with centralized administration and distributed users, working from anywhere, on any device. This has also given Journey Beyond the opportunity to recruit for talent in other locations outside the market around its Adelaide office.

Journey Beyond has also rolled out the solution’s workforce management functionality to better align agent availability with customer demand. The advanced feedback capabilities allow Journey Beyond to measure customer net promoter scores (NPS) right down to the consultant level. That NPS functionality will then be integrated into Salesforce, enhancing the 360-degree view of the customer experience.

The solution’s quality management functionality is providing Journey Beyond with a level of automation to ensure the contact basics are being completed, allowing leaders to focus on scoring the more complex or intangible components of customer engagements — delivering a recording of both the call and what is happening on screen at the same time. “Quality analytics completes the picture in terms of everything we need to see from a skills gap perspective,” says Mazumdar. Journey Beyond has deployed the UC solution to all businesses nationally. The CC solution has been rolled out at the company’ rail division and Rottnest Express while onboarding for the other businesses is in progress.

Unified Communications

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Time stands still for no one – and for no network either. If there’s one lesson that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s that large-scale change can happen without warning. If your network can’t adapt quickly and efficiently, you’ll be left by the wayside.

For example, while your organisation may already have tapped the power of the Internet of Things and edge computing (perhaps even enhanced by the speed and stability of private 5G in the quest for digital transformation, this does not automatically make you future-proof.

Watching the trends

A new NTT ebook, The Future of Networking in 2025 and Beyond, looks at the trends that are likely to have the biggest impact on CIOs and information technology in the next few years. These trends include:

1. The hyper-distributed workforce

Post-pandemic, people in many industries will continue to work in a flexible way as they move between their homes and their workplace, or sign on from hotels, trains and other locations. This workforce distribution will become more global in nature as organisations in need of specific skills look beyond traditional geographic boundaries.

Organisations that embrace this trend will be able to access a much broader talent pool and be more attractive to prospective employees. If executed well – through networks that make hyper-distributed working seamless and secure, and which support collaboration tools that make remote workers feel like part of the team – it will drive higher levels of employee satisfaction and productivity. Networks that enable immersive, high-definition collaboration will underpin the employee value proposition for organisations fighting over top talent.

2. Multicloud adoption

Migration to a multicloud architecture is becoming a critical strategy for many organisations. Deciding what to host where, while managing costs and supporting network agility, is now part and parcel of the deployment of applications and services, both on- and off-premises.

More than 90% of organisations around the world now place the migration of network functions to the cloud and cloud-first network solutions among their top three expected changes to network characteristics, according to our 2022–23 Global Network Report.

3. Evolving security

New network architectures also create new and more complex security needs, including the shift from perimeter-based security to identity-based security.

A distributed workforce presents a bigger target for cybercriminals. Organisations are moving to more centralised, cloud-based security solutions, such as secure access service edge (SASE), and a managed endpoint security model.

4. The move from software-defined to intent-based networks

Networking functions are shifting away from software-defined networking towards an intent-based approach. Through centralised orchestration and high levels of extensibility, intent-based networking allows for a more business-outcome-based network, where smart network infrastructure uses business-aligned policies and rules to control the network’s behaviour and performance – for example, increasing video capacity and priority during a CEO’s video address to all employees.

You need the right skills – whether in-house or sourced from a managed service provider – to support new, programmable and orchestrated networks that use intent-based networking platforms.

5. AI Ops-driven operations

There is increasing complexity in managing modern, highly distributed and increasingly more intelligent networks. Using AI in network operations (AIOps) gives you the essential and fast-developing tools to process and make sense of the increasingly vast amounts of data generated by modern networks.

These tools allow you to maintain and optimize your systems in line with business changes. As these tools evolve and become more mainstream, they can even help you mitigate skill shortages.

6. Sustainability

As your organisation adopts sustainability goals and you monitor your carbon footprint, it becomes crucial to integrate environmentally friendly initiatives with your information technology strategy. This extends to building management (including smart buildings) and educating your employees on the benefits of your sustainability efforts.

Data will drive organisational sustainability objectives. Access to the data needed to make decisions – and then tracking the effectiveness of those decisions in real-time – will be key to organisations’ success in pursuing their sustainability objectives.

What comes next?

Other innovative technologies such as augmented and virtual reality within the metaverse, photonic computing, quantum networking and 6G may not be mainstream – yet. But shifting to a modern, cloud-based, software-defined and data-driven network infrastructure has never been more important, according to Amit Dhingra, Executive Vice President of Enterprise Network Services at NTT.

“Networks form the backbone of our digital world,” he says. “The explosion in demand for connectivity that arose during the pandemic gave organisations a greater appreciation of this unsung superhero of modern business – and cemented the network’s role as a vital contributor to enabling computing applications and achieving business goals.”

Make sure you’re prepared by assessing the readiness of your organisation’s network for the disruptions that lie ahead.

Download our ebook, The Future of Networking in 2025 and Beyond.

Matthew Allen is VP, Service Offer Management – Networking at NTT

Networking

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The headlines read “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will completely transform your business.” But does the hype match the reality? We have been seeing these exclamations for two decades, but where are the examples? Where are the success stories? Is AI really a game changer, and does it actually apply to my business?

Every ten years it seems there is a new technology that is going to change the world, but all too often only leads to disappointment when adopting it becomes too challenging. For several decades this has been the story behind Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

However, we have now reached a tipping point with AI where the compute capacity, ubiquitous connectivity, and wealth of data can match the moment and assist business leaders to create unique competitive advantages by better serving customers, improving processes, enhancing employee experience, or reducing costs. As Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, said, “Most applications, in the fullness of time, will be infused in some way with machine learning and artificial intelligence.”

As I advise in my presentation “Building a Smarter Organization Powered by Machine Learning” there are three key focus areas successful organizations master to get value from AI: Mindset, Skillset, Toolset. This creates a flywheel we call The Data Network Effect, where you acquire more data, which helps create better algorithms, which drives better engagement, ultimately leading to happier customers, which then generates more data, and so on, and so on. This process then repeats, improving and generating more value with each cycle.

While some companies are already benefiting from this transformative impact of AI, we see others struggling. There is often confusion at the management level about the applicability and impact of AI, leaving business leaders to struggle to find the right use cases to prioritize. Additionally, navigating existing AI resources reveals a great deal of highly technical information but little in the way of business impact examples and guidance. Until now, a comprehensive list of AI and ML use cases that serve as meaningful references for business leaders simply did not exist.

The bottom line: Most companies know they need AI but have not found the answer to “where do I start?” In this blog post, I will share five actions you can take to move beyond the buzzwords and make your AI-driven digital transformation a reality that will shape your organization’s future.

Be clear on the “why”

Do not just implement AI so you can check it off your list. AI should be used to support your business strategy not be your business strategy. Do not fall victim to the analogy of “a hammer in search of a nail, that only winds up pounding in screws everywhere.” Instead evaluate your business opportunities or problems and then determine if AI is the right tool for the job.

Get alignment from your stakeholders

I always told my team and customers that long-term success with AI solutions is driven by people, not technology. As you begin to work with various stakeholders on your initiative, ensure you are effectively and continuously collaborating with them. Structure your strategy discussions around the four key areas: business, finance, technology, and science, and encourage stakeholders in those areas to weigh in on your AI project decisions.

It is also important to develop an organizational culture that empowers people across business and technical roles to become involved with your AI. Our customers who have successfully rolled out these initiatives have one thing in common: they embraced the culture of continuous process evolution and had champions who brought teams across the organization together. Creating a culture that excels in change management, celebrates failure as learning, promotes new skills acquisition, and fosters collaboration is a great way to propel your organization in this direction.

Explore what is possible with AI and get started

To help you get started, AWS has just launched the AI Use Case Explorer, a complimentary, interactive guide for business leaders and AI practitioners to conceptualize and build their applications.

With over 100 use cases and sub use cases and 400 customer success stories, this tool can help you quickly identify the right use case to get started based on your industry, function, and desired business outcome. Once you have identified your use cases, you can read about success stories from around the world and kickstart your deployment, from proof-of-concept to full production, by following an expert-curated action plan provided for your specific use case.

Do not boil the ocean … we tried that … it did not work

As an industry, we have learned hard lessons from trying to deploy monolithic data warehouses, business intelligence implementations, and analytics solutions by gathering, cleaning, and preparing tremendous swaths of data from across the entire enterprise. This delayed value, increased cost, raised complexity, and ultimately failed to deliver. Instead, focus on gathering the data specific to the use case you are implementing, and drive quickly through proof-of-concept to production and value. Then move on to the next use case and do the same thing again, expanding your data assets as needed.

Technology is not the objective, it is the enabler

True value does not come from just using a new technology, but rather from using new technology to reimagine existing processes. As you look to implement your AI project go beyond just creating an AI-enabled twin of your existing process, and instead reimagine the process using the new capabilities of AI.

As AI transforms the way we live and work, from optimizing business processes to personalizing content for consumers, I am excited about all of the innovative and impactful AI applications that can assist businesses as well as individuals in the coming years. The possibilities are endless! I invite you to check out the AI Use Case Explorer site and explore your organization’s unique path to AI success.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Tom Godden is an Enterprise Strategist and Evangelist at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Prior to AWS, Tom was the Chief Information Officer for Foundation Medicine where he helped build the world’s leading, FDA regulated, cancer genomics diagnostic, research, and patient outcomes platform to improve outcomes and inform next-generation precision medicine. Previously, Tom held multiple senior technology leadership roles at Wolters Kluwer in Alphen aan den Rijn Netherlands and has over 17 years in the healthcare and life sciences industry. Tom has a Bachelor’s degree from Arizona State University.

Artificial Intelligence

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Technology is becoming ever-more core to the educational experience, with teachers and students alike relying on rich media, deep data and analytics and cloud delivery to drive better educational outcomes.

At the same time, education has a specific set of requirements of IT that differentiate it from other verticals. Resilience and true all-day computing is required, as is massive scale as every student and teacher in every classroom needs to be working simultaneously. Security is also paramount and, increasingly, the delivery of truly rich media experiences puts additional pressure on the processors, requiring more powerful computing power than ever.

As Gartner noted in its report on the current global trends in education: “This year, the ‘hybrid world’ trend is refined to the more specific ‘digital learning environments,’ reflecting the need to think in multiple dimensions about how, when and where learning takes place. These changes include not only new additions to classroom technologies, but also those that enable this level of flexibility required to deliver instruction under nearly any conditions.”

Intel is placing the vPro platform at the centre of its efforts to address the challenges and opportunities ahead in education. There are five areas that this platform’s features will be appealing to educators in the months and years ahead:

Blended learning: The rich media experience of the classroom is going well beyond video, audio and text. The blending of these more traditional media formats with emerging formats such as VR and AR is going to put additional stress on the raw power of the processors, with the vPro platform providing a boost to the device’s ability to handle that.

Furthermore, AI is becoming increasingly important to the learning experience. Intel, in collaboration with the University of South Australia and meldCX, recently demonstrated what that might look like with the AI Playground, giving students a safe space to experiment with and explore AI. This too requires far more powerful base computing availability to enable within the learning environment.

Management: Schools are environments that involve a lot of devices, and a consistency of experience across the entire facility will be essential in ensuring that the technology doesn’t become disruptive to the learning experience. The vPro platform includes the capability to activate, configure and manage devices, with remote management capabilities, meaning that the school, or it’s managed services provider, can deliver that consistent experience across the whole campus.Security: With so many touchpoints on the network, education faces an uphill battle on security. Late last year there was the example of Newcastle Grammar School, which was infected with a virus that encrypted the entire network, compromising the data of over 900 staff and students. Further data loss meant end-of-year exams and reports needed to be re-written, and considerable expense needed to go into recovering and rebuilding systems.

The vPro platform includes hardware-level security features that provide advanced threat detection and response capabilities, minimising the attack surface across the school network and helping to ensure that vPro-powered devices are less vulnerable in the event that the network does come under attack.

Stability: One of the challenges facing schools is the wide range of devices that are on networks, with a massive number of software configurations. Driver incompatibilities across the school network make overall management difficult. To help the IT managers grapple with this, Intel has produced the Stable IT Platform Program (SIPP) as part of the Intel vPro platform. Key to this is a validation program that aims for no hardware changes within the typical buying cycle (15 months/until the next generational release), which Intel then works with key partners to deliver.Educating the Educators: Helping educators in understanding how to best leverage the technology available to them is going to be essential in maximising the opportunities that platforms such as vPro bring to the sector. With this in mind, Intel has developed the Skills for Innovation (SFI) program designed to help plan, experience, train and deploy technology-supported learning models across the education system.

While events over the past three years have brought unprecedented disruption to education systems, the response – which was to embrace technology, remote learning, and new content delivery mechanisms – has now become an opportunity. With the right technology solutions in place, that allow for a consistency and resilience to computing on and off-campus, students will be able to enjoy the benefits of an expanded, deeper, and richer use of technology to enhance their learning.

For more information on vPro, click here.

Education Industry, Intel

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Technology is becoming ever-more core to the educational experience, with teachers and students alike relying on rich media, deep data and analytics and cloud delivery to drive better educational outcomes.

At the same time, education has a specific set of requirements of IT that differentiate it from other verticals. Resilience and true all-day computing is required, as is massive scale as every student and teacher in every classroom needs to be working simultaneously. Security is also paramount and, increasingly, the delivery of truly rich media experiences puts additional pressure on the processors, requiring more powerful computing power than ever.

As Gartner noted in its report on the current global trends in education: “This year, the ‘hybrid world’ trend is refined to the more specific ‘digital learning environments,’ reflecting the need to think in multiple dimensions about how, when and where learning takes place. These changes include not only new additions to classroom technologies, but also those that enable this level of flexibility required to deliver instruction under nearly any conditions.”

Intel is placing the vPro platform at the centre of its efforts to address the challenges and opportunities ahead in education. There are five areas that this platform’s features will be appealing to educators in the months and years ahead:

Blended learning: The rich media experience of the classroom is going well beyond video, audio and text. The blending of these more traditional media formats with emerging formats such as VR and AR is going to put additional stress on the raw power of the processors, with the vPro platform providing a boost to the device’s ability to handle that.

Furthermore, AI is becoming increasingly important to the learning experience. Intel, in collaboration with the University of South Australia and meldCX, recently demonstrated what that might look like with the AI Playground, giving students a safe space to experiment with and explore AI. This too requires far more powerful base computing availability to enable within the learning environment.

Management: Schools are environments that involve a lot of devices, and a consistency of experience across the entire facility will be essential in ensuring that the technology doesn’t become disruptive to the learning experience. The vPro platform includes the capability to activate, configure and manage devices, with remote management capabilities, meaning that the school, or it’s managed services provider, can deliver that consistent experience across the whole campus.Security: With so many touchpoints on the network, education faces an uphill battle on security. Late last year there was the example of Newcastle Grammar School, which was infected with a virus that encrypted the entire network, compromising the data of over 900 staff and students. Further data loss meant end-of-year exams and reports needed to be re-written, and considerable expense needed to go into recovering and rebuilding systems.

The vPro platform includes hardware-level security features that provide advanced threat detection and response capabilities, minimising the attack surface across the school network and helping to ensure that vPro-powered devices are less vulnerable in the event that the network does come under attack.

Stability: One of the challenges facing schools is the wide range of devices that are on networks, with a massive number of software configurations. Driver incompatibilities across the school network make overall management difficult. To help the IT managers grapple with this, Intel has produced the Stable IT Platform Program (SIPP) as part of the Intel vPro platform. Key to this is a validation program that aims for no hardware changes within the typical buying cycle (15 months/until the next generational release), which Intel then works with key partners to deliver.Educating the Educators: Helping educators in understanding how to best leverage the technology available to them is going to be essential in maximising the opportunities that platforms such as vPro bring to the sector. With this in mind, Intel has developed the Skills for Innovation (SFI) program designed to help plan, experience, train and deploy technology-supported learning models across the education system.

While events over the past three years have brought unprecedented disruption to education systems, the response – which was to embrace technology, remote learning, and new content delivery mechanisms – has now become an opportunity. With the right technology solutions in place, that allow for a consistency and resilience to computing on and off-campus, students will be able to enjoy the benefits of an expanded, deeper, and richer use of technology to enhance their learning.

For more information on vPro, click here.

Education Industry, Intel

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , ,

Service level agreements (SLAs) have long been the standard operational metrics for technology services, measuring performance in areas such as systems availability or resolution time. But a new approach to gauging IT performance has begun to take hold in organizations where ensuring an optimal customer experience has become paramount.

Experience level agreements — XLAs, for short — go beyond traditional IT SLAs to focus on the end customer experience, tracking measurements such as customer or user satisfaction and sentiment. In an era marked by a laser focus on customer-centricity and increasingly digitized interactions, there is a need for key performance indicators directly correlated with the quality of the experience instead of simply the performance of the technology that underpins them.

“Organizations are increasingly using XLAs,” says Sameer Bhagwat, vice president and head of the Applications Managed Services Center of Excellence at Capgemini Americas. “The shift to the digital economy accelerated the adoption of XLAs as companies have been eager to gain better insights into the customer experience.”

IT outsourcing providers were the first to make a shift toward experience-based performance metrics, incorporating quantitative and qualitative data to measure service outcomes and user experience. But the XLA approach can be valuable for CIOs eager to communicate the business value of what IT contributes to the organization. 

“IT leaders often get consumed with details that are important, but hard to consume,” says Rahul Mahna, managing director of managed security services at EisnerAmper. Metrics such as the number of incident tickets or trends in systems alerts or alarms may be meaningful within IT, but can be largely noise to those working outside the walls of IT.

“We find it better to position IT as solutions that enable the business to operate and support the goals of the firm,” Mahna says. “Positioning an IT department as a key component of all management functions that are strategic in nature can produce far better results in maintaining the IT organization through difficult time periods.”

The evolution from SLAs to XLAs

SLAs have reigned supreme in measuring IT performance for decades. And they were largely sufficient for what was, for a period of time, a back-office function. “Historically, IT teams operated separately from business users and established their own set of SLAs primarily focused on IT metrics such as availability and resolution time,” Bhagwat explains.

With the shifts in customer and employee digital needs, attitudes, and behaviors, a siloed approach to IT performance management no longer makes sense. Traditional SLAs provide little insight into business performance or user satisfaction. With technology now intrinsic to the end user experience, IT metrics should evolve to reflect that.

“This is where XLAs come into the picture,” Bhagwat says, adding that they can be a key foundation for changing how the business value of IT is measured and reported across an organization.

In addition, XLAs “provide an incentive for all of the parties involved — internal groups and outside vendors — to cooperate and do the right thing for the business to achieve the rewards and not just suboptimize the end-to-end process to optimize the portion of the process they are responsible for,” says Andy Sealock, senior partner in the advisory and transformation practice at West Monroe.

A measured approach to customer-centricity

Knowing the value of XLAs is one thing; being able to devise, measure, and track them is another. With decades of reliance on traditional SLAs, it can be challenging to rethink IT performance in this potential abstract way.

Still, it’s very much possible to measure experience for both external customers and internal users of IT systems. And with employee experience proving to be an important driver of overall business performance, it’s fast becoming essential to do so. The vast majority (85%) of respondents to a recent IDC survey said that improved employee experience and engagement lead to a better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and increased revenues.

External XLAs tend to align with key business goals related to customer engagement, customer retention, and conversion rates. Internal XLAs more likely center around employee satisfaction scores, response times, adoption, or engagement. Rather than measure uptime of enterprise applications alone, an organization might track employee satisfaction with the remote work experience. Another XLA might focus on optimizing the employee onboarding process to ensure employees can hit the ground running on day one.

“Internal service management tools can be used to track XLA performance,” explains Bhagwat. “IT leaders can then use XLAs to have a pulse on the user experience and overall customer satisfaction.”

In most situations, XLAs will not replace SLAs, but complement them to provide a more complete picture of customer or user experiences — and IT’s contribution to them.

“SLAs should be retained even if XLAs are introduced, in part because without SLAs an organization will lose important visibility into operational performance and the direction that can provide towards root-causing issues,” says West Monroe’s Sealock.

XLA best practices

XLAs are, by definition, boundary crossers, cutting across functions, processes, and technologies. “Removing the siloes between business and IT is one of the challenges in implementing XLAs,” says Capgemini’s Bhagwat.

Other issues include determining who owns the XLA, defining which metrics are the most meaningful to organizational success, establishing a change management plan to ensure XLA adoption and acceptance, and creating a robust XLA enforcement plan.

To address these and other issues, organizations seeking to implement XLAs should heed the following best practices:

Establish clear responsibility and accountability. In many cases, a business function such as marketing or HR may own the metrics associated with an XLA, but IT must have a seat at the table and work closely with business stakeholders on expected outcomes and potential issues.

“These past two years have consistently proven that there’s no longer a separation between IT and the business,” Bhagwat says. “The two functions must work together for an organization to thrive in today’s evolved experience economy.

Map the user journey. By charting out user journeys through IT services and solutions, organizations can identify various user types and needs, uncover key pain points, identify gaps in services, and create a baseline for improvement and optimization.

Focus on meaningful metrics. Settling on metrics that best represent the desired outcome can be tricky. They need to both “represent tangible value generation for the business and be clearly and directly — even though not completely — driven by the performance of the parties,” Sealock says.

Be transparent. Experience data should be shared widely and often among teams, employees, and external partners. This creates greater visibility into issues and encourages greater collaboration.

Emphasize carrots, not sticks. When working with external parties in particular, it’s beneficial to set up gainsharing or other rewards for XLA achievements rather than punishment for XLAs misses.

“We have seen XLAs used most effectively when they are structured as a reward to the participating vendors for the achievement of business objectives, not as penalties for not achieving business objectives,” Sealock says. “The problem with the latter scenario is that few, if any, vendors are willing to take on the financial liability of incurring penalties for outcomes that are outside of their direct control.”

Get IT staff on board. SLAs are familiar to IT veterans. They remain the gold standard for measuring technical performance. While the IT organization should understand that SLAs are not going away, IT professionals will need to be brought up to speed and on board with XLAs. Ensuring a successful shift will require IT leaders to invest in evolving IT’s mindset toward continuously measuring and improving the user experience, in addition to ensuring availability and issue resolution.

Digital Transformation, Employee Experience, IT Leadership, ROI and Metrics