Digital Transformation: When transformation is no longer transformational

We’re probably all a bit tired of hearing these two words together, and yet Digital Transformation is still a hot topic. Most successful organisations have spent the past 10 years finding ways to reimagine their traditional ways of working, strategically digitizing processes, products and people to provide efficiencies in response to what has been continuous, and rapid, change. But there is one thing about change we can rely on – its constant. Organisations are always needing to transform, so what happens when transforming is no longer transformational? When transformation is business as usual. A new normal. An expectation.

After surveying over 2000 CIO’s,  a recent report from Gartner suggested that if enterprises wanted to thrive amid constant disruption, they would need to embrace composability.

‘The main objective of composability is to make the user experience seamless by having workflows jump between applications without requiring the user to manually travel between apps—taking an entire tech stack and making it a singular, fluid work environment.

Composability removes the need to deploy and oversee separate workload-specific environments. The very nature of this software methodology allows companies to create and reconfigure systems without having to move physical assets. Based on the various workload needs of an application, companies can set up computing, storage, and networking resources on-demand.’

– Walkme

You may see it as another industry buzzword, and maybe it is, but a composable business strategy can deliver organisations an agile model, across processes, technology and people. It allows organisations to adapt and ultimately accelerate what’s working – and stopping what isn’t.

Consider all the journeys across an organisation from user to application, consumer to purchase, machine to data. Many are made up of autonomous steps, tech stacks and people all weaved and orchestrated to deliver an end result. There are hundreds of these journeys, all underpinned by the orgnanisations technology, processes and people. If something in the chain isn’t working (think of the popular game show The Weakest Link), it’s critical the organization can adapt and change quickly, addressing only the weakest link, ensuring the whole journey is as efficient as possible. This orchestrated modularity allows us to recognise the sum of the parts whilst considering the role each component plays. This is exactly why Xalient has developed a modular based, Zero Trust framework.

Xalient’s Zero Trust Framework is built on the premise that the journey from user to application is underpinned by a number of autonomous technology components including:

• Identity and Access – recognising and authenticating user and device identities.
• Secure Transport – connecting users and devices to apps and data over a flexible, affordable, high-performance, encrypted network, via constantly optimised traffic pathways.
• Secure Service Edge – deploying a secure web gateway to the cloud, bringing users and devices closer to applications, whilst maintaining the user and device security posture and app experience, regardless of location.
• Applications and Data – segmenting apps and workloads to protect against cross-infection, in the event of viruses, and ensures users only have access to the apps and data they need.

However in the user to application Zero Trust journey these modular assets are orchestrated to deliver a seamless experience, and is an example of a composable end-to-end journey. It enables the right tech stack to be engaged to solve specific challenges, however the end-to-end integration of each module delivers the end-to-end seamless experience within an overall Zero Trust strategy.

In our next blogs we’ll take a deeper dive into each of these autonomous components and the part they play in that Zero Trust Journey. In the mean-time why not find out about our June Summit where you can learn from some of the World’s leading brands including Kelloggs, WSP and Sunbelt, and their Digital Transformation journeys – find out more here.