1 Introduction

The Digital Transformation of Business affects virtually all industries. It enables organizations to deliver products and services that are better aligned with the needs of their customers, more effectively and more efficiently. Through this transformation, services and service levels are becoming more important, not only from the perspective of customer satisfaction, but also as a source of increased revenue.

This digital transformation involves, but is not limited to, the exploitation of connected sensors and devices, the IoT (Internet of Things), cloud services and the massive amounts of data that these make available.

Digital Transformation means that organizations need to reinvent themselves. They must implement faster go to market and become more adept at identifying and seizing new opportunities. To achieve this, they need to replace long release cycles for products and services with an approach using continuous improvement. Furthermore, this must be achieved while preserving and improving on security. The accessibility of these new services and the impact of their being compromised means that security cannot be added as an afterthought, security by design is essential.

The IT systems that most organizations depend upon to run and administer their business are built using mature technology and processes. However, while these traditional systems and processes ensure a good level of security, many are not suitable for the wide range of data types, the volume of data as well as the rate at which this now needs to be ingested. This has led many organizations to adopt a variety of new technology stacks aimed at addressing these challenges, but which lack some of the fundamental security characteristics that are required to manage the news risks. In addition, this variety adds to the costs of management and the challenges of compliance.

What is needed is a common IT platform that is suitable to meet the new requirements of digital transformation as well as supporting the traditional IT systems of record. This means one enables the development of new applications that can support these new challenges while supporting the traditional security objectives of:

• Confidentiality: data can only be accessed in ways that are authorized.
• Integrity – the provenance of data is known, and changes can be audited.
• Availability – data is available to authorized entities from wherever and whenever it is required.
• Compliance – access to the data can be shown to be compliant with laws and regulations

However, as well as involving changes to the IT technology, this transformation requires changes to the organization and business models. These are explained in detail in Eight Fundamentals for Digital Risk Mitigation in the Age of Transformation - 71302 - KuppingerCole.