By: Srini Addepalli

Digital transformation has brought about a significant change in the way enterprises function by leveraging technology to fundamentally alter the way businesses operate, interact with their customers, and manage their operations. The boom in hybrid work across enterprises initiated by the pandemic has shifted digital transformation from a key priority to mission critical. 

With digital transformation, businesses can gain a host of benefits, such as automating routine tasks, optimizing supply chain management, using AI-powered chatbots to handle customer service interactions, and enabling employees around the world to work together on projects in real time. The increased adoption of automation and support systems has allowed businesses to streamline processes and improve efficiencies, which in turn is leading to higher productivity, reduced costs, and better customer experiences. 

According to a study by Deloitte, companies that invest in digital transformation are more likely to achieve their strategic goals and outperform their peers. The study found that digitally mature companies are 64 percent more likely to achieve their business goals than their less digitally mature peers. Additionally, the study found that digitally mature companies are more agile and can respond more quickly to market changes.

While digital transformation and new technologies offer several benefits to businesses, however, they also present new risks that must be addressed to ensure a seamless transition.

Cybersecurity risks

It’s no surprise that one of the biggest risks associated with digital transformation is cybersecurity.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated digital transformation to enable employees, partners, and suppliers to work remotely and collaborate over the Internet using cloud-based collaboration tools. To enable remote workers, enterprise critical applications are increasingly made available in public and private clouds. IoT sensors and actuators are also connected over the Internet to collect and exchange data to automate industrial processes. Essentially, digital transformation is making company assets easily accessible from anywhere. When systems are accessible from the Internet, bad actors can try to disrupt operations.

Organizations are also embarking on application modernization by updating legacy systems to leverage new technologies, such as microservices architecture to improve performance and scalability of their systems. Though a microservice architecture provides several benefits, it can also increase the attack surface due to multiple independent microservices.

Edge computing is one of the key enablers for digital transformation for a significant number of industries. Edge computing brings computation and storage closer to the users, providing multiple benefits including superior user experience, bandwidth savings, and compliance with the regulatory requirements of keeping data local. Edge computing makes organizations’ data and compute spread across more locations than cloud computing, which increases the attack surface.

Cyber threats are a significant concern for organizations that are undergoing digital transformation. According to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures, the cost of cybercrime is expected to reach $10.5 trillion globally by 2025, so if you’re not actively looking for ways to continuously protect your business, you could be putting it at serious risk. As enterprises adopt new technologies to automate processes, they are also increasing their attack surface and creating new vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cybercriminals. Cybersecurity threats can take various forms, including phishing attacks, malware, ransomware, and data breaches. These threats can