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Is Your Business Ready for a Digital Twin?

October 23, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The idea of simulation and modeling has been around for a long time. But, the rise in the use of advanced analytics and the Internet of Things (IoT) today have evolved this into the concept of the digital twin. It’s the idea of having a virtual digital model of a physical system that is used to make better decisions about the real world physical system. Digital twins are usually intertwined with sensors and include a two-way interaction between the physical and digital twin. While it’s one of the hottest concepts in technology, is your business really ready to take advantage of one?

Digital twins are utilized in three main ways:

To prototype and iteratively test and design what the product could be before it’s produced in addition to design optimization
To monitor the performance of the physical asset and intervene in the operation if needed
To collect data off of a fleet of a particular type of product or asset (called aggregate twins) and create an approximation of those devices, which could support things like predictive maintenance

Digital twins can range from being pretty simple asset twins to increasingly sophisticated and ambitious twins. They are used across various industries for a number of different use cases. In healthcare, a patient digital twin is used to monitor how a patient could respond to different treatments, and if intervention is needed. More sophisticated twins are being used to model cities, taking into account traffic, transit, power consumption, and pollution.

While it sounds great, implementing one isn’t always straightforward. There are a number of elements to consider: What is the problem and is a digital twin a fit? Is it sustainable? Is it an expensive version of what could be a report? Is it real-time? The bottom line is that you need to start with a sound business case that looks at the value of having a digital twin—typically driven by the use case.

In the case of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One, the use case is pretty straightforward: create a simulation that mimics the real track experience and acts as a digital twin to maximize the benefits of limited on-track testing time. The purpose of the simulator is to help the team set up the car to run faster, to rapidly advance car development, and to increase the team’s ability and speed to fine-tune advancements during the season. It is also used to find out where the team needs to improve, where its competition is the strongest, where the team has weaknesses, and the performance areas to advance. Additionally, an F1 simulator also provides a driver’s first opportunity to test new design features and understand how they will affect performance before going on to the track.

Once you determine the purpose and the value-add to your digital twin, you can then establish a “data to decisions cycle”, which ultimately means picking and choosing the data you want to capture from the twin in order to gain the business value and success from it.

Data is at the core of Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One’s simulation work. The team needs to quickly filter through the data to identify the optimal setup among millions of combinations. This involves interactive visual analytics, data science, and what-if scenarios to optimize car balance and setup parameters. Target values and parameters are tracked throughout the season. When performance in a particular race is sub-optimal there is more headroom to optimize the configuration for the next race.

If you are a technology or business leader, you can gather a vast amount of data in a short period of time, visualize it, and run machine learning algorithms to derive insights and patterns that enable teams to collaborate and make more informed decisions faster. This improves the odds of getting ahead in a very competitive business world. Digital twins produce better results and deeper insights for operational optimization. The end result? Better processes, insights, and optimal business action, giving you a competitive advantage of your own.

Digital twins are one of the hottest concepts in technology, but is your business really ready to take advantage of one? Click To Tweet

Learn how Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 has implemented a digital twin to help maximize its on-track performance. And, listen to our TIBCO Talks podcast episode for a deep dive conversation on digital twins with TIBCO’s global CTO, Nelson Petracek, and Doug Henschen, the vice president, and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

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Overcome the Most Common Roadblocks to Digital Transformation

October 10, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Your digital business is constantly changing: customer demands are shifting, as are the means of production and operation. To support effortless experiences, new business opportunities, and real-time intelligence, your business needs to be agile. However, transforming into a digital business that enables agility is not easy. You have a lot of legacy architecture and a culture that’s just not ready to change. Fortunately, you now have two resources to help you overcome any roadblocks you might be facing in your digital transformation efforts.

Both Gartner and TIBCO have recognized the most common roadblocks to digital transformation and have laid out manageable road maps of how to overcome them. Using both the Gartner report (talked about below) and the TIBCO solution (the TIBCO Responsive Application Mesh blueprint), you can become a truly agile, digital business, regardless of your current technology debt or any other hurdle that may be preventing you from becoming a digital organization.

To begin, Gartner explains three application architecture trends that you can use today to facilitate transformation, modernize your application portfolio, and deliver new capabilities. The three modern application architecture trends that they recommend you adopt to help transform are:

Mesh App and Service Architecture (MASA)

First, you must build a mesh app and service architecture (MASA) that provides fundamental architectural capabilities that enable applications to multi-channel experiences. It responds rapidly to digital business demands such as agility, shared business capabilities, security, and resiliency. As digital business depends on a flexible application portfolio that enables effortless experiences, supports new ways of doing business, and makes the most of new technologies, now is the time to implement a MASA in your organization.

API Platform

Your organization needs APIs that enable access to the services that implement your business capabilities and data. However, It is not enough to just create APIs; you must also manage and govern your APIs and pull them together into a platform of shared business capabilities. You need a full lifecycle management API platform and strategy to design, build, publish, advertise, and manage your APIs.

Event Processing

The fast pace of modern business requires that organizations improve their real-time awareness and decision making. Event driven architectures have proven to be a differentiator for those businesses that have taken the time to learn and deploy them. They deliver intelligent insights gleaned from event processing solutions detecting and responding to patterns in business operations, often in real time. Event processing is an old concept that has never really taken off in many enterprises, mainly due to its apparent complexity. However, embracing this type of architecture in a phased way can greatly speed up your digital transformation efforts.

TIBCO Can Help You Transform into a Digital Business

According to Gartner, to build business agility and transform into a digital business you need to start with three modern application architectures: MASA, an API-platform, and event processing. These provide the foundation for rapid innovation—one that is API-led and event-driven to maximize connectivity and take action on events in the business as they occur in real-time.

To help your organization take advantage of these modern application architectures, TIBCO has devised an easy to use blueprint, called the TIBCO Responsive Application Mesh. This blueprint can help you efficiently build a technology foundation that will enable agility, regardless of your current infrastructure and technology debt. Meaning – if you use the TIBCO Responsive Application Mesh, you don’t have to throw away what you already have. We will help you transform no matter what roadblocks you may face.

To support effortless experiences, new business opportunities, and real-time intelligence, your business needs to be agile. Click To Tweet

Digital businesses are constantly demanding new application capabilities. Thus, application leaders should work to modernize their application infrastructure with the latest trends to enable these capabilities. Read this report from Gartner and learn about the TIBCO Responsive App Mesh to learn how you can implement modern application architecture trends to facilitate transformation regardless of your current situation.

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5 Strategies for Shifting to a Digital Commerce Mindset

August 7, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

COVID-19 has and will continue to have a massive impact on commerce. For many, the effects have been devastating. Retail sales are down close to 20 percent in the United States, with many categories suffering even more precipitous drops.

The retail environment is likely changed forever, meaning more online shopping, further declines in mall and department store traffic, and a greater reliance on gig workers to shop and deliver. But these changes didn’t just start with COVID-19. Many of the trends we’re seeing today are an acceleration of those that were gaining steam prior to the pandemic.

Now more than ever, retailers must invest in customer-focused strategies and digital-centric technical capabilities. Here are a few strategies worth exploring:

Channel Blurring. Go beyond dual-channel capabilities to eliminate the idea of rigid channels altogether. The purchase process from awareness to selection to completion to service is best delivered across platforms and touchpoints so customers no longer see distinct channels—instead the focus is on engaging and buying.
Predictive Engagement. Predictive engagement provides relevant and personalized interactions between a business and its current and prospective customer. Combine full contextual awareness of location, real-time behavior, inventory, and competitive pricing with past purchases and demonstrated preferences to generate a highly appropriate “next action.”
Experienced-based Commerce. Ironically, while we’re experiencing an almost unimaginable change in how we’re engaging with stores and restaurants, the ongoing importance of curation of digital and hybrid experiences will likely emerge as one of the most dominant characteristics of post-pandemic commerce.
Seamless Ecosystems. Even when commerce returns to somewhat normal, consumer demand for on-demand goods and services will continue. Therefore, a combination of new insight into the availability and location of inventory and the ability to seamlessly connect to the means of delivery will be a dominant aspect of a longer-term digital commerce ecosystem.
Demand-driven Supply. A final aspect of the shift that we’re experiencing reflects the need to more closely match the investment in supply with the realities of customer demand. Digital commerce requires a higher level of availability for more items combined with a more sophisticated ability to personalize merchandise.

Now more than ever, retailers must invest in customer-focused strategies and digital-centric technical capabilities. Click To Tweet

Required Capabilities for a Next Generation of Digital Commerce

Each of the strategies described above relies on a common data journey:

Accessing the sources of data that define the digital landscape and interconnecting each device, system, and application that plays a part in that ecosystem
Managing and refining data into an intelligent data layer that provides governed access to the right information in a form that is more easily understood and used
Applying the power of data insight and discovery to understand the past, predict the future, and closely monitor and adapt to what is happening in real time

To ensure a successful shift to digital, retail organizations must support capabilities across this entire data journey.

To learn more about how TIBCO can help your organization shift to a digital-first business design, read this whitepaper on the future of retail and how to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic more relevant and powerful than before.

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How to Build Resilient Supply Chains with a Digital Nervous System

July 20, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Supply chains, which increasingly rely on global connections, have had a number of disruptions over the past 12 months, requiring greater resiliency and adaptability.

Buying intentions and stock inventory can change overnight, and many supply chain systems may not be ready for rapid shifts in purchasing patterns. And even the most intelligent companies with the most sophisticated analytics may not be able to keep up without real-time data.

This ever-changing market landscape has created a need for greater collaboration and increased information flow along the entire supply chain. Lack of cross-function support, limited workforce engagement, and lack of robust technology make it hard for organizations to achieve their supply chain goals.

Lack of cross-function support, limited workforce engagement, and lack of robust technology make it hard for organizations to achieve their supply chain goals. Click To Tweet

To solve these challenges, your organization needs a smart, real-time, data-driven supply chain management solution that delivers: real-time visibility, continuous data, streaming artificial intelligence, early warnings, risk predictions, advanced analytics, and collaboration. All the elements needed so your company, suppliers, and your entire supply chain can adapt quickly to today’s changing conditions.

That said, think of this intelligent supply chain like a “digital nervous system” that combines leading technologies including: visual analytics, data science, streaming apps, data virtualization, metadata, and integration. All of these tools work together to create a seamless, intelligent supply chain, making full use of all the data generated.

How to Build Resilient Supply Chains with a Digital Nervous System

One example of an intelligent supply chain nervous system made possible by TIBCO is Bayer Crop Sciences. Its approach implemented enterprise-scale data integration, data virtualization, 14,000 visual analytics users, steaming image analytics, and AI and edge computing to drive precision planting and farming.

This enabled the company to:

Share collaborative analytics for added agility and flexibility in precision agriculture use cases
Blend image data from drones with traditional sources (soil, irrigation, and fertilization) without moving or altering source data
Synchronize and replicate high-scale data integrations between crop profiles and its CRM

Join us for this webinar with RTInsights to learn how you can implement TIBCO Connected Intelligence solutions to build a resilient supply chain with a digital nervous system. Also, read the paper on TIBCO’s Supply Chain Nervous System for a more in-depth look.

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A Powerful Problem Loan Management Solution for Lenders in the Digital Age

July 2, 2020 CRM News and Info

Everyone in the banking industry is following the news, you see the statistics and the predictions. There is no doubt that there are going to be problems in your loan portfolio. Smart lenders should be asking:

Have my policies and procedures kept pace with the changes of the last decade, and am I prepared to execute them in a digital space?
Is my staff assembled, aligned, and trained to work out problem loans according to best practices and the chosen strategy of the bank?
Are we equipped with technology to enable efficient problem loan management at a high quality?
I know problem loans are coming, what should I be doing right now?

To help answer these questions, Crowe has developed a Problem Loan Management Framework.

In our recorded presentation “Identify and Address Problem Loans With Technology and Foresight” we discuss these three different areas in detail:

Identification
- Problem Loan Management
- Covenant Testing
- Annual Review
- Financial Statement Receipt and Review
- Delinquencies Review
Assessment and Monitoring
- Loan Documentation Review
- Site Visits
- Financial Condition Assessment
- Borrower Conversation
- Security Perfection Assessment
- Collateral Valuation
- Pre-workout Agreement
Strategy
- Bankruptcy
- Foreclosure/Liquidation
- Restructure/Return to Lending Group
- Exit (Borrower driven or loan sale)

Plus, we look at the kind of people, policies, procedures, and technology that can help.

To address the issues outlined in our Problem Loan Management Framework, we have developed the Crowe Problem Loan Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365. This solution makes it possible to stay on top of, and even be proactive with, distressed borrowers in good times and bad, including:

Deferral tracking
Watched asset reporting
Reserve calculator
Relationship monitoring
Action item tracking
Touchpoint reminders
Problem loan onboarding

Take action now to prepare for a wave of problem loans.

With the right guidance and technology, you can take care of your borrowers, your organization, and your books. Crowe services and solutions can help you find and address your credit portfolio risk.

Request more information and assistance for managing problem loans

By Ryan Plourde, Crowe, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Gold Partner

www.CroweCRM.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

All Def Digital Strikes Deal To Land New Series For Television

June 24, 2020 Humor

All Def Digital and Sky-backed producer Jupiter Entertainment have struck a deal to adapt the hip hop and comedy platform’s digital media series for television.

The two companies have struck a partnership to adapt All Def Digital’s library of content, including music formats The Crate and Bar Exam.

All Def, which was founded by Russell Simmons, was acquired by Culture Genesis, the LA-based digital studio whose investors include rapper T.I, Grand Hustle Records’ founder Jason Geter, NBA star Baron Davis and venture-capital firms Betaworks and Mucker Capital, last year.

Culture Genesis co-founders Shaun Newsum and Cedric J. Rogers (below) will work closely with Jupiter Entertainment President Patrick Reardon, and Vice President of Development Chris Spry on the adaptations. Reardon, in particular, has experience in this space, working on projects such as Time: The Kalief Browder Story and #FreeMeek during his time as head of television and film for Roc Nation.

In addition to The Crate and Bar Exam, projects currently being adapted include comedy series Dad Jokes and the hip hop music format Traffic Jams.

The Crate is a format challenges music producers to create a beat on the spot with the use of random objects. It gained global notoriety when Doritos launched a beat-making competition with Busta Rhymes called Blaze The Beat (see below). Bar Exam challenges hip hop artists to guess the performer of a song based on a few bars of music.

The deal was brought together by independent producer for Jupiter Michael Lappin and Sean Kilbane on behalf of Culture Genesis.

“All Def and Culture Genesis have a history of producing authentic content that promotes Black culture,” said Reardon. “There’s a clear and immediate need for more quality programming that amplifies the voices of diverse creators. Through this partnership we hope to create a wealth of content across all platforms that supports that mission.”

“Having a TV production partner of Jupiter’s caliber is critical to the continued success of our vision of elevating both our amazing talent and our content,” added Newsum. “We couldn’t ask for better partners as we bring our slate of hit shows to TV.”

Source: Deadline

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API Success: The Journey to Digital Transformation

June 16, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Application programming interfaces, or APIs, enable external and internal consumers to seamlessly access, interact, and engage with a company’s data and functions. APIs essentially bind different parts of a value chain together even though the underlying components may be based on different systems, technology, or supplied by different vendors.

The use of APIs can be easily seen in the marketplace through the web of interconnectivity developing between popular SaaS and PaaS providers, along with partners and the developer community. For instance, the customer service management platform Service Now can interact via APIs with the customer master data in your NetSuite customer relationship management (CRM) system so when a customer calls your organization, all of the caller’s correct details are readily available. You know who they are and you don’t keep them frustrated on the phone for 10 minutes while you type in all their information.

APIs make the needed information readily accessible, promote the rapid development of new capabilities, and even greatly reduce the amount of rework required should you switch to a different vendor or datasource. Or, another example of the power of APIs is how your corporate travel site can “talk” to Trip Advisor (via APIs, of course!) to help manage your itinerary, share feedback on the hotel or airline, and help you sync travel plans with colleagues or customers.

The Power of APIs

When companies have access to data and functions via APIs, it empowers them to make smarter decisions, improve customer satisfaction, drive innovation, and identify new areas of business. In fact, many businesses have identified APIs as their largest enabler of digital transformation strategies. According to Harvard Business Review, Expedia.com, for instance, generates 50% of its revenue through APIs and eBay, 60%. The benefits of using APIs are many, including enabling new digital products, reducing time to market, opening new partner opportunities, enhancing customer experiences, and preparing for the future.

To reap the full benefits of all that APIs have to offer, your organization’s API strategy should reflect the key business drivers and goals upon which you are focusing in the market today. Say, for example, you supply a network of large companies with components. And they use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system like SAP. Ideally, you would provide them with API endpoints so their order management system can talk to your order management system without any manual intervention, leading to automation and a lot of time saved. But how do you build an API strategy that will enable this digital transformation?

Developing a Successful API Program

Developing an API program is a significant undertaking that can have a profound impact on your organization. Because it can drive new products, new innovation, new customers, and new revenue streams, it’s not a task to take lightly. Even though APIs are important, many companies still struggle. We have found that it’s not enough to just start using APIs. In our experience, organizations that establish a comprehensive API strategy, whether the APIs are being consumed internally or externally, are the most successful.

For starters, you need to plan your API strategy like it’s a new business. That includes:

Aligning to the business goals
Identifying supporting technology
Measuring performance
Engaging your ecosystem

Aligning the business goals with the API program is important, as is identifying the appropriate use of technology and supporting architectures. KPIs are for measuring the success of the API program and ensuring that it is meeting the goals of the business. And engaging the ecosystem is important, whether this is for external API consumers or even internal API developers. It is important to know and understand your audience, what capabilities they need, how to support this audience, and how to build an effective communication plan for your program.

As you can see, building a successful API program is not just about technology. You need to define the foundation of your API program in terms of its strategy, monetization approach, target audience, goals, etc. And then evaluate and find an appropriate technology upon which you can execute the API lifecycle. Think about it. It’s like any other product that you produce. You wouldn’t launch a new product without a go-to-market strategy, would you? APIs are the same. They need nurturing and support to grow into their full potential.

In his new, easy-to-use book, “API Success: The Journey to Digital Transformation,” API and tech expert Nelson Petracek sets out the criteria, questions, and thought processes you need to consider to build and deliver a successful API strategy that is technology-agnostic. Petracek draws on his decades of customer use cases and interactions to layout a guide that your company can use to create and run a successful API program.

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The TIBCO Blog

Apache Kafka®: A New Approach for Providing Digital Communication

May 8, 2020 TIBCO Spotfire

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The world is changing fast and it seems like no one can keep up. But, the one aspect that has remained constant is the need for communication. Application communication and integration are critical capabilities when it comes to rapid business change and adaptation. However, effective communication can be a challenge, especially in the digital world. That’s why we welcome new technologies like Apache Kafka that can help you create a truly digital enterprise that can quickly respond to business changes with a tightly coupled communication infrastructure.

Apache Kafka: A Newcomer to Messaging Communications

One of the newest players in the field of messaging communications technology, Apache Kafka, was developed by LinkedIn in 2010 and later donated to the Apache Software Foundation. Kafka was originally designed to provide a distributed approach to streaming logs for data processing. The software provides a common framework for streaming real-time data feeds with a focus on high-throughput and distributed workloads.

Kafka has become the de-facto standard for open-source streaming of data for stream processing. Since its launch, Kafka has been rapidly adopted by businesses to build a digital nervous system for stream processing and event-driven architectures. The platform provides scalable, high-volume, persistent data distribution in real-time. Kafka’s new open-source approach allows users to deploy messaging communication technology quickly and simply. By leveraging free, open-source software, developers can stand up Apache Kafka nodes and stream data for numerous application types in minutes.

Do More with Kafka & TIBCO Messaging

Scaling application layer deployments to enterprise-level volumes and integration points can be a challenge. With the support of TIBCO^® Messaging, your enterprise can implement a wide-scale adoption of Apache Kafka. This combination gives your developers, managers, and enterprise architects the core functionality of Kafka with the support of TIBCO.

Users can now fully integrate Kafka into their enterprise nervous system. TIBCO’s support for Kafka allows organizations to expand their existing usage of the system for added integration points, simpler stream processing, and native support for streaming analytics. Together, TIBCO and Kafka facilitate a new approach for better integration and enterprise messaging.

Get started with Apache Kafka with this whitepaper to learn how you can adopt the platform into your enterprise nervous system for integration services, data analytics, and data distribution for stream processing.

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The TIBCO Blog

Google and Facebook: Digital ad market is avoiding coronavirus disaster

May 1, 2020 Big Data

(Reuters) — Reports of the demise of the digital advertising market due to the coronavirus outbreak appear exaggerated as the tech giants dominating the online ads business, Google and Facebook, said this week they saw early signs that the worst could be over. Their remarks countered Wall Street expectations of a devastation of the market as hard-hit brands in travel and autos, traditionally big ad spenders, have pulled marketing dollars and as small businesses, the lifeblood of big tech companies’ businesses, have shut down.

At Google’s parent, Alphabet, first-quarter total revenue grew 13% from the previous year to $ 41.2 billion, while Facebook‘s ad sales rose 17% to $ 17.44 billion. They issued first-quarter results that factored in only two weeks of the widespread stay-at-home orders in the United States. But both companies also reassured investors that revenue for the first three weeks of April showed signs of stability, following lower revenue in March.

Alphabet, Facebook, and Snap credited direct response ads, or ads that solicit a direct action, such as clicking a link, using a coupon code or downloading mobile games, for propping up sales during the pandemic. Such ads help advertisers get the most for their money by encouraging immediate response from audiences and are easier to measure, since brands can see how many people clicked on a link or took an action after seeing the ad.

Brand advertising that is used to spread awareness and name recognition for a company, but whose effectiveness is often more difficult to measure, was harder hit. Alphabet said on Tuesday brand advertising declined on YouTube in mid-March, when the pandemic accelerated in the United States.

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Ad prices drop when marketers lower their spending and demand for digital ads decline, and direct response advertisers have been taking advantage of that, said David Campanelli, chief investment officer at ad agency Horizon Media. “This will likely continue through 2Q as we expect pricing to remain low for the foreseeable future,” he said.

Facebook executives said on Wednesday they expected direct response advertising to continue to drive ad sales and that the coronavirus pandemic only reinforced the importance of the strategy. Still, Facebook was cautious, given economists are forecasting a global downturn in the second quarter and “if history were a guide, would suggest the potential for an even more severe advertising industry contraction,” said David Wehner, Facebook’s chief financial officer, during an earnings call.

Alphabet warned that the second quarter could be difficult because the early April trends may not hold. Snap, which owns messaging app Snapchat, said it would shift resources on its ad sales team to serve direct response advertisers better, due to the success of the category.

But Twitter alarmed investors on Thursday as it pointed to a 27% decline in ad revenue as a sign of what the company has seen so far in April. Twitter’s ad business is heavily event-driven and “the suspension of major sporting leagues in March will have hurt its bottom line and will continue to do so as long as social distancing and stay-at-home measures remain in place,” said Jasmine Enberg, senior analyst at research firm eMarketer.

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Securing Remote Working In The Digital Age

April 27, 2020 BI News and Info

Part 15 in the “Controls and Risk Management” series

With multiple benefits for both employers and employees, remote working was already quickly gaining traction, and the current situation is further accelerating this trend. To be able to continue operating in geographies where confinement is being enforced and enable employees to keep their jobs, many organizations have opted for a remote working approach.

A sustained trend with multiple benefits

This trend started many years ago, though, with the emergence of the technology that allows employees to access organizational IT systems from anywhere in the world – as they would if they were within the four walls of the company.

As a matter of fact, the number of people who work from home has increased by 91% in the last decade, and by 2028, it is expected that 73% of all departments will have remote workers.

It’s also undeniable that this is driven by quantifiable benefits with estimates that average business could save $ 11,000 per remote worker and 65% of respondents claiming that they are more productive in their home office than at a traditional workplace. But it’s not just about productivity or costs, as people who work remotely at least once a month are 24% more likely to be happy.

As a result, I can only concur with Jennifer Christie, head of human resources at Twitter, when she stated, “We’ll never probably be the same.” People who were reticent to work remotely will find that they really thrive that way. Managers who didn’t think they could manage teams that were remote will have a different perspective. I do think we won’t go back.”

But there is also another side to the coin. In a previous blog (Internal Control – From Necessary Evil to Operational Excellence), I referred to ISO31000’s definition of risk management, where a risk is the effect of uncertainty on objectives, be it positive or negative. Well, there are unfortunately also threats associated with the positive aspects (benefits) of remote working. These will need to be addressed by the organization.

Going back to statistics, a concerning finding by a study from OpenVPN shows that 90% of IT professionals believe remote workers are not secure. And over 70% think remote staff members pose a greater risk than onsite employees. Note that this is a perception, of course, but it still needs to be addressed – especially when considering the fact that there has been a 10-fold increase in cyberattacks in some regions at the moment.

As a result, organizations need to target the root causes of both external threats to deter both the cyberattacks and the insider threat. IT professionals are concerned that internal actors may pose a significant level of risk to the organization’s IT infrastructure.

Effectively addressing these challenges

Managing system accounts and ensuring the correct authorization assignments

By putting in place a sound identity and access management process, companies could more easily manage access to enterprise applications, be they cloud or on premises, via user-role- and attribute-based access. Companies could further implement multi-factor authentication to improve security. And to remove the burden of excessive login procedures, simply putting in place single sign-on would help them achieve this objective without additional workload for the employees. Effortless security, in a way!

Protecting the applications that run your business

A company’s internal systems make an appealing target for hackers, as they run business-critical processes and house sensitive corporate information that can be used for cyber espionage, sabotage, or fraud. To prevent data breaches, organizations could monitor business applications for suspicious activities (i.e., anomalies) and attacks. They could also analyze the business transactions themselves for fraudulent or unusual patterns. By correlating insights, companies could take a proactive approach and identify threats early.

Addressing data protection and privacy concerns

In some cases, users need to access sensitive data in the course of their daily tasks. To protect them from unwelcome suspicion as well as to protect the organization’s crown jewels, companies could implement data-masking tools so that unnecessary information is hidden by default but can be revealed on demand. And of course, data logging will help cyber investigations if a data breach does occur. Data logging not only helps to identify the culprits but also to understand the scope of the breach and to notify impacted parties and regulators in a timely manner.

These three processes create an additional security layer for the organization, but this would nevertheless not be at the detriment of the employee. Indeed, these processes would run in the background and not create additional workload for the employee. It’s a win-win situation, I believe, since all parties would feel better protected.

Finally, I’d like to leave you with a quote from SAP’s chief security officer, which I find extremely relevant as I believe it really represents our mission statement: “SAP is not in the security business, but in the business of securing our customer’s business.”

What about you? Has your company changed its security policies and procedures to adapt to recent events? I look forward to reading your thoughts and comments on Twitter @TFrenehard

Improve the implementation and operation of your SAP solution by exploring how SAP Next-Generation Support real-time channel Schedule an Expert can help you in this process.

This article originally appeared on SAP Community and is republished by permission.

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Digitalist Magazine

Tag Archives: digital

Is Your Business Ready for a Digital Twin?

Overcome the Most Common Roadblocks to Digital Transformation

5 Strategies for Shifting to a Digital Commerce Mindset

Required Capabilities for a Next Generation of Digital Commerce

How to Build Resilient Supply Chains with a Digital Nervous System

A Powerful Problem Loan Management Solution for Lenders in the Digital Age

All Def Digital Strikes Deal To Land New Series For Television

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