The C-Level Must Anticipate Change

The decade of the 20s will go down in history as the age in which organizations learned to position themselves as adaptable. Right at the beginning of the current decade, companies were confronted with unique IT challenges, where rapid response and adaptation to remote work set the course for business success. One hit followed the next, because after the pandemic, the phase of economic uncertainty ensured that the call for agility was once again loud, and the topic of resilience became a trendsetter. But how can companies better adapt to constant change?

Nothing is as constant as change

Every age is accompanied by new, special demands for the decision-makers who steer the fortunes of companies. However, business success has never been so closely linked to the IT department as it has been in recent years. Since users, applications, and devices are located in distributed environments, and mobility is a high priority for employees, secure connectivity to on-premises and cloud-based work environments is more important than ever. Seamless and secure connectivity to information is the silver bullet.

But there is a long way to go before organizations adapt their traditional infrastructures to this change. After all, lifting and shifting applications from the data center to the cloud is far from achieving desired flexibility. The topic of the cloud is now on the agenda of the management team and accepted as a fact in order to make a company more agile. However, there is still a need for clarification that moving applications to the cloud is far from enough.

For holistic digitization, a wide variety of forces must be bundled to ultimately benefit from the required agility and flexibility of the cloud. Today's demand is to achieve more with less IT effort. Because one thing is clear: digitization, automation, and artificial intelligence are not creating fewer data streams, but rather ever-larger data lakes that need to be organized, used, and secured. So how can the requirements for IT complexity reduction be reconciled with greater resilience to external influences while reducing costs?

Change requires courage and investment in new things

Any change requires the willingness to separate from traditional procedures and processes and break new ground. In difficult economic times, efficiency is imperative. However, in order to achieve higher performance at lower costs, the perspective must be changed. Implementing a change based on existing IT infrastructures will often fail due to entrenched processes and thought patterns.

Full integration cannot be achieved from the cloud if traditional network infrastructures are retained for the data streams to cloud environments. Transformation means breaking completely new ground to replace the existing infrastructure. To transform organizations holistically, application, network, and security transformation must go hand in hand while bringing the workforce on board. Decades of network operations cannot be deleted overnight from the minds of your technical teams. This means that a change to a digitized company must not only be considered technologically, but it also requires change management at the personnel level. “Reskilling” is the motto required to implement the topics that will be driven in the cloud in the future with the available resources. Roles and responsibilities are changing with the advent of new technologies.

Zenith Live offers an exchange of experiences

Zscaler customers have already embraced the change. While customers are at different levels of maturity of digitalization, they have all taken their first steps and repositioned their organizations by adopting the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange. Each individual customer has their own best practice story to tell about how the technology change has succeeded, and many of our customers are using Zenith Live 2023 as a platform to share their transformation journey with other organizations.

If you are looking for guidance on how zero trust runs as a common thread through the reorganization of IT infrastructures, you will receive first-hand information at Zenith Live. Impulses for the introduction of zero trust for users, workloads, or IoT and OT environments are on a packed agenda in Berlin from June 27 – 29, 2023. Register here.