Supercharge Digital Initiatives: How To Drive Efficiency With the Right Tools in Place
Streamlining your digital initiatives with the most appropriate tech tools and secure processes.
Investment in digital advancement is now critical to power business growth and drive productivity. John Peluso, chief product officer at AvePoint, outlines how your organization can empower digital initiatives with the enhanced tools and security guardrails needed to succeed.
In recent years, organizations across every industry have undergone a significant digital transformation to maintain growth and power success in a hybrid environment. According to McKinsey, technology transformations are driving tangible business value, with more than two-thirds of respondents saying change efforts have increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved employee experience.
But digital advancement goes beyond equipping employees with basic collaboration software and band-aid solutions to remote work hurdles. To drive business growth moving forward, IT leaders must prioritize implementing processes and platforms that deliver rapid innovation and ease of use–along with maintaining thorough security protocols to ensure that collaboration and digital advancement has a strong base for success to be built upon. With this in mind, I’ve outlined how your organization can streamline digital initiatives with the most advanced tools and secure processes in place.
Audit Your Existing Tech Stack
Before implementing any new technology, it’s critical to fully audit your organization’s existing tech stack. In your cloud ecosystem, ask yourself–which SaaS applications are being used most frequently? How much do they help drive productivity and output? Do these applications pose any significant risk of a data breach or user error? Aligning cloud tools to your organization’s security needs and business goals ensures that these applications will drive continued and safe growth. Beginning digital initiatives by taking a closer look at your existing cloud environment can help your organization avoid cloud sprawl and the incurred costs of overloading on applications, and give you an idea of your current security environment and where potential risks may lie.
With analysts predicting that as much as 30% of cloud investments could be wasteful, it’s essential to pin down which applications employees are continuously using and which are collecting dust. To control cloud costs, consider leveraging tools that can provide insight into your usage and business data. Employing advanced tools to monitor activity and extract more granular data will give you a clearer picture of how many individuals use existing SaaS solutions and for what purposes to ensure that your cloud spend is delivering maximum ROI. With a holistic view of your current cloud environment, your IT team can turn their attention towards revamping the tech stack.
Invest in Tools That Will Accelerate Digital Initiatives
By 2025, Gartner predicts that nearly two-thirds of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies. In an unpredictable business environment, it’s imperative that your organization focuses on choosing software that will deliver maximum value – to avoid the unnecessary costs that come with deploying too many cloud applications. To drive and track significant growth, give your teams the cutting-edge tools they need to power success beyond just Excel and PowerPoint.
For example, Microsoft’s Power Platform allows employees to personalize and automate repetitive business processes to speed up work. Additionally, this platform enables those with no software development experience to build low-code or no-code apps to solve their teams’ unique problems – without the need of IT’s support. It makes it easy for non-developers to build apps independently, access necessary business data and construct flexible workflow logic.
However, tools like Power Platform must be used responsibly to avoid sprawl. IT should be monitoring usage and capacity and they should establish a more formal governance structure to ensure that employees don’t get carried away building an excess of tools, workspaces, or redundant applications. IT should ensure that the proper guardrails are in place to configure an environment that empowers success while managing critical data.
See More: SOC Meets Cloud: What Changes and What Stays the Same?
Ensure Digital Security Is Up To Speed
On top of creating a lean and cost-efficient tech stack and giving employees the advanced tools needed to facilitate productivity, it’s also important to prioritize security when it comes to powering digital initiatives. Maintaining a secure data environment is absolutely necessary, and this starts with assessing your current systems from top to bottom to ensure that all collaboration is secure.
By regularly running security assessments to pinpoint vulnerabilities, IT can take the steps needed to mitigate areas of potential risk. For example, as many employees now work remotely across different devices and locations, identity verification is vital to keeping data secure at every step of the way. Organizations should consider implementing a Zero-Trust approach, to ensure that both internal and external users are identified and verified before gaining access to essential data and workspaces.
Further, IT must keep a close eye on where–and how–data is being shared across the organization. With the average cost of a data breach expected to surpass $5 Million per incident in 2023, this is an increasingly critical consideration to ensure that files are shared safely and responsibly.
As employees often work with external teams or collaborate with other organizations on special projects, it’s imperative to keep a close eye on who has access to confidential data and how these access points are managed. Employees are only human, and maintaining constant education and guidance around security protocols and updates directly helps power not only security, but also lays the foundation for productivity and long-term success. As the saying goes, every company is only as strong as its weakest link and must prepare accordingly.
Empower Problem-solving
Now is the time to power digital initiatives for customers by listening to their needs through every step of the process. Tools can support customers to directly enhance productivity and deliver more in-depth insights safely. It’s essential to have automated policies and governance in place so that businesses can use the latest tools without compromising their security.
Ultimately, standard collaboration and workplace software can no longer accomplish digital enhancement. In 2023, true transformation means providing teams with the tools to tailor their workflows to unique needs, design custom solutions and bring new ideas to life with ease–while providing the proper security protocols and guardrails to ensure collaboration runs smoothly and responsibly.
How are you empowering your digital initiatives? Talk about the tools that have helped you on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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