Currently our entire daily world is digital, whether in the field of communications or the transmission of information. Computers, networks and content, digital is becoming common and highly present in our reality.
However, the original meaning of the term digital was different. Today, digital is not only related to data, but also has to do with applications and operations. Digital reality is a new way of doing business, as it emphasizes interaction and not just data.
In this context, the digital universe is an encouraging opportunity. Now, we have digital business, digital commerce, digital collaboration, and digital education. Actually, this is just the beginning. Digital products and services offer a number of benefits. Among which are:
The simplification of information exchange
Better scalability
Lower operating costs
Increased end-user productivity
This last point is perhaps crucial to understanding the importance of digital technology: productivity is the concept that helps us measure the success of any technology. And the increase in productivity as a benefit clearly indicates that digital opportunities are revolutionary and highly beneficial.
However, this is only the beginning of that revolution. That is why it is important to have a clear vision on the matter: such techniques and technologies are constantly evolving and, without the constant updating of IT professionals, the company runs the serious risk of wasting too much time and money pursuing opportunities that do not provide a good return on investment and probably not aligned with digital reality.
To achieve the best results in this area, we present some of the technologies that are already and will continue to be fundamental for the future of companies:
1- Corporate content management
The main contribution of digital technologies is, in general, an increase in work efficiency. Such efficiency creates the ability to work seamlessly with data and information between applications and workgroups. In this context, such data and information are generally recognized as content. And it is of utmost importance that companies maximize their control over this content to ensure the benefit of increased productivity.
In addition to having the ideal management tools in the corporate environment, the IT department must control the way data circulates on the network. This includes common tasks such as copying and printing all data sensitive to various aspects of digital security.
2- Cloud Computing
The digital age demands that companies deploy solutions based on Cloud Computing. Centralized management and control of information are vital for the proper functioning of the organization. And this reality is much easier to implement in a cloud-based context.
This means that the IT team needs to carefully evaluate cloud solution providers. You also need to assess operational criteria and scalability requirements, as well as issues such as failures, reliability, and service continuity.
3- Mobility
Many companies operate in a geographically large and well distributed environment. This landscape raises certain needs: a wider range of mobile devices, wireless networks, and centralized mobility IT services.
Managing corporate mobility, managing mobile expenses, mobile apps, and content management, as well as monitoring and enforcing organizational IT policies, are critical activities for the digital success of such solutions. Naturally these devices and the availability of collaborators in environments outside the office create a reality of higher productivity and better results.
4- Collaboration and Social Networks
The future of digital collaboration will focus on the evolution of social media. However, they will not be public services that operate based on advertising, such as Facebook and Twitter. We are talking about social networks focused on corporate environments.
The use of these social networks will be widely disseminated in companies, and organizations will incorporate unified communications, as well as platforms for sharing, accessing and managing information. This will naturally imply a huge emphasis on security.
This idea allows us to affirm that the nature of the digital concept is collaborative by itself, since the basis of the concept is to share information. The evolution of digital solutions has resulted in a more accessible and data-fluent environment. And this evolution is directly related to the way we see collaboration. The traditional format was created for use within companies, giving rise to Intranets. However, digital collaboration applications are focused on sharing activities between organizations, giving rise to Extranets.
This change is logically due to the new reality on the planet: many companies expanded their businesses globally, resulting in the need for collaboration platforms between organizations located in different places. Now the value of collaboration is not only found within organizations, but also between them.
5- Big Data and Analytics
The spread of the concept of Big Data in digital revolution the digital age did not surprise anyone. Technologies related to Big Data and Analytics are related to data mining, and the terms are often associated with information exploration situations.
In simple terms, Big Data tools are used when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for. However, the very fact of being able to identify patterns and trends in the data and to know how that data is being used generates great advantages in practically all sectors. That is why the use of Big Data is a great idea.
6- Security
The digital age basically poses 3 great challenges: security, integrity and privacy of solutions. Of all, these are the biggest challenges to face, and the inability to overcome them can completely make it impossible to enter the digital age.
Security, or rather, digital security flaws are in the news almost every day. Hacker attacks, invasions of corporate networks, information bots and many other undesirable events are very common.
Still, simple techniques, such as cryptography to encrypt sensitive data or the deployment of ID authentication or management solutions, coupled with the general awareness of all employees using the corporate network, can yield important results.
For all this to become a reality quickly, new investments in infrastructure are necessary. Much of the new processing and storage expenses will be focused on cloud-based services, which offer many benefits, including scalability and cost reduction, as well as higher availability and fault tolerance. Nor can we forget that network congestion is a sure way to lose productivity and, consequently, to increase, and not decrease, costs.
Finally, the advances in the functionalities of the management tools complete the digital picture. It is important to determine the ability of the company to plan, configure, monitor, control and enforce the policies of use of digital applications.
This may be the most important infrastructure advance for the future. The optimization of network monitoring and application performance, as well as the widespread use of Analytics technologies and the automation of operations, will contribute greatly to the goals of the digital age. The digital concept is a revolution and one of the most important indications of the future of IT.
