IDC East Africa CIO Summit 2021

Adopting a Zero-Trust Security Model

In a digitally transforming world, the end-user choices are all about trust. Accordingly, organizations are replacing old castle-and-moat architecture with modern zero-trust architecture. An evolving set of cybersecurity paradigms that move network defenses from static, network-based perimeters to focus on users, assets, and resources.

Driving Transformation from Data: How Insights at Scale Holds the Key

Digital Transformation is not a new term; but as maturity builds, organizations are having to cope with envisioning what their organization will look like in 10 years time, and the practicalities of devising and implementing a strategy to get there. What's clear is that intelligence – data driven processes with rising degrees of autonomy – will play a leading role in the Future Enterprise.

Accelerating Paths to Business Value Through Data

While many traditional industry players are looking at BDA and cognitive systems to drive operational efficiencies that will help them reduce their overall cost structure and provide quick ROI, the more progressive companies are starting to utilize these solutions to aggressively enter adjacent industries and market segments. These digital “disruptors” are finding ways to leverage the 3rd Platform technologies – mobile, cloud, analytics and social – as a platform to quickly develop and deploy cognitive systems and BDA solutions that are dramatically changing the way traditional businesses models function.

Migration and Multi-Cloud Management for a Cloud Enabled Enterprise

In this digital age, more and more enterprises are rapidly migrating to multicloud-based platforms. With its many advantages, organizations need a strategic approach to the entire migration process – planning, assessment, and defined outcomes – that factors in the exact needs of the organizations and whether it’s workloads are better served through public, private, or hybrid cloud architectures. Join this session for an in depth look at migration planning, sequencing, and the various strategies for multicloud management.

Cloud Data Management for Agile IT

Businesses are facing a new challenge to offer world-class services and building these services in the cloud has become crucial while managing the workloads add a layer of complexity. Managing and leveraging data in this model using legacy solutions is not an option anymore.

How Digital Workers Help Achieve Empathy at Scale

As organizations accelerate and expand digital transformation initiatives – even more so in the aftermath of COVID-19 - traditional work models aren't nimble enough, adaptive nor scalable. “Digital workers” will make up a growing share of the workforce, enabling human workers to drive new value with skills such as imagination, creativity, and empathy. This requires entirely new work environments, organizational structures, and metrics for success.

Rethinking Cybersecurity in the Digital Age

In the new digital world, the way we look at securing our transforming environment is in transition. The legacy question, "Are we secure?" will shift to "How secure are we?" Metrics and visibility become key. All digital activity and applied controls must be measured, including legitimate events – not just suspicious traffic. It is not uncommon to assert that policies and procedures are more important than inline controls or to suggest that one should eliminate technical information when discussing cybersecurity with executives. But, there is no escaping that 100% of the risk in question comes from digital activity.

Data Privacy Regulation: Navigating the Compliance-Risk Landscape

In an era of increased privacy and cybersecurity regulation, enterprise behaviors are under greater scrutiny. Numerous new and more onerous data-privacy requirements are affecting businesses. Join this discussion on the processes and best practices that organizations can use to avoid unnecessary pitfalls and create an atmosphere of privacy compliance.

Beyond The Hype - How Artificial Intelligence is Becoming Reality

Today, we are at the cusp of this technological quantum leap. AI and other emerging technologies such as RPA, BDA, and IoT are fast being embedded into the core of any "digitally determined" organization looking to compete in the evolving business landscape of the future. However, this does not come without a set of unique challenges and risks that need to be preemptively addressed and mitigated.

The Digital Backbone: Intelligent Process Automation Enabling Multiplied Innovation

Robotic process automation (RPA) has gained much traction over the years as enterprises target seamless, efficient operations and greater levels of productivity. In fact, many enterprises now rank automation in workplace operations among the top three capabilities they expect from their digital workplace environments. Enterprises have realized that the true value of RPA is not in piecemeal automation but in integrated deployment at scale. As lines of business and IT departments now look at RPA as a strategic transformation tool embedded in their digital transformation roadmaps, we are set to witness a rapid adoption of RPA in diverse deployment environments. Enterprise RPA adoption is now moving from simple and standard, rules-based environments of front- and back-office tasks to much more complex processes that need to tackle massive amounts of structured and unstructured data.

The Impact of Hyperconvergence on People, Process, and Technology

Hyperconverged infrastructure has now matured into a mainstream infrastructure option for small to large enterprise IT organizations and from edge to core datacenters. The collapsing of compute, persistence, and data services brings with it the opportunity for organizations to refine their application architectures, team structures, operational processes, and workload placements. Over the next decade, IT organizations will continue to consolidate workloads on hyperconverged architectures as a means to reduce cost, enable greater levels of automation, and increase efficiency. The ability of the IT organization to streamline and consolidate infrastructure services can have a strong influence on the enterprise's ability to drive IT and business innovation.

Making the Edge the Ultimate Multiplier for Innovation: Delivering Infrastructure at the Edge

Success in digital transformation requires new thinking about the consumption of IT resources in increasingly "smart" edge locations. These are the urban cores, hospitals, factories, transportation hubs, and a wide range of spaces where local people or "smart" things demand an optimal digital experience. They are where IT, operational technology, and customer experience intersect. Join this session to discuss the strategies and challenges that IT organizations and their technology partners must address as they extend new services to edge locations where real-time insight/action, continuous operation despite network degradations, and data privacy/control are paramount.

The concept of work to thrive in the Next Normal

The degree of an organization’s elasticity and adaptability to change – across business processes, technology, and, most importantly, their workforce – will dictate their chances of survival moving forward. Agile collaboration, employee empowerment, lifelong learning, and trust will be ingrained in the culture of any organization wanting to succeed in the digital race.

Building a Future-Ready Digital Workforce

Workplace transformation cannot be ignored, and we are moving further than just discussing employee productivity and remote working. The future of work takes collaboration to a completely new level where people work virtually with multi-sourced online communities, work across ecosystems, and work with AI, augmented humans, and machines on a daily basis.