Why Digital Transformation Calls For Increased Visibility

Sometimes it is difficult to see everything that affects us.

Getting philosophical for a moment, you cannot see what you do not know about, like colour blindness affecting the ability for people to see red and green. For those of us in IT security, this inability to see everything can lead to unnecessary risks and challenges. In other words, you cannot defend what you can’t see.

Visibility across IT is a challenge today. New digital transformation initiatives have delivered vital competitive advantages for the companies involved, but these new projects have made it difficult to track what is taking place across IT. Rather than being able to maintain accurate lists of assets over time, IT teams today can find it difficult to keep up with all the changing parts that make up applications.

How does digital transformation affect the practicalities of IT?

Digital transformation involves developing completely new business models based on technology and leads to a huge amount of change in how IT teams work to support the scale, speed and ephemeral nature of underlying IT, particularly when cloud applications or third-party services are involved. Rather than being centralised and easier to manage, the range of IT assets to track has gone up considerably, and the number of different infrastructure locations or platforms used has risen too.

This has a big impact on security, which relies on visibility of assets to manage and reduce risk. IT teams now need to have a constant stream of updates around all the changes and fluctuations taking place, and consolidate that information in one central location. The resulting singlepane visibility provides a foundation for other processes that can harmonise IT, Security and Compliance teams across the organisation.