Industrial Data Summit 2018: The digital future

Following a morning of roundtable conversations and an expert panel discussion, Paul Brook took to the stage to deliver his Industrial Data Summit 2018 keynote.

Upwards of 90% of the data that exists today was created in the past two years. This explosion of information has created a world where ‘data’ has become a company’s most valuable asset.

And yet, the value of data has historically depreciated over time. Manually saved to tapes and disks, this ‘corporate memory’ was recorded and then filed away – often sitting untouched for decades, Brook explained.

However, all that is changing. Thanks to the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning and advanced analytics, the value of your business data can now increase over time.

Technologies such as these – combined with support from expert technology partners – are helping manufacturers shift away from the status quo and embrace change. And with that change comes rich opportunities for productivity improvements, market differentiation, heightened customer service and business growth.

Digital transformation

When setting about creating their business’ response to the digital future (which has progressively become more today, than tomorrow), executive teams need to consider three pillars, according to Brook: IT transformation, workforce transformation, and security transformation.

IT transformation encompasses modernising and updating infrastructure, automating your IT service delivery and transforming not just processes, but people. Increasingly, it will see greater numbers of manufacturers embrace and adopt cloud computing – a trend which has already gained significant momentum of late, and shows no signs of slowing.

It will also see data being placed at the heart of a business’ growth strategy, requiring champions to address how the organisation manages, stores, protects and analyses its most precious asset – information.

The ability to be connected to anyone, anywhere at any time is seeing the way we work being equally transformed, noted Brook; requiring businesses to identify and implement how a highly mobile, interconnected workforce will transform their operations.

With 1 million cyber-attacks reportedly taking place every day, organisations are going to have to think harder about how they protect themselves from threats, Brook continued.

Technology-driven strategies including threat intelligence, analytics and collaborative knowledge sharing not only enable businesses to take better-informed actions, it also offers them better command of risk to deliver more predictable business outcomes.

“If data is the ‘new oil’, as many people have said, then security is absolutely vital,” Brook noted. “That’s why there are two IT security companies within the Dell Technologies family – Secureworks and RSA.”