Any healthy market economy relies on innovation. The simple act of making bright ideas even brighter helps boost economic efficiency and growth, creating a higher standard of living. Business processes are being transformed through information technology. Here, let’s look at how some of these shifts are shaping up.

Innovation Technology

Information technology systems are the foundation of the many processes that a lot of businesses rely on. These systems enable you to store data efficiently, putting it to use and interfacing with it collaboratively - but as these systems are so crucial, they must also be properly monitored and maintained.

After all, without its technology, a business that relies on said technology isn’t going to be able to accomplish much.

This has been a driving force behind innovations to technology - boosting reliability, introducing transformative tools, and advancing both business and society at large. However, since this isn’t particularly easy to put into practice, various industry thought leaders have been actively attempting to transform a variety of considerations, including:

• Applications
• Infrastructure architectures
• Service delivery
• DevOps
• Production operations
• Security
• Compliance

This has effectively been accomplished by developing solutions to meet assessed needs. As a result, new solutions are being thought up to help expand IT from its role in support to actively promoting key business tasks.

Leveraging Cognitive Computing Investments

Cognitive computing is the processing of business data through a combination of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other powerful computing resources. With these systems, patterns can be recognized, data mined, and language processed far more efficiently than without. With more information, businesses that leverage cognitive computing can see considerable benefits:

• Enhanced business agility via quicker decision making
• Consistent process scaling to meet operational and budgetary demands
• Improved business performance and efficiency

Using these technologies also allows you to support various other aspects of your operations, both internally (filling out your operational structure) and externally (automating customer retention efforts). By making a business more “intelligent,” these investments can provide a competitive advantage, as well as more diverse means of generating revenues.

Smarter Security

A data breach can be catastrophic for a business - and attacks happen far too often today to be ignored. Quite a few tools have been developed to help block out these threats, as well as improve internal data security initiatives.

Of these tools, many leverage AI and machine learning to adapt a cybersecurity policy to better match the threats a business contends with. However, these systems aren’t impervious to threats, which means that business owners need to identify their potential risks, including:

• Remote access - With the rise in remote workers and other mobility enhancements that allow data and applications to be accessed from outside the network, the connections that enable this access need to be secured.
• IoT - The Internet of Things has seen an explosive growth in popularity, but with the unfortunate side effect of bringing insecure endpoints into your business. You need to have a strategy to minimize the risks they present.
• Regulatory requirements - Some businesses and industries have additional rules that they must abide by passed down by the government. You must ensure you are meeting any conditions that apply to you.
• Hackers and cybercriminals - While businesses now have access to better tools, so do hackers. This requires you to remain vigilant in your network security.

It is also important to mention that this list is far from comprehensive - there are many more threats out there to resist, avoid, and otherwise defend against. Today’s tools are the most effective way to accomplish this.

To learn more about how you can adopt technology that helps your business succeed, reach out to the IT professionals at Dresner Group.