Four Steps to Ensure Robotic Process Automation Security

Written by Naved Rashid, Analyst (Research & Advisory) RPA at Gartner

Parting ways with a legacy solution isn’t always easy. The old, familiar processes and workflows may be comfortably predictable, even if outdated. Now, as companies begin to prepare for postCOVID recovery, the need for a change is harder to ignore. The cloud is tempting.

Necessity forced many companies to accelerate cloud adoption as they transitioned to a remote workforce, online services, and contact-less offers for customers. The leap into digitalization wasn’t as frightening as imagined. Those cloud experiments proved positive, removing lingering hesitations for many risk-adverse companies.

For companies looking to remove their last doubts about cloud, here are 10 examples of how cloud solutions simplify business challenges.

1. Agility. Want to change direction? No problem. Cloud solutions are highly flexible, making it easier to quickly set up new divisions or branches, break off business units, or merge with partners. Go ahead. Chase new concepts or business models.

2. Innovation. Think outside of the box. Encourage cross-functional collaboration within your organization with real-time tools for sharing ideas, files, and data. The deep storage capacity of cloud solutions will support ongoing R&D efforts. 3. Automate steps. Solutions backed with Artificial Intelligence (AI) help enterprises analyze processes and make smart decisions. Take advantage of cloud’s vast storage capabilities, use AI-driven analytics to find anomalies needing attention. Set up trigger events and automate responses, such as quality control checkpoints.

4. Yes? No? Maybe. Make well-informed decisions based on system recommendations. Some yes/no checkpoints can be automated, the system deciding if sufficient standards are met.

5. Streamline security and services.

Security is a top concern for many companies, and they are relieved to learn about secure infrastructures, especially when provided by experts like AWS. A provider can also manage maintenance and disaster recovery and day-to-day needs, making the entire IT function simpler to manage and maintain.

6. Rules. Rules. Rules. Governance requirements have become confusing and time-intensive to manage in some fields. Always-modern cloud solutions can help companies stay current on the latest requirements.

7. Do-it-yourself reporting. For many legacy systems, reporting is complex, requiring assistance from the IT team to custom write queries. Modern solutions deployed in the cloud often have AI-driven reporting that guides the business user through creating customized reports.

8. Power to the people. Cloud solutions give business users tools to help them do their job, often from any place, anytime. Remote connectivity is simplified – without risking security.

9. Platform as a service (PaaS).

Choosing the right PaaS will give your team tools for no-code and low-code applications so they can build out specialized functionality as needed.

10. Stretch resources. Finding qualified IT technicians isn’t always easy. And your existing team may be stretched beyond capacity. Cloud solutions relieve your IT team of day-to-day maintenance, security, and back-ups so they focus on more important tasks.

Cloud solutions provide the powerful end-to-end solutions that organizations need to modernize and simplify processes. Complexity can be tamed and managed with the right solutions. By moving the entire core ERP into the cloud, enterprises can make bold, high-impact changes. They can shed the modifications of their legacy solutions. They can employ proven best practices and confidently embrace the future.

HOW THE PANDEMIC HAS IMPACTED COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS

Written by Amr Alashaal, Regional Vice President - Middle East at A10 Networks

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact on countries around the world and, even with the successful vaccination roll out, regions are still moving in and out of lockdowns. Containment measures have, as you would expect, caused a substantial drop in business activity across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), especially in contact-intensive sectors. Economic growth is expected to pick up throughout 2021 as vaccines become more widely distributed. However, communication service providers have seen a significant surge in demand because of the pandemic. Overnight they saw demand spike as organisations moved to a distributed workforce.

With many businesses now committing to a more hybrid working model, communication service providers will continue to experience high demand for the foreseeable future, which presents a unique set of challenges.

To understand the true scale of demand and examine how COVID-19 has impacted communication service providers, A10 Networks conducted research that analyses the challenges and issues that senior IT professionals in communication service providers are facing, and how they are adapting to a post-pandemic world. Over 1,200 senior professionals took part in the research from five different countries and across seven different vertical market sectors including financial services, education, healthcare, government, ecommerce and retail, utilities, and gaming.

Examining the responses across these different vertical markets here is what we found:

Gaming and retail and ecommerce see significant spikes in demand for data and network bandwidth

Without a doubt COVID-19 had a significant impact and almost universally (99%) the 1,200+ respondents experienced an increase in demand for data and network bandwidth from their customers and subscribers. This was clearly due to the rapid switch to remote working and the continued lockdowns across countries and regions, which have continued throughout the first half of 2021.

Interestingly, communication service providers with gaming customers witnessed the highest increase in demand, perhaps as citizens found themselves with more time on their hands working from home or furloughed. This was followed by government sector respondents and then ecommerce and retail. To this point, gaming and ecommerce and retail saw significant spikes in the increase in demand for data and network bandwidth in the over 75% and up to 100% category with 13% and 11.5% respectively.

Education sector customers have witnessed unprecedented demand as a result of home schooling

Clearly, the rapid surge in demand owing to COVID-19, meant that communication service providers had to quickly expand their capabilities. As organisations have moved to a remote set up, the attack surface has also expanded and intensified. This meant that respondents had to invest heavily in security technologies to protect their networks. Likewise, demand has come from multiple different locations. Previously customers/subscribers were more likely to be in offices together. Now, workforces are geographically dispersed, creating broader and heavier spikes in multiple locations.

When we asked whether COVID-19 had accelerated network transition to a more distributed network (edge) and how much of the total network traffic has this impacted, interestingly, respondents serving the healthcare and utilities sector witnessed above average acceleration: 66% and 67% respectively, in the “by over 25-50%” category. Respondents serving the gaming sector were highest (38%) in the “by over 50-75%” category.

Healthcare invests in security technologies

The increase in traffic has significantly changed capital investment plans for communication service providers in multiple ways. More than half of the respondents plan to increase their investment in security. No doubt this is due to the escalating attacks witnessed on organizations with remote workforces.

Providers serving the healthcare sector were most likely to be investing in security. However, communication service providers with customers in the government and education sectors were pausing investment plans.

Cybersecurity training programmes are a priority for education and healthcare

In terms of the security challenges enterprise customers/subscribers are facing, the education (62%) and healthcare (61%) sector respondents were more likely than other sectors to say that their customers need to revise their employee cybersecurity training programmes. The financial services sector ranked highest in terms of ensuring that BYOD policies were more robust. Additionally, when we asked about the highest priority security investments for 2021-2022, ecommerce and retail (51.5%) were the most focused on the upgrading of firewalls and other security appliances.

When it comes to 5G, just under one-third of respondents stated that maintaining a quality service and avoiding service outages were top security challenges. Clearly, for ecommerce and retail respondents, ensuring uptime is critical, and 35% said that maintaining a quality service and avoiding service outages were key challenges.