Businesses are deploying your software applications to facilitate more efficient, cost-effective ways to do business, but IT solutions that advance digital transformation may be introducing businesses to a new tier of challenges – some of which they may not have anticipated.
Here are three examples of next-gen challenges that your clients may encounter – and may need your help to manage.
Data Management
The applications you develop collect data, analyze it, and allow businesses to use those insights to make smarter decisions and provide better customer service. But in addition to collecting and using data, your clients must responsibly manage it – and comply with regulations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Rod Oancea, director of Governance and Compliance Services at InterVision, says, “The enforcement ramifications as a result of GDPR compliance are yet to be seen. Many businesses are still attempting to cope with how to meet the regulation’s extensive reach and requirements.”
“Expect some fairly large penalties and fines in 2019 to show up in national and international news headlines from GDPR,” says Oancea, “and while U.S. regulation around privacy has lagged behind, high-profile incidents and the resulting public interest has brought the stigma of data breaches to the forefront.
Scott Drossos, President of Infiniti at InterVision says as Software as a Service (SaaS) IT solutions proliferate, they will continue to expose organizations to new data integration and data security challenges. “Knowing where one’s data is and leveraging that data in a secure fashion is of paramount importance to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance.”
Drossos, says this will require organizations to step up their data governance strategies and investments in new capabilities that protect their clients and limit their liabilities.
Security
Oancea adds, “As the outright and pervasive costs of noncompliance and breaches continue to grow, many organizations will need to invest in their security and data privacy practices, especially proactively in solution design.”
He says the extensive adoption of public cloud infrastructure, As a Service applications and platforms, hosted IT solutions, and deeply integrated vendors and partners present businesses with a significantly growing security governance challenge. “For many, the last several years have seen complex and siloed approaches to security and compliance, which leads to extensive overhead, costly gaps, and incidents. While this may originally have been presented as the growing pains of cloud migration strategies with the promise of reconsolidation down the road, the rapid pace, demands for agility, and upsides of efficiently blending best-of-breed will lead to hybrid ecosystems being more a mainstay. Success and sustainability will require an increased focus on coherent security governance, strategy, and execution that ensures assets and data are protected across all environments and parties.”
Ben Miller, senior cloud solutions architect at InterVision adds, “Encrypted storage area network (SAN) checks the box on the ‘encryption at rest’ requirement, but as regulations become more sophisticated, IT will be pushed to truly own their encryption strategy. Encrypted disks protect against someone stealing physical disks, not data from running workloads. Replicating data to the cloud for disaster recovery or Software as a Service (SaaS) exposes the shortcomings of this approach. More organizations are going to face the challenge of truly managing their keys and certificates to encrypt sensitive data inside their databases and applications to meet regulations and real-world attack vectors.”
IT Resilience
Jeff Ton, SVP of product development and strategic alliances at InterVision, says IT failure that causes disruptions to business operations won’t be tolerated. “With datacenters embracing smart device technology and processes, companies will be able to virtually eliminate the number one cause of disaster declarations: IT equipment and application failures,” says Ton. “This growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in data center operations will enable the promise of IT resilience. “Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) combined with AI will provide the capability of predicting the onset of a ‘disaster,’ the migration of workloads to secondary data centers and clouds, and the failover to these datacenters before disaster strikes,” says Ton.
Plan for Contingencies
Anticipating challenges that your clients will encounter as they deploy new technologies – and providing IT solutions to manage them – can position your software development business as a trusted partner that your clients can depend on as they make progress toward digital transformation. 
