business
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TALKING
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5. De-risking through the proper
investments in change, resources, models
and technology is the final step. Many
companies fail here – especially in the
human factor of change management
At Nokia, we developed a significant
experience over the last three years by
implementing diverse digital reinvention
programmes with many telecom service
providers and enterprises around the world.
We started with ourselves by completely
redesigning a new software assets and
solutions portfolio around capturing
digital times.
What are the main factors CIOs
need to contemplate when
considering the Digital Transformation
of their organisations?
We’re living in an unprecedented age of
opportunity for communication services
providers (CSPs). Those that are customer-
centric, data-driven and agile will seize the
day and break through their legacy barriers.
Faced with declining traditional revenues,
CSPs need to increase customer mindshare
and share of wallet. Customers are looking for
something new, bold and differentiated, but
that doesn’t mean CSPs’ focus should be the
speed of bringing digital services to market.
Yes, they need to move fast, but speed is not
enough; agility is the key. Without agility,
speed to market is the same as outdated
ideas spun out faster.
Agility and data often go hand in hand.
For instance, most CSPs are sitting on a
goldmine of data. The approach to data
should be more proactive and reactive,
creative and innovative. It’s about being
data-driven in their decision-making –
connecting insights with actions and
predictions with personalisation.
And this needs to happen within a fabric
that combines the intelligence of technology
and people to enhance each other. The
totality is what we at Nokia call ‘connected
intelligence’. Today’s reality for many
CSPs, however, is quite different. Data
isn’t an instant insight until you ‘close the
loop’, revalidate and continue that cycle.
Technologies and teams are often siloed.
Legacy systems and processes are unable to
cope. Risks are commonly avoided. Just some
of the reasons why many miss out, compared
to how digital leaders use data analytics and
act with agility.
How can Nokia help service providers
and react to the changing needs of
their customers?
If the network is poor, customer’s experience
is bad. If the operations are slow, the
customer will have to wait a long time to get
services set up and problems resolved. If the
care or billing is off, a customer may decide
to find another supplier. So, all systems
within a service provider must come together
to create a great experience. The operations
engineer needs tools that allow delivering
services in digital time. The networks need
to feed relevant information to the customer
experience layer.
The silos created in departments prevent
service providers from getting a holistic view
of what’s happening with their customer
and what’s the next best action to take.
They can’t wait until analysis is pieced
together and the digital time window has
closed. Nor should they have to.
At Nokia, we can connect the experience,
operations, and network and take a broader
look at what’s happening. This is something
not every company can do. Our position
is the network matters. Telecom domain
knowledge matters. Advanced intelligence
matters. Extreme automation is necessary.
And the real value is connecting them to
drive better outcomes.
Are there any security concerns
linked to Digital Transformation? If
so, how can they be avoided?
With the digital times, come also a new era
of endpoint attacks, especially for weakly
secured IoT devices. Cybercriminals are quickly
learning to leverage botnets, orchestrate them
and run very focused and destructive attacks.
And it’s not just vulnerable IoT devices that
are ingress points, but also highly secured
smartphones that are now being targeted at
scale. In the last three years, our Nokia Threat
Intelligence Center has recognised a scary
growth in smartphone attacks that malware
writers and scammers love to employ.
In addition to the traditional SMS
Trojans, spy phone apps, banking Trojans,
information theft and ransomware, we are
now seeing bitcoin mining added to the
smartphone attack repertoire.
To address these threats, service providers
and enterprises must implement modern
security operations solutions capable to
aggregate, correlate and analyse data from
disparate point tools into cohesive and
enriched security intelligence with business-
specific context. Integrated security workflow
automation and orchestration are at the
heart of the transition from static defence to
agile and adaptive response.
To address those needs, Nokia developed
NetGuard, an award-winning suite of
integrated software modules providing
end-to-end Security, Orchestration, Analytics
and Response (SOAR). This industry-leading
software is powered by Machine Learning,
analytics and automation that provides
extensive visibility and insight into the nature
of security threats, and drives intelligent,
automated responses. n
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INTELLIGENTCIO
www.intelligentcio.com