In the first installment, we talked about how artificial intelligence is now appearing in different devices and applications. Then, in the second installment, we talked about how strategic technologies are changing the way users are interacting with the virtual world. In the third and last part, we will talk about the mesh strategic technologies that touch on interconnecting people, devices, businesses, services, and content, in order to deliver digital results.

Blockchain

Put simply, blockchain is a ledger of transactions that is shared, decentralized, tokenized, and distributed. It does not have the same issues facing traditional ledgers in that it does not need individual participants and applications. This is the technology that is powering Bitcoin because it enables two parties to exchange without having to go through third party verification.

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize several strategic technologies mainly because it unlocks a lot of financial opportunities, but it has a host of other possible applications in different organizations, including healthcare, public service, supply chain, and content distribution, among many others. However, the problem is that blockchain strategic technologies that are currently used now are still rather new and immature. There is also no regulating body that governs blockchain.

If you are planning to use blockchain in your business, you would need to have:

• A clear understanding of what opportunities blockchain could unlock for your business.
• The limitations and capabilities of the technology.
• Some sort of trust architecture to use with blockchain.
• The skills needed to implement blockchains.

That said, you should be very clear that your IT team has the required cryptographic skills that they would need in order to understand which tasks or transactions are possible and which ones are not. They should be able to determine the different integration points when incorporating blockchain with your current system. They should also be able to monitor how the platform evolves and then eventually mature.
Other caveats would include exercising utmost caution when you interact with blockchain vendors, and to make sure that all parties have the same definition of blockchain and what it entails.

Event-Driven

The trick to succeeding in the digital age is to be able to identify crucial events so that you could take advantage of these moments and exploit it. Businesses should be able to discover notable and significant states or changes in states, such as fulfilling a purchase order. These business events, or a collection of events, become moments. Business moments require a specific business action. Be on the lookout for business events that affect several parties, such as different applications, partners, business or product lines, or even a number of applications.

If you use the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence, as well as a host of other strategic technologies, then you can easily detect these business events. You can also analyze these in detail.
Enterprises should start thinking in terms of business events if they want to be considered as a digital business.

In just two years, situational awareness, based on events and done in real-time, will be one of the features that digital business solutions should offer. Most organizations will also need support for processing business events.

Round the clock adaptive risk and trust

If you think that security is difficult now, you should know that digital businesses have an always evolving and very complex security environment. You would need to use sophisticated and advanced tools that can adapt to any security threats.

This is where CARTA comes in. CARTA means “continuous adaptive risk & trust assessment”, and this enables your system to have a real-time decision-making that is based on both risk and trust. These decisions also adapt to current challenges, making your digital business even more secure.

Old security techniques that employ control and ownership tactics will not be enough for the digital business. What’s more, simple perimeter and infrastructure security will not give you accurate threat detection. It also cannot protect you against insider threats and attacks.

With CARTA, your security becomes focused on people. Your developers would have to take full responsibility for your systems’ security as well.

The term DevSecOps comes to mind, because that is what it is: upgrading your DevOps to include security. You security strategy would also need to explore deception strategic technologies, such as adaptive honeypots.

In short, CARTA must have the following elements:

1. Decisions should be continuously adapting. Your security responses will need to adapt to evolving threats, as well as risk and trust.
2. Block and allow security strategies for access and protection will not be enough because your system will still be vulnerable to zero-day attacks, targeted attacks, insider threats, and credential theft.
3. Throw static trust and risk out the window. Trust and risk should be dynamic. You should continuously assess these because transactions happen continuously and context changes over time.

Your digital business will only be successful if digital trust is adaptive, and includes several dimensions of risk and response characteristics.

Other benefits of using CARTA

1. CARTA allows you to focus on the biggest threats when resources are limited. Analytics can scale your resources and use these on significant threats.
2. It enables continuous authentication replacing one-time authentication, which is flawed.
3. CARTA is used in DevSecOps, and in planning and governance. Did you know that it is no longer advisable to force your employees to change their passwords periodically? This is not a guarantee of security. Instead, digital business can use CARTA, where you have adaptive controls and you are constantly assessing risks.
4. Gartner analysts say that pragmatic security measures, such as CARTA, would help digital businesses succeed. But even if you are still planning your digital transformation strategy, using traditional security with its binary decisions will limit your opportunities and make you conservative.

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The top strategic technologies trends should help guide businesses as they go digital. Artificial intelligence, digital twins, event focused thinking, immersive experiences, and adaptive security. All of these technologies are what you should aim for if you want to survive in the digital age.

Photo courtesy of Brother UK (Flickr).