How Mobility Helps MSME in Data Transformation

Article By Mr. Sameer Wadhwa, Vice President - Digital Consulting and Client Success, Visionet India

The advent of modern technology has proven to be a vital tool for MSMEs to bring efficiencies and a greater degree of standardization. MSMEs have developed a competitive edge to operate in the market on the global front by implementing advanced technology. 

The accelerating pace of evolution is increasingly driving customers, tech-savvy firms and MSMEs in a constricted embrace, with the convergence of disruptive technologies eradicating the limitations separating them. Technologies like mobility, cloud computing, social media, analytics, etc. are integrating to unveil great opportunities and values. This convergence in the coming few years will emerge as an instrumental enabler for MSMEs to flourish based on innovation and automation across the market segments including IT, Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing, Biotechnology, Electronics, etc.

Mobility solutions are allowing MSMEs in transferring data whenever and wherever they need. Employees in the corporate world today are getting increasingly mobile and require access to applications, corporate data, and services. MSMEs have IT islands outside their datacenter at several remote locations or office branches. The inability to share or access official information in need drastically impacts the business in different ways like supply chain schedules, new sakes, customer satisfaction, and product development. It often leads employees to carry their own devices to workplaces, acquire non-sanctioned IT cloud services and generally both.

Consequently, corporate data is rapidly getting distributed. Accessed from personal or corporate devices, business content is shared amongst several devices, clients, colleagues, partners, and many more entities. Mobility solutions like cloud services for sharing files and the transformation of corporate data in bulk are ubiquitous in the present corporate settings. These services not just enable productivity but also offer a workaround for restrictions and challenges like file transfer size with corporate VPN access. 

IT struggles with a grim decision, which is to permit or deny. Blocking services such as cloud and BYOD may result in shadow IT – which is not a good thing for businesses and IT. It rather enhances the risks of corporate data loss, theft and security breach. Storage of corporate data in unsanctioned devices, clouds or applications by the end-user puts the data out of the corporate IT control and governance. In this condition information, governance and security policies cannot be enforced. Such corporate files and data become orphaned after the custodian (employee) of this data quit the company. What happens to the data in this case? It may end up getting into the wrong hands or to the competitors with an employee. 

Progressively, IT organizations are permitting BYOD and cloud services on their rapports – recollecting centralized control and visibility. Smart IT firms are authorizing BYOD and cloud services utility but in a very agile, cost-effective and secure way. Subsequently, it creates a win-win scenario where the workforce can utilize data to mobilize the business and IT allows MSMEs suppleness by mitigating jeopardy and security events.

MSMEs should now act by leveraging a hybrid cloud offering that works effortlessly across public and private cloud infrastructure. As the expansion of public cloud services continues, most businesses are inclined to adopting a hybrid cloud for security, performance, risks, compliance and jurisdiction reasons. 

Research by IDC reveals that top use cases for hybrid cloud involve archiving, backup, public cloud recovery, alliance, disaster management, and cloud bursting.A hybrid cloud delivers secure, enterprise-level cloud-based services to the organizations while allowing their users to access services like synchronization and file sharing. The service architecture needs to have international access topology with support for the dissemination of geographical data dispersal. Moreover, the capability to abstract data from underlying applications is also crucial. At the object level, features including content tagging, encryption, efficient storage, automation rules, advanced metadata management, and intelligent search are paramount to allow adequate data handling which results in optimized business visibility, cost-efficiency, security, and agility.

Conclusion

Mobility solutions significantly help in data transformation and offer enormous potential to MSMEs to alter its entire working process soon. It is high time that MSMEs and other medium businesses should take the lead in embracing digitalization and make it an integral business strategy. Businesses comprehending the power of digital transformation will lead to inclusive and sustainable growth. MSMEs should harness this new trend to provide effective output with utmost security.