A level 1 BBBEE contributor with over 20 years' experience as one of South Africa's leading ICT services and solutions providers
COVID-19 has been a massively disruptive force—it has caused businesses to close, forced people to work from home, accelerated the rate of technological adoption and pressed organisations to reinvent themselves overnight to remain sustainable and survive.
HPE GreenLake is a pay-per-use consumption-based model that delivers hardware, software, and expertise on-premises or in the cloud. Businesses pay for only what they use instead of investing in the infrastructure and skills to provide it themselves. HPE GreenLake enables businesses to combine the simplicity, flexibility and pay-per-use economics of the cloud with the security and control on-premises infrastructure offers.
There will always be market and technology disruptions impacting businesses across all sectors. An organisation’s ability to rapidly shift its business model through digital transformation to adapt to change can mean the difference between success and failure.
COVID-19 has highlighted the urgency for digital transformation. It has forced organisations to rethink their business strategies to confront the future and remain sustainable and competitive. Technology has enabled many businesses to continue in ways that would not have been possible several years ago—and companies that were further along their digital transformation paths have been able to innovate and adapt more quickly.
Digital transformation has been a reality for organisations for many decades with the advent of enablers such as the internet, personal computers, commodity servers, artificial intelligence (AI), and mobile devices. The technology progression of these enablers over my 28-year career in IT has been both fascinating and awe-inspiring to observe—the possibilities for digital transformation with the ever-growing speeds, versatility and options seem almost limitless.
The COVID-19 crisis has caused massive disruption globally and affected organisations quickly and severely, forcing them to respond with remarkable speed. Necessity has indeed sparked invention as they have scrambled to adapt to the extraordinary circumstances brought on by the pandemic and the resulting economic downturn, and many companies have had to fast-track their digital transformation due to a dramatic shift towards the adoption of digital technologies to reduce face-to-face interactions—examples of this include e-commerce apps for online shopping and technologies that facilitate remote work.