Kathy Gibson is at the Dell Technologies Harness your Digital Future Virtual Summit The four pillars of digital transformation are IT transformation, workforce transformation, security transformation and application transformation.

This is the word from Walid Yehia, senior director: presales for MERAT at Dell Technologies, who point out that workforce transformation is about the users’ experience, and the ability to manage workers regardless of where they are working.

“You need to make sure they are able to access your applications and their data, and are able to interact.

“The unrelenting pace of digital and workforce transformation creates new challenges consistently and yet also presents huge opportunities for companies to get things right,” he says.

“The transformation into a digital workplace does not come about easily. Older enterprises are set in their top-down approach to IT services, wherein enterprise product investment by the IT department has resulted in an environment in which only vetted and approved corporate applications can be used.”

Those companies who have done workforce transformation have been able to work more efficiency during the Covid-19 outbreak.

Security has always been important, but today it is more about predictive analytics based on a deep understanding of the user behaviour and the context of where the use is.

“So you need to make sure the predictive analytics, the ability to be able to predict things before they happen, is something you have in place.”

The modern application display a number of characteristics, Yehia says.

“You can redevelop applications to become more agile; or you can keep them as they are; or you can modernise them – or even retire them once you have retrieved the data.

“What we are seeing is that that the platform has become more important than ever. This is not just the technology platform, but as a way to collaborate with partners and customers.

“Businesses have realised that they cannot be creative on their own.”

Multi-cloud is also going be critical to be able to run applications in the most efficient and cost-effective way, Yehia adds, and allows users to access applications wherever they are, or in any circumstances.

Dell Technologies itself has more than 100 000 users working remotely at the moment. “This would not have happened if we had not started doing this a while ago.

“We were digitally mature enough to show we can do make it work,”Yehia says.

“At Dell Technologies, we are helping our customers develop modern and digitally enabled workforces through end-to-end, integrated infrastructure from the edge-to-the-core-to-the-cloud.

“From creating hyper-tailored experiences for everyone with the right apps, data, services and devices to enabling office, remote, home and on-the-go collaboration with total security, an organisation’s technology choices are key to making remote workers more connected and their business more competitive.”