The wave of digitalization is boosting the rapid development of the world economy, and all walks of life are actively practicing digital strategic transformation to create more value. IT has become a huge industry, and the global scale of IT has reached 40,000 to 4.5 trillion US dollars, accounting for about 5-6% of the global GDP (84 trillion) in 2020. In this context, the traditional IT architecture has been unable to meet the needs of the rapid change and development of enterprises, and no longer adapts to the challenges brought by digitalization. A new architecture is urgently needed to help enterprises realize innovation by optimizing business and technology.

Throughout the digital transformation development process of an enterprise, it can be divided into three stages: the first stage is task automation. In this stage, by introducing applications into business processes, complex manual tasks are turned to automated execution to improve efficiency. The second stage is digital expansion, in which as enterprises begin to automate with cloud-native infrastructure and software development, a new generation of applications will be digitally expanded so that the entire enterprise end-to-end process can be completed digitally. The third stage is artificial intelligence-assisted business. Entering this stage, with the further deepening of the digitalization process of enterprises, application platforms, telemetry technology, data analysis, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence technology will be integrated into the business process of enterprises. Intelligence assists the business thereby increasing the productivity of the enterprise.

Six Technology Capabilities Needed to Achieve Digital Transformation

Lin Geng, global executive vice president and chief technology officer of F5, and chief Chinese scientist, said that these three stages also show a general process of digital transformation, which introduces some new changes to the IT capabilities and architecture of each enterprise. Ability.

Among these competencies, six competencies are essential for business transformation. These include: The capabilities of IT infrastructure, which today's enterprise IT infrastructure is delivering system, network and storage resources in a unified, more efficient manner across data center, cloud and edge environments. It is no longer fixed or static, but based on dynamic and distributed concepts, providing resource elasticity that supports other infrastructure environments; security, the traditional binary security strategy based on rigid IT architecture will no longer serve the business, and even become obstacles to business development. Therefore, enterprises need to find the necessary balance between security and performance in risk strategy; data, enterprises need to expand data to break data silos, including using telemetry to collect real-time operational data, implement new strategies to provide more Accurate, sharp insights to drive automation and decision-making. Application distribution and delivery, with increasing pressure to improve performance and user expectations for digital experiences, enterprises need to provide applications and digital services to meet the challenges. This will inevitably put application delivery on the technology agenda to differentiate the infrastructure it has traditionally been associated with; observability and automation, observability injects the digital enterprise with the signals (i.e. data) it needs to enable it to Adjustment with minimal human intervention (i.e. automation); SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) practice, SRE fills the need to run a digital business based on data, by leveraging automation, with an eye toward meeting SLOs tied to business outcomes rather than purely technical measures .

F5 Global Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Chief Chinese Scientist Lin Geng

Six technical capabilities to empower enterprise customers

Among these six technical capabilities, F5, as a company focusing on multi-cloud application security and application delivery service technologies, has strong strengths in application distribution and delivery, application security, observability and automation. In the application delivery product line, BIG-IP and NGINX can help enterprises to complete the distribution and delivery of applications. By-products of both product lines can bring observability and automation to the enterprise.

In terms of security, F5 has BIG-IP, WAF, API protection, DevOps protection and other products. After acquiring Shape, F5 will increase R&D efforts in robot attack, protection, bot protection, traffic fraud, and end-user protection.

At the platform level, through the acquisition of Volterra, F5 can provide a distributed cloud platform to help enterprises complete multi-cloud distributed connections. In business scenarios, F5 distributed cloud provides edge-based products, including WAF, API protection, etc.

Changes in strategic layout, team capability or management mode

In addition to technical capabilities, enterprises also need to make adequate preparations in terms of strategic layout, team capabilities or management models when conducting digital transformation. Lin Geng introduced this in detail.

The first is the change in the technical capabilities of personnel. With the deepening of digital transformation of enterprises, there are more and more requirements for the technical capabilities of personnel. Take the banking industry as an example. In the past, the talents needed by the banking industry were mostly professionals in the financial industry. With the transformation of technology, in addition to professionals with financial backgrounds, there is an increasing demand for data scientists and talents in digital security.

The second is the transformation of the process. Nowadays, there are more and more applications of online banking and mobile banking, and the integration of online and offline business is also increasing. The back-end structure and business process of banks must change accordingly.

The third is that the organizational structure of the entire enterprise will change. In the digital age, new leadership positions will emerge, such as chief digital officer. In the traditional banking industry in the United States, the general organizational structure is to organize according to revenue, and to manage many branch banks in a unified manner, and all business flows are completed through branch banks. For other businesses, such as credit cards, there will also be a CEO in charge of the credit card business. In short, its organizational structure is built according to revenue channels. With the digital transformation, most of the banking business is ultimately a powerful application and digital service. Various channels are just the way to complete the digital service. Therefore, the organizational structure of the enterprise should be changed from vertical to horizontal, and more focus on What kind of digital services should companies provide?

Authoritative data shows that 2023 will be the first year in which digital technology consumption exceeds traditional technology consumption, so various industries are about to enter the stage of digital priority. Subsequently, at the technical level, 50% of the personnel will be personnel with digital technology capabilities, and the subsequent business processes will be more custom-designed and optimized digital transformation processes, and the organizational structure will be digital-first oriented. .

Epilogue

Digital transformation has become the main theme of corporate strategic transformation, but if companies want to use digital transformation to lead change and achieve innovation, they also need to formulate customized transformation strategies that meet their own characteristics based on their own technical capabilities. Get ready to build six technical capabilities of IT infrastructure, security, data, application distribution and delivery, observability and automation, and SRE practice, and use the power of digital to reshape the technical foundation and improve user experience to create more value .