Will we continue to see the acceleration of digital transformation post-pandemic?

I began my journey as an IBMer close to a year ago, and the pandemic has made for a unique experience. I have engaged with most of my fellow-IBMers, clients and partners through virtual interactions, as others who started new jobs this year can likely relate to as well. While I covet the days when we will be able to meet in person and have impromptu conversations in the office hallways again, I also look at the positives that each new challenge brings. I’ve met “face-to-face” with many more colleagues around the world in the past eleven months than I likely would have otherwise. I’m able to attend meetings in multiple continents on the same day. All while still being at home each night for dinner with my family. 

Many enterprises had to accelerate their digital transformation journeys practically overnight to support seamless and secure employee and customer interactions similar to mine above. Every industry has been affected by this shift and needed to adopt a digital mindset – from telehealth to virtual classrooms to sports and entertainment. A recent study revealed that 59% of executives accelerated their digital transformation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (source). Businesses were forced to focus on the importance of cloud adoption and cybersecurity and began their hybrid cloud journeys.

But as we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel with the roll-out of the vaccine and think about the post-pandemic world, I know many of us are thinking…what’s next? Will we continue to see the prioritization of digital transformation and acceleration of cloud adoption?

I believe we will. And so do many others. 

Enterprises are continuing to push ahead with digital transformation, especially focusing on privacy and security. In fact, 76% of execs plan to prioritize cybersecurity over the next two years (source). We see great momentum for cloud adoption across highly regulated industries as the businesses continue to look to de-risk their supply chain across third- and fourth-party platforms and adopt an open hybrid cloud approach. I believe that by reducing risk consistently you also increase the opportunity of how fast you can innovate. 

For instance, we continue to see this momentum with IBM Cloud for Financial Services, which we kicked off in November 2019 with Bank of America. Today, we shared the significant progress BNP Paribas, IBM’s anchor client in Europe, has made since adopting IBM Cloud for Financial Services last summer. They are focused on delivering innovative experiences to their nearly 33 million customers. The bank has already migrated more than 40 line-of-business applications to the platform, with plans to accelerate migration moving forward. 

We also now have more than 90 partners who have joined our ecosystem, including some rapidly growing FinTechs. SAP is the latest partner to join us, along with Adobe, Avaya, EY, Infosys, Lumina, Tata Consultancy Services, VMware, Zafin - to name a few. Our expanded ecosystem helps to improve digital experiences and creates new revenue streams for partners and clients, while allowing financial services institutions to offer new products to their clients. This co-creation of innovation is a key trend we see as a critical element of success moving forward. 

IBM Cloud for Financial Services also now supports Red Hat OpenShift and other cloud native services, a major milestone for us as we leverage the key capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift. Financial services institutions can now accelerate their cloud journeys with built-in security and compliance controls for cloud-native and VMware workloads, all backed by IBM’s leading confidential computing and encryption capabilities. They can migrate virtual machine workloads, and establish compliance profiles across their workloads, to help achieve continuous compliance. Clients and their partners can build and modernize in a secure environment to drive the innovation necessary to support today’s customer. You can see more in the short explainer video here.

The momentum we have seen for IBM Cloud for Financial Services as more partners and clients embark on their digital transformation journey is just one example that shows how enterprises are continuing to prioritize this work even with the post-pandemic world in sight. While we all look forward to the day when we will be able to interact with colleagues, clients and each other in person again, we also now see the benefits of technology when it is deployed to its full potential. We will all continue to expect the seamless and secure digital interactions we have become accustomed to during the pandemic, to complement our in-person lives. 

How do you see your digital transformation changing in the post-pandemic world?