Forward-thinking businesses around the globe had already taken steps toward digital transformation (DX) before the pandemic hit. But the impact of this crisis has made the digital shift—and the digital agility that comes along with it—more of an immediate priority.

“Companies that had a decent level of business agility pre-Covid were able to respond and move quickly, while those that did not are really struggling,” says Zeus Kerravala, a principal with ZK Research. “From an IT leadership perspective, you need to have the capability to change the way the company operates, almost overnight. Everyone’s in the office, and then no one is. In retail, everyone is in the store and then no one is—and every combination in between.”

We talked to Zeus Kerravala and Amit Verma, VP Solution Engineering & Technology for Comcast Business, about the solutions that CIOs and business decision makers need to deliver digital agility.

How has Covid-19 reshaped business needs and accelerated the trend toward digital transformation?

Amit Verma: Companies that had already begun the journey toward digital transformation fared much better than those businesses that hadn’t yet begun the process before the pandemic.

Having a digital business or a plan for digital transformation allowed those companies to adapt to changes very quickly. Another driver of digital transformation is gaining the ability to learn from their customers and make changes very quickly to adapt to their changing needs. The digital business model allows for that much more quickly than a traditional work process or workflow-driven business model.

Zeus Kerravala: Industry transformation used to take decades, but the rise of digital technologies has allowed business disruption to happen a lot more quickly. Look at the rise of e-commerce, or ridesharing. Covid really put an exclamation point on that. It’s Darwinism: It’s not the strongest company that survives, it’s the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Also, in this “new normal” world, businesses are realizing that they don’t need employees to work from an office location. They can work from anywhere, so you will have largely distributed talent pools that need to collaborate, access applications, and share content and files securely.

But if you have all the data, content and the company’s resources in a central location, it increases latency. To help increase productivity and prevent a negative employee experience, it is imperative to move some of the latency-sensitive applications and content to the edge of the network. However, most of the traditional VPN infrastructures are built for 10% to 20% of employees working remotely—it doesn’t scale well when you move to 100% remote. So remote working has significantly increased the need for security and changed how organizations think about their security.

ZK: I think it’s possible to achieve market leadership without being agile for a brief moment, but if you want to sustain that leadership, you need to have the necessary digital agility to constantly disrupt not only your own industry, but disrupt your own business. You see that in the rise of virtual interactions, and how important customer service is.

From a CIO perspective, the network has never been more important. You need the ability to move resources to and from the cloud; you need automation; you need integrated security.

AV: Organizations that are moving to cloud applications and those with a managed services provider can be more agile. More agile organizations can quickly add resources and adapt their network to changing needs.

That might look like a restaurant that has moved everything to a drive-through and has people with tablets taking orders outside, or perhaps they’re adding other line-busting applications like mobile ordering. Now, they need Wi-Fi infrastructure outdoors to handle that and speed up order processing.

Or a manufacturer that shifts to remotely monitoring machines and production lines, suddenly needs powerful Wi-Fi networks or other connectivity in the warehouse or on the production floor. Healthcare organizations need more bandwidth to serve patients through telemedicine or exchange data-heavy medical imaging files.