Security’s Role in Digital Transformation

Digital Transformation is changing the way businesses operate, and security should be at the forefront

First, what is digital transformation?

Digital transformation has been defined as the profound transformation of business and organizational activities, processes, competencies and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities of a mix of digital technologies and their accelerating impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way, with present and future shifts in mind.

Security’s role

This digital revolution has resulted in tremendous benefits for businesses, but there are people who seek to take advantage of vulnerabilities in the systems built with this technology. Whether they do it for personal gain, promotion of ideology, espionage, influencer, or another reason, these bad actors can cause issues from minor inconveniences to devastating impacts on businesses.

32% of companies disclosed an incident of cybercrime

During 2016, Symantec reported 1,209 confirmed breaches which exposed more than one billion user identities. PWC reported 32% of companies disclosed an incident of cybercrime. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a breach is roughly $9.5M. These are alarming numbers, yet they still underestimate the total impact because it is hard to put numbers to cyber security incidents for individual consumers. Importantly for HP and our customers, it is estimated that 71% of breaches start from an endpoint device, such as a PC or printer, putting our products at the forefront of protecting customers’ data.

HP’s role

HP has been at the forefront of endpoint device security for many years, as demonstrated both through active participation and leadership in industry consortia and standards bodies, and our market-leading innovations such as HP Sure Start.

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Because security is such a key element of our promise to partners and customers, and the impacts can be so severe, we continually strive to push the envelope in delivering the best security technology, with a process methodology that ensures HP products and services are developed securely.

HP University, a one-stop solution to empower and equip our 18,000 worldwide Partner First partners to optimize revenue and future-proof their business. It combines sales skills education, product training, and certifications to enable our partner ecosystem to migrate to evolving business models such as contractual and subscription sales.

At HP University, we believe every endpoint purchase decision is a security decision. That’s why we are preparing our salesforce and technical consultants to confidently engage and educate customers with security in their sales conversations.

Overall, security is a team sport which benefits by everyone — not just security professionals — being knowledgeable and invested in the security of the products and services we deliver to our customers. But security is an expansive topic, uses terminology which can be daunting to those new to the subject, and makes use of a broad array of often complex technologies.