The top three barriers to digital transformation

To stay competitive in an increasingly digital world, companies are looking to transform their digital environment to improve collaboration and maintain their edge.

But a new study by Intralinks and the Cloud Security Alliance reveals that digital transformation strategies are being hindered by three main barriers.

These are data privacy and compliance fears, data siloed in specific departments and locations, and outmoded enterprise content management (ECM) systems.

Of particular concern on the privacy front is the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will greatly tighten existing EU rules on data protection and privacy, and add new requirements beginning in 2018. This will impact not just European companies, but any company that handles European citizen’s personal data.

Companies across all industries are exchanging content with customers, employees, partners and regulators like never before. With 82 percent of companies having some sort of restriction on regulated data in the cloud, this means migrating data to the cloud will lead to many data privacy challenges.

Traditionally, systems for data storage and management have always been siloed, leaving companies managing data across multiple systems and in different locations. This results in unnecessary infrastructure management and costs. Increased adoption of cloud computing has made this problem more apparent, but cloud computing also offers possible solutions. However, 57 percent of respondents still think their company's content tools like ECM, cloud storage and SharePoint are siloed and difficult to connect.

Putting in place a strategy for building the right capabilities and measuring preparedness of these technologies will lead to successful digital transformation. Overall, 75 percent of companies surveyed have some digital transformation initiatives, these are championed by the Chief Information Offcer according to 42 percent of respondents.

When it comes to ECM the report finds many businesses still have a long way to go before they are ready for digital transformation. Of the 440 IT and security professionals surveyed, 80 percent admit that their company is still using traditional file folders to organize and share content.

"Our research with the CSA sheds light on the barriers that enterprises continue to face as they try to meet the seemingly opposing goals of increased collaboration versus stricter security and regulatory compliance measures," says Daren Glenister, field CTO at Intralinks.

The full report is available to download from the Intralinks website.

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