BUSINESS INNOVATION

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Nguyen Thu Hang

09.29.2020

INTRODUCTION
This paper outlines how information technology (IT) can help to drive business innovation and growth.
Today innovation is a key to properly managing business growth from all angles. IT governance is
responsible for managing and aligning IT with the business objectives; managing strategic demand
through the projects portfolio or managing operational demand through the services portfolio. IT
portfolios offer the possibility of finding new opportunities to make changes and improve through
innovation, enabling savings in capital expenditure and the company’s IT operations staff time. In the last
century, IT was considered as a new source of infinite possibilities and business success through
innovation

More recently, cloud computing has further expanded IT solution possibilities. Solution providers now
offer customers infrastructure as a service, software as a service and other on-demand offerings. The
provider either builds and supports its own proprietary cloud services or resells (or recommends) the
services of a public cloud provider. Cloud solution providers offer consulting and professional services
around one or more cloud platforms, helping customers use public, private and hybrid cloud
environments to solve business problems.

One of the companies that uses cloud-based technology I want to mention is General Electric. General
Electric (GE) began its digital transformation in 2014, but three years later, it chose Amazon Web
Services (AWS) as its preferred provider and depended on the service to host more than 2,000 cloud-
based apps and services.

WHY WAS THE TECHNOLOGY CHOSEN? WHAT WERE THE ALTERNATIVE

Reduced costs. Speed to innovation. Global visibility. The potential benefits of cloud adoption are not
only many, but they’re tough to ignore. And that’s why more and more industrial companies now know
they must make the move. Only, the distance between knowing and actually migrating can appear long
and arduous . . . unless that is, they can find the right guide to lead the way.

Historically, these companies have operated within a trusted boundary, where all external
communications were closed and information was never shared across the Internet. Today, that’s no
longer an option. To drive business imperatives, they need to cross that communications’ chasm. They
need to tap into the power of the cloud, big data, and sophisticated analytics to derive deeper, actionable,
real-time insights into operations.

Fortunately, there are ways to bridge that chasm. Unfortunately, not all bridges—or cloud computing
services—are made the same, and companies must figure out how to choose between Software as a
Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). In the end, it’s about
deciding which service works best in industrial environments, especially those with critical infrastructure
in remote locations across the globe.

CHALLENGES

Every technology comes with the baggage of some pros and cons. Similarly, cloud computing has its
share of problems, despite being the core strength of some businesses. This can also create some
significant issues in some rare situations. Let’s talk briefly about some real-life ghosts of cloud
computing.

1 — Data Security

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When it comes to security concerns of cloud technology, a lot of questions remain unanswered. The
biggest cloud computing data security issues are mysterious threats such as virus attack and hacking of
your site. Entrepreneurs need to think about these things before adopting cloud computing technology for
their business. As you transfer essential details of your company to a third party, you need to ensure you
have cloud management and security system.

2 — Lack of expertise/knowledge

Not every company has enough understanding of implementing cloud solutions. They do not have expert
personnel and tools to utilize cloud technology properly. It is challenging to provide information and
select the right cloud in the right direction. Teaching your employees about the process and tools of cloud
computing is a huge challenge. It is as catastrophic as any company to turn their business into cloud-
based technology without the right knowledge.

3 — Cloud Spending Management

Companies make many mistakes that help them increase their costs. Often, developers or other IT
workers forget to rotate a cloud event to be used for a short period and turn it off. Many companies find
themselves overwhelmed by unexplained cloud pricing plans that offer many opportunities for discounts
that cannot be used.

4 — Governance/Control

In today’s cloud-based world, IT does not always have complete control over infrastructure delivery,
provisioning, and operation. This has increased the difficulty of IT to provide the necessary governance,
compliance, risks, and data quality management. To reduce the various risks and uncertainties in moving
to the cloud, IT must adopt the traditional IT management and control processes to include the cloud. To
that end, the role of key IT teams in the cloud has evolved over the past few years. Along with business
units, central IT plays a growing role in the choice, mediation, and governance of cloud services. In
addition to this third-party cloud computing/management providers, they are gradually providing
government support and best practices.

5 — Compliance

One of the risks that cloud computing faces is compliance. This is an issue for anyone using backup
services or cloud storage. Every time a company moves data from internal storage to the cloud, it faces
compliance with industry regulations and laws.

6 — Managing Multi-Cloud Environments

Challenges facing cloud computing haven’t just been concentrated in one single cloud. According to
Rightscale’s findings, 81 percent of enterprises adopt a multi-cloud strategy, and 51 percent have a hybrid
cloud strategy (public and private clouds combined). In fact, on average, companies use 4.8 different
public and private clouds.

7 — Immature Technology

Many cloud computing services are at the forefront of technologies like artificial intelligence, machine
learning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and advanced big data analytics. The potential downside to
accessing this fascinating new technology is that services do not always meet organizational expectations
in terms of performance, usability, and reliability.

8 — Integration

Many organizations, especially those with hybrid cloud environments, report challenges related to
accessing their public tools and applications to the public cloud to work together. In the Teradata survey,
30 percent of respondents said connecting old systems with cloud applications is a barrier to adoption.
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IMPLEMENTATION

GE understands that security and compliance go hand in hand. So much so, in fact, that it developed
Predix Platform. A distributed application and services platform, Predix not only provides a standard way
for customers to build applications that power Internet-connected industrial machinery, but it does so
while prioritizing security, regulatory compliance, and data governance.

Also thanks to long experience, GE is familiar with the unique security control frameworks of a wide
variety of industries, inclusive of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to regulate aviation, the
North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to oversee power systems, HIPAA to safeguard
medical information, and many more. Though each framework bears a different name and uses a slightly
modified language, together they all share a common foundation for securing operational infrastructure—
a foundation based on the ISO 27001/27002, NIST, SOC, IEC 62443, and CSA-CCM family of
standards.

In addition to providing several layers of security around data protection, access control, and privacy,
Predix Platform has adopted ISO 27001/27002 and CSA-CCM to help build a security governance and
controls framework that consists of four key pillars:

Policies: Policies are considered the constitution of security governance and provide high-level
statements of management intent, expectation, and direction.

Standards: In this context, standards are the metrics and allowable boundaries used to determine whether
procedures, processes, or systems meet policy requirements.

Processes: Processes define and ensure adherence to security and compliance requirements, define
ownership and stewardship, and align roles and responsibilities.

Technology: Technology supports provisions within standards and facilitates processes by leveraging
capabilities like multi-tenancy, boundary defense, encryption of data at rest and during transfer, and
simplified provisioning and policy enforcement.

Moreover, to further demonstrate that adequate controls are in place, GE engages external third-party
auditors to conduct official inspections and evaluations. Often, these audit and attestation evaluations
culminate in detailed audit reports and certifications (e.g., ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC-2)
that verify adherence to standards guidelines and compliance with regulatory requirements.

By extending the assurances and certifications traditionally available in the IT space to Operational
Technology (OT) and industrial asset management environments, Predix Platform helps solve the edge-
to-cloud security dilemma in a holistic manner. Using the Predix “recipe” to secure end-to-end
connectivity, companies can now extract and analyze real-time data not only from IT assets, but also
industrial devices like aircraft engines, wind turbines, water injection pumps, CT scanners, and more.

THE FUTURE OF CLOUD COMPUTING

Cloud computing is presented as the evolution of hosting and the new technological dawn in IT. Over the
last few years alone, there have been major developments that have completely changed the cloud market.
While cloud computing is not a new idea, its abilities are only now beginning to be realized.

Continuous innovations in cloud computing are set to push artificial intelligence and the IoT to the fore in
the next decade and beyond. These innovations will support emerging technologies and help them adapt

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to different platforms and devices such as mobile and home appliances.

For instance, today’s mobile devices require a lot of time and processing power to analyse unstructured
data. These devices, therefore, have to send the data to servers in the cloud slowing down the response
time of AI. As a result, industry experts predict that mobile devices will use inference continuously in the
future.

Inference is where AI learns in the cloud and applies the knowledge gained to real-life problems. This
will allow the device to categorise photos according to content, respond to voice commands immediately
and set cameras to capture subjects under different shooting conditions.

By 2050, the world’s population is set to reach approximately 10 billion people, with the largest number
being concentrated in urban centres. This will increase the need for advanced digital solutions to manage
the population.

The cloud is expected to provide the digital infrastructure for smart cities. This includes automated and
connected vehicles, smart parking lots and elevators, efficient farms and power plants and better trains
and subways. All these will be safer and easy to manage, thanks to the cloud’s capability to store and
analyse data.

Additionally, companies will be able to access artificial intelligence, data analytics and other capabilities
as services.

CONCLUSION

The benefits of cloud services are many and proven. They include increased flexibility and speed-to-
market, scale, lower IT costs, the improved path to innovation, and faster product releases. By letting
third parties that specialize in the cloud manage IT solutions that previously were handled in-house,
companies are in a better position to focus on what truly counts: innovating to stay ahead of digital
disruptors