Navigating a maze of business priorities? A strong digital foundation can help

From meeting sustainability goals and reducing operating costs by half to airline ensuring flawless connectivity across continents. Businesses that have managed to unlock such efficiencies and success had one thing in common - a strong digital foundation.

As your business navigates the complexities of today’s multi-cloud environments, the need for consistent elevated customer experiences and tapping into the generative AI potential, what can you do to achieve the same levels of success as these enterprises? The answer again is a strong digital foundation. What’s the secret ingredient that makes this possible? Read on to find out.

A car manufacturer tracks daily operations to meet its sustainability goals. A shipping company reduces operating costs by 50%. And an airline achieves always-on connectivity for its crews. None of these successes would be possible without a strong digital foundation that powers everything from the cloud, networks and customer experience.

This digital foundation is crucial for chief information officers (CIOs) tasked with driving change, all while dealing with pressure to grow, innovate and reduce costs. In fact, 75% of CIOs find difficulty balancing the innovation objectives they’re tasked with implementing and the ongoing quest to achieve operational excellence. [1]

CIOs need to integrate generative artificial intelligence (AI), which requires massive amounts of computing resources, data storage and networking bandwidth that most companies do not have. [2]

They are also trying to manage complexities in multi-cloud environments along with legacy systems that can’t support larger workloads. CIOs realise that their multi-cloud strategy needs to be supported by an internet-first approach. A thoughtful cloud networking architecture underpins a successful multi-cloud strategy by providing seamless connectivity and robust security, enabling enterprises to maximise the benefits of their multi-cloud environments.

Another priority for CIOs is to deliver a secure, seamless customer experience. Enterprises need to deliver exceptional experiences throughout the customer lifecycle, by unifying all marketing engagements, contact centre operations and customer journey workflows.

This is why it’s crucial for CIOs to deploy cutting-edge solutions across their organisation’s digital foundation, including connectivity, collaboration, cloud, edge and security. However, this can lead to an incredible level of complexity. Legacy systems and organisational silos can make it challenging to get unified visibility and manageability across the entire IT estate.

When building for the future, CIOs should plan ahead to ensure they have a robust digital infrastructure that supports the scale of innovation while providing much-needed resiliency.

“People have migrated to the cloud, but they are still in islands,” says Lakshmi Amur, chief executive and managing director of Tata Communications. “And that poses a great challenge.”

Bridging digital islands

As technology advances, so do users’ expectations for ease and speed. Yet, applications proliferate to perform different tasks, with data flowing from one cloud to another. Often, these systems have little interaction, creating isolated pockets of information, or digital islands.

Organisations with strong digital foundations point the way forward to bridging digital islands and providing more streamlined customer experiences. Nizar Trigui, chief technology officer at GXO Logistics, a logistics management firm, highlights four fundamentals vital to this effort:

George Maddaloni, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Operations at Mastercard, says a high-performing network is also critical.

You’ve got to have something that is agile," he says. "It has to be able to scale, and you need the intelligence.

One organisation that can help CIOs on this journey is Tata Communications, a leader in building digital foundations and getting the most from emerging technology.

A digital fabric solution

Tata Communications’ digital fabric brings together tools and expertise that can help CIOs simplify large digital infrastructure, uncomplicate their IT estate, and provide more visibility and control. The AI-driven digital fabric provides visibility, manageability and control across various infrastructure systems including network, cloud and security. It includes four key elements: the network fabric, the cloud and edge fabric, the interaction fabric, and the Internet of Things (IoT) fabric.

The network fabric powers a next-generation network that is agile and secure. It is built on top of a network that connects to more than 35% of the world’s internet routes and spans 150 countries, which allows customers to connect to employees, partners and others across markets. The network fabric includes cloud connectivity solutions, which helps to manage multiple cloud services and avoid islands of data.

The cloud and edge fabric includes capabilities for specialised, cost-efficient and high-performing clouds and storing and processing data at the edge. It helps organisations build the right cloud strategy and enable the entire journey from IT infrastructure and cloud security architecture assessment to data and resource migration and monitoring to management and control. Demand for this type of cloud is growing as business leaders look to accelerate their initiatives. [3] 

In hyperconnected systems, leaders need to consider how to create intelligent, uninterrupted experiences. This is where the interaction fabric comes in, using Tata Communications’ global reach to improve customer experience and workforce collaboration.

The IoT fabric includes connectivity and analytics solutions to help enterprises build solutions faster. If one provider fails, Tata Communications can automatically connect to another provider.

Together, these elements have made a difference for Tata Communications’ customers, including Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Singapore Airlines.

JLR brought in Tata Communications to improve its connected experiences. They connected nearly 900,000 vehicles to its global network and cloud contact centres in more than 80 countries and connected nearly 2m SIM cards for infotainment and telematics.

They also migrated 35,000 JLR company users into a new digital fabric. With combined data from multiple departments, managers can take the digital pulse of day-to-day operations as they drive toward their goal of becoming carbon net zero by 2039.

Singapore Airlines built a network foundation with Tata Communications that enables intelligent call routing to its global customer service centres for more seamless experiences. It also uses the IoT fabric to power its pilot and crew collaboration platforms for an always-connected experience that leads to expedited flight turn-round, enhanced on-time performance and cost savings

“Uncomplicate things, that is what we aim to do for our customers with our digital fabric,” A.S. Lakshminarayanan says. “Uncomplicate and simplify.”

By focusing on a strong digital foundation, companies can address challenges and set the stage for future growth and innovation. “Customers have to get the foundational things right in order for them to leapfrog into the future,” A.S. Lakshminarayanan explains. That means bridging digital islands and reducing complexity to streamline operations, increasing the speed and agility needed to tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Discover how we are helping ease the digital transformation journey of these enterprises with our digital fabric

References

1 Foundry, “State of the CIO Study 2024,” 2024.

2 CIO, “Getting infrastructure right for generative AI,” 3 June 2024.

3 Gartner, “What Are Industry Cloud Platforms?” 16 November 2023.