COVID-19 Pandemic and Its Brunt on Digital Transformation and Cybersecurity

Introduction

The year 2019 is an unforgettable one for everyone due to the global pandemic called Covid-19, and its perils to the human race. Even nobody thinking that it was fetching many as well as drastic changes to the economy as well as society. After the outbreak, within a short time, it has started to collapse all the sectors such as medicine, finance, education, manufacturing, and services. Its effect has reflected all the sectors irrespective of manufacturing and services sector. As a result, approximately all offices started gradually to change their working styles especially in the case of the academic sector. Thus all the sectors had moved to the concept of working from home. Although when the actions were taken in a precipitate, the organizations also had the accountability to uphold income and to earn profit. Lakhs and lakhs of employees and workers were dismissed from different positions from different organizations globally due to no demand for the goods and services, stoppage of the production process, and dreadful income position of the organizations (KPMG, 2021). As a result lot of changes have taken place across the industries along with new-fangled technological changes. Almost all the industries going ahead by implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled technologies similar to cloud datasets to avoid the gap and abide by the typical labor force. Though, technologies have started to enter and evolve significantly in all industries, on the other side the hackers were geared up to smash the system and begin their way of making income. As a result, all the sectors have encountered the problem of cyber threats. Thus the covid-19 paves the way for the transformation of the business into digital, it also leads to cyberattacks. Consequently, many business concerns have started taking the new path to reprioritize their business investments and fast-tracking assignments intended to guard the business data and efforts of the employees. A survey was conducted recently by Microsoft and collected data from 1000 selected business concerns from various countries such as the USA, UK, Japan, Germany, and India to dig up the opinion on the brunt of Covid-19 on cybersecurity background and also asked how the companies are going forward with the policies on investment, recruitment and overall budget to deal with the cyber threat challenge. It could understand from the outcome of the survey that the majority of the business concerns revealed that they are having willingness for transforming their business into digital, on some essential ways to silhouette the prospect of the industry with uncompromising cyber security measures. Almost all sorts of industries such as private and public, micro, small, medium, and larger industries have been attracted by the digital transformation since from last few decades (PWC, 2020). Further, there are changes in the economy and society that make the industries extremely need to re-engineering the business process, up-skilling the employees, and strategize to stay spirited and pertinent to the serve customers’ needs and wants. In the information era, information and communication technologies are playing an essential part in the growth and development of businesses, economies, and nations. In the present digital world, the personal, as well as business lives, are featured by augmented usage of automation technologies, Internet of Things (IoT), AI, Machine Learning (ML), Blockchain technology, data science as well as the bundle of new and promising technologies. Thus, the present world is operated by the data-driven culture, in which data is considered one of the most significant strategic assets (James Kaplan, Wolf Richter, and David Ware, 2020). Knowingly or unknowingly individual as well as business data have been collected from each browsing session of the internet, where the websites can collect and track an individual as well as business data and forecast the future accordingly. Thus data have been playing a major role in studying individual behavior and helping the business to serve better for the consumers. Based on the search patterns of the consumers on the internet, online sites, posts on social media, and online transactions, individual data have been collected and the same is helping the companies to design an exclusive experience for the consumers. Thus, both data and data analytics playing a major role in the digital transformation of the business generates great monetization opening, brings changes in the customer experience, and redesigning industries (Renata Gabryelczyk. 2020).