Why Enterprises Need to Get Ready for the “Roaring Twenties” Redux

The RSA Conference 2021 Virtual Experience is happening May 17-20 and Symantec, as a division of Broadcom, will be providing a summary of some of the leading stories from the conference to help you stay informed.

Think of the “The Roaring Twenties” and the phrase conjures up images of the anything-goes decade between the end of the first World War and Wall Street’s 1929 Crash.

A century later, “the IT world is on the precipice of another Roaring Twenties,” according to Forrester VP Laura Koetzle, who predicts the next decade is shaping up to be a “may you live in interesting times” era.

“Because this has been such a difficult 15-ish months, I do expect a bunch of 1920s-style decadent partying, once that’s allowed,” she said in a speech at the RSA Conference 2021. But post -2021, Koetzle expects the roaring 2020s to be a little less ‘Gatsby’ and a lot more about adapting to pandemic-connected shifts that are going to leave permanent changes in the business and technology landscape.

Indeed, Koetzle recounted how the business world has made radical changes over the course of 2020 and 2021 that were once thought too difficult, if not impossible, to pull off. She said they made those changes because there was no alternative. But now, as IT tentatively enters a post-pandemic future, an equally important challenge looms to sort through those changes and decide which remain and how to secure them. Here’s how she expects events to unfold:

• More Security, More Convenience
  Empowered consumers will increasingly direct their spending to brands that offer secure no-touch techniques and new digital experiences. During the pandemic, businesses operated under unique constraints, rolling out digital experiences of varying quality. While this has been a learning experience for all concerned, consumers will lose patience with vendors that can’t provide both security and convenience. As security teams get more funding, brands will need to build better systems that scale, everything from application security to better handle adaptive technologies to investing in non-creepy, anti-fraud techniques that don’t make customers uncomfortable about how much is known about them.
   
• Businesses to Create More Hybrid Experiences
  As the digital engagement wave builds, it will feed demand for a new breed of hybrid physical digital experiences, such as touchless mobile check-ins at hotels. Better security controls that don’t just comply with regulations but make the consumer experiences more satisfying as design focuses on new customer outcomes, such as saving money or protecting the environment. 
   
• Firms, Governments Invest to Drive the Future of Work
  Companies and governments are increasingly going to drive the future of work forward by investing in things that once seemed improbable. This might manifest itself in investments by more “high-empathy firms” in their employees, in the process gaining a creative edge over their rivals. (Companies that invested in their workforce during the lockdown are going to reap dividends from grateful employees who are more likely to stick around once the job market improves.) Longer term, expect a more redistributed workforce that reduces the pre-COVID trend toward hyper-urbanization. As work redistributes to different places outside major cities, we’re going to need secure edges, so people aren’t at the mercy of the services delivered from a cloud in some faraway place, because there's just not enough connectivity. Policy makers can seize on the possibilities of this new world of remote work with government incentives to attract employees to more remote economic zones.  
   
• Smart Firms to Retire Technical Debt
  Who doesn’t have overlapping bits of security, technology and process that they don't need any longer? To ride the tech disruption wave, organizations will need to take a broom to their old infrastructure and clean house wherever possible. This so-called technical debt, piled up over the years, means old security technologies must get replaced by newer tech, such as Azure or cloud-delivered security. Never waste a good crisis and replace old security tech while your company re-platforms its legacy core systems. Longer-term, follow up by investing in OT security for connected, automated production lines or perhaps even blockchain for third-party risk management. Once you’ve caught up, you are going to be able to innovate and grow as the economy recovers.  
   
• Business Resiliency = Competitive Advantage
  Uncertainty is going to be a fact of life in this decade. When it comes to essential risk management and business continuity, aim for redundancy, flexibility, and sustainability. All it took was for a ship to get stuck in the Suez Canal to wreak havoc with just-in-time delivery models. And so, there's going to be a lot of investment in diversification as organizations shift from individual and regional sole suppliers. That means a need for more visibility into supply chains as well as the ability to anticipate and respond to nascent problems before they turn into crises. Long-term, here’s where artificial intelligence will help to handle uncertainty and systemic risk. Expect continuous change from now on.

In her conversations, Koetzle said most of the executives she speaks with about these topics grasp the need for change and don’t dismiss the COVID-related shifts as transitory.

“I was surprised to the degree that I haven’t had to do too much arguing,” she said. “There have been enough strange events that were described as once-in-a-century events that now occur every couple of years – like a storm in Texas that knocks out the energy grid or really strong rains or droughts or ships getting stuck in the Suez Canal. You get a lot of companies and people in positions of authority saying, “I see lots of evidence that things are happening in discontinuous ways, so the impetus to go back to the way things were isn’t as strong.”

“The message is getting through,” she said.