Amid global headwinds, Singapore faces significant workforce disruption as it continues to strive to compete internationally. For one, although retrenchments fell in the second quarter of this year, it was preceded by increases for three consecutive quarters.
Indeed, retrenchments aren’t the only concern. For instance, EY notes that Singapore faces multifaceted and complex challenges. The research firm highlights hurdles that range from investment in talent required for the next phase of growth, to encouraging upskilling in line with industry needs, and preparing the future workforce.
In the face of these perils, Singapore-based businesses must be wary of the fact that workplace disruption has significant repercussions for data security. This upheaval, marked by abrupt jolts and rapidly evolving trends, can derail business success if matters like data security are not taken seriously.
The first port of call should be measures that eliminate careless mistakes, such as employees saving content to their personal drives. More importantly, organisations need to equip themselves with technology that can secure data without sacrificing seamless workflows.
Data security and manoeuvring workforce dynamism
A recent study by Rocket Software found that 37% of corporate IT professionals are concerned with data being saved and shared on employees’ personal hard drives, underscoring the clear and present danger to data security.
While this is especially worrisome when an employee and an organisation parts ways, this practice is also at risk from cyberthreats that could jeopardise sensitive, classified, or critical information saved to their personal drive. Mission-critical information will be extremely vulnerable to a whole host of threats that can leave them at the mercy of malicious actors.
Everything, from trade secrets to customer data and financial information, can be put at risk when not stored and secured properly. Not only are organisations in hot water if data breaches were to occur, but likewise customers will feel the impact – which, depending on the type of data, could even put them in danger. Additionally, productivity obstacles can arise when crucial data is kept on personal devices, even more so when an employee leaves the company.. If organisations tempt fate by not taking data management seriously, they are actively risking their relationships with customers, the reputation of their business, as well as their financial wellbeing.
Competitiveness and compliance
As organisations strive to cover all their bases and act based on good information, their data grows more voluminous. Naturally, this will mean they must manage more data along with more business applications, all while adhering to dynamic industry regulations both locally and abroad. This can put businesses at considerable risk via greater vulnerability to security breaches, lost data, and regulatory infractions. The IT professionals in charge of managing enterprise data and information — especially those in large organisations — will inevitably feel the heat from this.
In the same Rocket Software study, the majority of corporate IT and line-of-business professionals in organisations with 1,000-4,999 employees shared that they are extremely or very concerned about how their content management systems integrate with other business applications. Other leading concerns include migrating critical data and information away from legacy to more modern systems, and managing the widespread user adoption of content management systems and metadata classification.
All of these concerns are exacerbated by the current workforce landscape, which is more febrile than ever. As a consequence, IT leaders are rightly concerned about the vulnerability of their data. One of the ways to address these risks is to bridge mainframe, distributed, and cloud tools with a single technology fabric. This approach unifies and governs critical business data and information.
Supporting IT leaders mitigate risks
At the heart of what drives businesses to choose a content management solution is its ability to safeguard and secure valuable and sensitive company information. Our survey, in fact, found that security of a content management system was the top factor for two-thirds of respondents.
With workforce disruption complicating efforts to effectively undertake corporate data governance, organisations need to remove silos and facilitate their ability to draw insights from data swiftly. Businesses need to evaluate what factors are obstructing them from achieving this. The help of domain experts can make a crucial difference, as it enables organisations to develop strategies and implement tailored content management solutions that reduce operational costs, improve data access, mitigate compliance risk, and improve customer experiences.
Often businesses are guilty of believing that modernisation means having to scrap their entire digital ecosystem. This couldn’t be further from the truth, regardless of whether the organisation is using the mainframe, cloud or something in between. Content management solutions are designed to integrate with companies’ current technologies with the aim of minimising disruption. In addition to securing data, content management solutions expand the scope of digital transformation, helping businesses explore new opportunities in the workforce, without it coming at the expense of compliance, employee productivity, and efforts to streamline business operations. As a result, businesses will be free of the stress that comes from employees failing to store or save data properly, which positions the organisation to navigate disruption adroitly.
