1. What’s the IT roadmap of Nissan Digital?. Within your organisation what is the most significant digital achievement of the past 12 months?
In this era of digital transformation or disruptive transformation, the key decision for a company is to decide where their data should be and how can it provide a scalable platform for onboarding resources. We are in the process of bringing-in technologies that work well with other applications, i.e the choice of bringing a tiger that works in lonesome versus a pack of wolves that works in a team. Some of the key achievements are migration of the traditional network to software-defined networks with hybrid transport technologies such as MPLS and leased lines and setting up of hybrid cloud architecture.
2. What are the technologies that will characterize the next phase of digital transformation at Nissan Digital?
In today’s world, companies are stepping into the digital transformation journey predominantly through cloud adoption for hosting applications, data storage, network etc. Cloud is the target in the digital landscape. One of the important steps we have taken is moving away from the traditional desktop/laptops to a scalable platform such as cloud-based workstation-as-a-Platform/VDI. To this point, a few technologies in the public cloud domains are being explored.
3. Since insiders have more access to information, what kind of processes do you have in place to prevent unauthorized use of information? How is Nissan Digital’s cybersecurity strategy going forward?
In this Industry 4.0 era, we talk about the technology that works in anywhere, any device, anytime and any OS platform, this is a challenge in terms of identity management, and it takes us to the Zero Trust model. The focus is on the identity management and vulnerability assessment of internal networks and applications. The data is very important, who is doing what on the data indeed matters. In that sense, log and audit record is very important in terms of compliance perspective.
4. With your experience of steering technology, can you please share some of the unique lessons learned?
Bringing a new technology is not the criteria, rather introducing a technology that blends well with the existing ecosystem and its capability in integrating with existing applications should be given due importance. The new technologies should be able to customize to the need of business and it should have the capability to expose API to talk with other applications or should provide the capability to re-write the codes to create modules to meet various business needs. The fundamental need of the IT landscape is innovating the latest technologies such as RPA for automating the mundane process and leverage AI/ML capabilities to drive business needs and break the siloed environments.