We've all seen how the global pandemic has accelerated IT trends that were already well underway. To stay competitive, many are turning to digital transformation as the strongest path forward. In a recent Cisco-commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, Operational Agility is the New Imperative, 72% of participants said they will accelerate their efforts to digitally transform their business.

Organizations are also focused on increasing their agility to adapt to changing business conditions and increasing IT complexity. According to Forrester, 80% say their business processes will need to become more agile to adapt to changing business conditions.

But reimagining the fundamentals of your key business processes requires careful planning. To maintain the required security, compliance, and performance, you need a simple way to manage, configure, and automate your infrastructure. You also need data visibility and analytics insights across your infrastructure and functions.

What's slowing digital transformation?

Achieving the level of business agility you need isn't easy. According to Forrester, organizations face real challenges in ops automation initiatives, including:

• Integrating multiple toolsto support multiple platforms and services
• Data silosthat make collaboration and analytics difficult
• Outdated infrastructuretechnologies that aren't cloud-ready
• Tool complexitythat slows team productivity
• Isolated islands of automationthat make operations less efficient

Accelerating digital transformation requires more than overcoming technical challenges. To maximize adoption and get the full value of your investments, you need to implement your new solutions in a way that's simple, consistent, and secure. Above all, you need to provide an intuitive, engaging user experience to users.

Putting transformation on the fast track with a platform approach

Studies have shown that businesses across a variety of industries agree that a platform approach is key to driving digital transformation. A platform approach is based on the concept of bringing together platforms that will work well together, with greater common capabilities, more sharing of information, and an API-driven approach.

The Cisco Platform Suite embraces this approach, helping your organization connect, secure and automate to accelerate your digital agility in today's cloud-first world. It spans leading Cisco platforms, including Cisco security, networking, collaboration, small business, and data center solutions.

As part of a platform approach, each of these Cisco platforms retains its autonomy, but the platforms can more readily exchange data and capabilities, providing developers the opportunities to build richer, more integrated experiences. Cisco's Platform Suite delivers the power of our portfolio to organizations in a simplified, consistent, and seamless experience. At the same time, it helps you retain the flexibility you need to maximize your agility and ability to innovate.

From single sign-on capabilities to full-stack observability and cross-platform UI integration and APIs. From a cloud-native, built-in security platform experience to enterprise agreements. The Cisco Platform Suite helps you unlock the outcomes you most need today -and build on these platforms over time. It provides:

• Simple, secure access and easy onboarding
• Service configuration across multiple platforms
• End-to-end- visibility and assurance
• Risk mitigation superior cross-architecture security
• Easier ways to purchase

Take a closer look at what's needed

To gain further insight into some of the key challenges organizations like yours are facing on their digital transformation journey and see how a platform approach can help you accelerate operations across an increasingly hybrid work model, view our webinar "Accelerating Digital Agility to Move at the Pace of Business."  In the webinar I talk with Cisco SVP of Strategy & Operations for Enterprise Networking and Cloud, Kip Compton, and Forrester VP and Research Director, Glenn O'Donnell, about the latest IT Ops trends and recommendations from our recently commissioned Forrester Consulting Operational Maturity Study.