Tata Communications launches ‘Secure Connected Digital Experience’

The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses around the world to adapt suddenly to survive the huge disruption to everyday life. With many countries now emerging cautiously from lockdown, businesses are looking to redesign and restructure their operations for a transformed landscape.

Tata Communications’ SCDx proposition is intended to meet this growing, worldwide demand for new ways of operating, which includes far higher levels of working from home, rising security risks, a shift to digital commerce and more contactless experiences for employees, customers and supply chain partners. It will help companies currently relying on short-term fixes, such as consumer-grade applications or employees’ home broadband connections, by providing holistic, secure, enterprise-level digital solutions that address current challenges and are fit for the long term.

The SCDx proposition consists of three offerings:

• Tata Communications Secure Connected Digital Workplace enables enterprise employees (those typically working from the office as well as those working in the field), to work seamlessly and securely from anywhere through industrialised, scalable and high performance remote workplace solutions for complete workplace readiness.
• Tata Communications Digital Customer Experience Platform recreates the in-store experience online for B2C companies, with the next generation of enterprise commerce and video collaboration solutions for superior digital customer engagement.
• As supply chains become increasingly digital and transparent, SCDx will enable the supply chain ecosystem with secure access to enterprise core applications and significantly improved performance for third parties.

A.S Lakshminarayanan, MD and CEO, Tata Communications says, “COVID-19 is acting as a catalyst and accelerator of business transformation. In recent months, millions of employees have experienced working from home, consumers have embraced digital shopping and delivery, and businesses have adapted to doing more, virtually. These changes have created a new reality and we are not going back to how things were done before.

As enterprises shift from focusing on business continuity to business recovery and growth, they urgently need to rethink their digital strategies and transform themselves to prosper in this digital-first ecosystem. With Secure Connected Digital Experience, our goal is to enable enterprises to adopt new digital working models, accelerate their time to market and drive agility and resilience, giving them the tools to innovate, invent, and redefine their employee, customer and supply chain experience.”

Within the Tata Communications Secure Connected Digital Workplace offering, Tata Communications will provide a range of services to enterprises looking to enhance and safeguard the employee experience. It will provide secure and high-performance, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) through a partnership with NetFoundry, a subsidiary of Tata Communications. The zero-trust solution provides employees secure access to applications and data in the cloud, regardless of location, device or broadband connectivity, with 3-10X performance acceleration. This is vital for companies who want to digitally transform and embrace higher levels of remote working but need confidence that employees can access documents and apps securely and with an enterprise-grade experience, even on their home broadband connection.

Tata Communications Secure Connected Digital Workplace solution will also offer enterprise-grade collaboration and security solutions, ensuring that dispersed teams can collaborate without compromise, with seamless features like video, voice, messaging, etc. as well as secure access to applications behind enterprise firewalls to boost innovation, productivity and efficiency.

Through its connected employee solution, it will provide IOT-based employee health and safety wearables and SafePass^TM smart ID cards, which enable effective social distancing, employee tracing and other safety norms, while enhancing worker wellbeing and minimising workplace risks in an industrial or campus setup.

NetFoundry was a key enabler in the digital transformation of FWD Insurance, one of the leading and fastest growing insurers in the Asia Pacific, providing FWD with a cloud-native, zero trust, software-only platform for FWD's cloud access use cases. When COVID-19 hit, FWD used the same platform to extend the secure access service edge (SASE) architecture for simple, zero trust remote access, while providing a high-quality end user experience for internal users and supply chain partners.

Shilpa Tumma, Business Information Security Officer, FWD said, “NetFoundry’s cloud-native connectivity has been the perfect match to aid FWD on our digital transformation and cloud-native application journey. In the current pandemic situation, although our usage has multiplied, NetFoundry easily scaled to cater to our demands to facilitate work from home in a few simple clicks, for both internal users and external parties. The solution helps us create AppWANs with zero trust micro-segmentation. NetFoundry multiplies the throughput by 3 to 4 times, giving the best user experience even for very huge file transfers.”