What Is a Digital Business?

Digital Business

A digital business is any business that embraces digital transformation to improve its internal and external processes to deliver better value to its customers. Whether they’re using AI chatbots to speed response times for common customer questions or leveraging customer data to deliver tailored experiences to end users of their products and services, digital businesses maintain their competitive edge through technology.

What are the Benefits of Being a Digital Business?

Common benefits of adopting a digital business model include: 

• Increased productivity through automation
• Enhanced data collection for improved business intelligence
• Improved resource management
• Streamlined communication and collaboration
• Tighter customer feedback loops
• Data-driven decision-making

Put all of these together and you have a business that’s agile and resilient enough to adapt to rapidly evolving markets.

Digital Business Strategy

Developing a digital business strategy takes more than just keeping up with the latest technology trends. It’s about strategically integrating new technologies into your products, services, and operations as they make sense to your business. 

A solid digital business strategy should look at how technology can be used to impact three key business areas: 

• Business models: How can technology be used to create a new market category or improve an existing business model? For example, Uber reimagined taxi services as a peer-to-peer service app. 
• Operations: Are there any software tools that could help streamline business operations such as order tracking, supply chain management, or version control systems? 
• Customer experience: Are there any customer touchpoints that could be improved with digital technologies? For example, using an AI chatbot to augment an FAQ section.

Digital Business Models

A big part of becoming a digital business is to embrace digital transformation by adopting a customer-centric, technology-driven business model. Examples of popular digital business models include: 

• Everything as a service (XaaS): This diverse digital business model replaces one-time purchases with subscriptions to services accessible via the cloud. Software as a service (SaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and other subscription services operate on the principle of delivering quality on-demand access to a product, service, or resource 24x7. For resources such as storage as a service), digital technology allows for metering of usage, giving customers granular control and agility over their expenditures. 
• Peer-to-peer services: The idea behind peer-to-peer services is to provide the platform through which individuals can offer and consume a shared resource. Whether that’s renting a car through Turo, ridesharing through Uber, or sharing your spare bedroom through Airbnb, peer-to-peer services are one of the most popular examples of what digital transformation is all about. 
• Multichannel retail: This business model allows organizations to expand their selling options beyond traditional brick-and-mortar stores. Ecommerce stores, social media, online marketplaces, and affiliate programs allow retailers to sell and market to customers across multiple channels, expanding their reach. 
• Open source + for profit: By open-sourcing your software, you can build an active developer community around your technology and services. When paired with another for-profit business model, you gain the benefit of free access to crowd-sourced technical expertise, distribution, and marketing. Businesses that build their software off your technology will also potentially become your largest customers. 

There are many other kinds of digital business solutions. The idea behind them is to reimagine how technology can help your organization better serve your customers.

Common Obstacles to Digital Transformation

While the advantages of digital transformation are obvious, there’s a good reason so many organizations struggle with effectively implementing a digital business strategy. Common obstacles to digital transformation include:

• Lack of dedicated IT talent
• Inflexible business culture and organizational structure
• Legacy technology infrastructure
• Inefficient business processes

At the core of these obstacles is a general lack of data mobility. Organizations often operate as siloed departments, each with its own data management and reporting practices. Digital transformation requires cross-organization cooperation, which can be difficult when information isn’t easily accessible or shareable across an organization. Consolidating legacy storage can help give businesses the data mobility they need to implement real digital business strategies.

Kick-Start Your Digital Transformation Today with Pure as-a-Service™

As a leading provider of all-flash file, block, and object storage, Pure Storage® is uniquely positioned to help you build a solid data storage solution (both hardware and software) for your organization’s digital transformation initiatives. 

Pure as-a-Service is a storage-as-a-service (STaaS) platform that unifies on-premises and public-cloud storage resources into a single data storage subscription that delivers a true hybrid-cloud experience. Our leading IT experts can help tailor a data storage solution to your business, giving you the data mobility, scalability, and performance you need to grow your digital business.