Evolutionary vs. Revolutionary Growth: Striking a Balance at Sunbelt Rentals

Originally published by CXO REvolutionaries.

Written by JP Saini, CTO, Sunbelt Rentals, Inc.

Every enterprise knows the importance of extending seamless connectivity to customers and employees without compromising security. The objectives seem – and sometimes are – at odds with one another. Best practices are elusive, and leading organizations must forge their own paths to do it successfully.

Generally speaking, we can divide digital transformation strategies into two groups: revolutionary and evolutionary. A revolutionary strategy is one in which the scope of change is broad, the time required to implement it is short, and hopes for what it may accomplish are stratospheric. The global pandemic of 2020 forced many organizations into this approach.

An evolutionary strategy, on the other hand, involves stepwise enhancements leading to demonstrable improvements that are implemented reliably over time. These tend to be more “peacetime” initiatives designed to unfold over quarters or years.

Each strategy has its strengths and weaknesses. A revolutionary strategy, for instance, can lead to a dramatically more secure, connected enterprise – and all of the top-line benefits that it entails – in a short period. These projects can also be risky if key team members don’t feel as if they have been sufficiently familiarized with the underlying technologies and the change to business processes the revolutionary overhaul requires.

An evolutionary strategy can reduce that kind of risk because, given the comparatively moderate pace of change, it's easier for people, processes, and technologies to remain aligned throughout a business’s transformation. Still, an evolutionary strategy introduces its own risks, like the risk that the enterprise simply cannot respond quickly enough to urgent business developments.

When COVID-19 struck, it was clear that most enterprises would need something revolutionary – enact fundamentally more secure and nimble ways for delivering core services and data to remote employees. The existing technology already deployed for that scenario, VPNs, wasn’t sufficient either in terms of either scalability or security.

But not every external trigger is quite as dramatic as a pandemic. In many cases, an evolutionary approach is not just adequate, but better suited to the pace of change required. This approach allows for easy assessment along the way and careful course corrections that, over time, collectively ensure a highly refined IT and business ecosystem.

Creating a strategy customized for the enterprise context

Sunbelt Rentals has experienced many of the same challenges other companies face today. The company is a leading provider of tools, heavy machinery, HVAC solutions, and other equipment required to handle almost any job in almost any industry, from agriculture and construction to manufacturing and mining. To serve our customers, assets must be exceptionally well-distributed. Today, Sunbelt’s 18,000 employees are spread across more than 1,300 locations.

Like other enterprises, Sunbelt Rentals has been enabling new business goals and strategies, responding more quickly to competitive pressures, improving the customer experience at every level, and of course, securing services and data against threats.

So as the business started thinking a few years ago about how best to optimize our digital transformation, many things became pretty clear, pretty fast:

• Sunbelt needed next-gen security capable of handling all the threats we knew about and expected, plus all the threats we didn’t
• Security had to be baked into the architecture from the start, not bolted on top as an afterthought
• Security also had to be enforced in a consistent way via standard policies that worked the same way for every endpoint and network context
• IT had to scale to support remote workers, handle increased traffic from outsourced cloud services, and provide secure access for third-party business partners
• A smooth, frictionless user experience was key if we were to keep customers happy and avoid churn

Revolutions here, evolutions there: A hybrid approach

If this list sounds like a revolutionary strategy, it is – particularly the high pace of change to secure services and data during the pandemic. We also implemented zero trust architecture relatively rapidly, requiring rigorous authentication of all entities in a network transaction and limiting network access to necessary assets (instead of granting access to an entire network after authentication).

But our strategy is really best described as a hybrid because it also involves evolutionary aspects. Only around a quarter of the workforce are office-based workers. For field personnel, who must be on-site to service equipment, the process of rolling out new tech and processes was significantly more gradual.

There are also the physical assets of our rental business to consider. One particular shift in our industry has been to treat every such asset either as a smart asset by design, or an asset that can be made smart in a practical sense by adding sensors that collect and transmit data over an IP network. Once analyzed \the telematics data can create new business value, such as by tracking an asset’s performance and detecting when it requires maintenance (or soon will).

The data and its transmission, however, open up security concerns that require a new approach. A more gradual, evolutionary angle ensures we get it right from the start, and allows us to reflect our commitment to customer needs and expectations. We know our customers require their own business information to be comprehensively secured, and naturally, we see to it that it is.

Security, in this context, becomes a business enabler and a competitive advantage. Every time customers work with us to obtain the assets they need for business purposes, they can be confident their data won’t be leaked. Their trust in us and our security increases their interest in forging ongoing relationships rather than one-off projects with Sunbelt (rather than our competitors).

Growth requires reevaluation and reimplementation

As Sunbelt stepped boldly into the global market, it will continue to rely on IT and security modernization to deliver benefits in short order, especially in disciplines including supply chain management, logistics, and regulatory compliance across national boundaries.

Our goals and mission statement are the same everywhere we do business. But the things that change a lot as we use our business model in new markets. That, in turn, means we need to address new security ramifications. Sometimes, we can be satisfied with a slower, more evolutionary maturation and implementation of security. Other times, getting it done last year wouldn’t be fast enough. You want a revolution.

Sunbelt has shown it can get the quick fix needed to solve big problems while also reducing risks and making it more flexible across a large, diverse, and distributed workforce, client base, and asset pool. It does this without needing to start from scratch for every improvement.