Global businesses are forecast to spend $10 trillion on digital transformation in the five years to 2025, capitalizing on rapid technological developments that are reshaping every corner of the corporate world. While digitalization is game-changing, it comes with risks, challenges and obligations that must be understood and navigated to succeed. Globally, complex laws and regulations are leading to significant legal obligations around digital responsibility for companies – which often diverge, rather than converge, across various jurisdictions. These laws extend significant duties and expectations to boards and senior leadership to ensure adequate oversight and governance in this area. In 2022, it is a business imperative to employ the right strategy to deal with these risks and obligations. ‘Going Digital’ Versus Digitalization There is often confusion between a company ‘going digital’ and digitalization. Implementing new technologies in a siloed manner, without consideration of the business-wide implications, can lead to major negative repercussions for the most senior leadership of an organization. Digitalization – the application of digital technologies to transform business activities, processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage the opportunities from technology and data – encompasses companies’ procurement, deployment and use of such technologies. It also includes businesses developing, selling or licensing out these technologies. This could be for internal use or customer-facing purposes, making it relevant to all companies, regardless of sector. Businesses in Asia, and globally, are seeking a competitive edge and digitalizing at breakneck speed, a trend that has been accelerated by the global pandemic. Fifty-five per cent of products and services are at least partly digitalized today, compared with only 35 per cent in 2019, prior to...