Julie Brill of Microsoft. Handout photo.

Today's world of digital transformation requires more than “flipping a switch” as companies find themselves facing an unprecedented level of legal and compliance risk, according to a new blog post by Julie Brill, deputy general counsel at Microsoft Corp. and head of its privacy and regulatory affairs group.

That's why Brill said Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft released a free new book to guide CEOs and their legal counsel, “Digital Transformation in the Cloud: What Enterprise Leaders and Their Legal and Compliance Advisors Need to Know.” The book was co-authored by Brill, a former Federal Trade Commission commissioner, and Rich Sauer, deputy general counsel in charge of Microsoft's global corporate and legal affairs team.

Certainly legal and business leaders are not naive, and they will spot the book's commercial aspects as the Microsoft name appears repeatedly in the context of trust and security in data handling. But there's more to the book than that.

For starters, it has an almost layperson's approach to techie terms, explaining the most important ones that anyone who wants to survive in a digital world should know.

It goes on to provide a blueprint for the world's new industrial revolution, which it prefers to call the “digital transformation.”

As Brill put it in her blog, organizations of every size can sense the impact of digital transformation on their strategy and operations. “Deeper knowledge of customers. Access to new markets. Fresh ways for employees to share ideas and work in collaborative teams. A dramatic acceleration in the pace of research, development and innovation,” to name a few.

The book discusses seven customer case studies from organizations that have undergone their own digital transformations, including Great Britain's Ministry of Defence, Bank of America Corp. and the state of Indiana.

It also liberally sprinkles in historical transformation lessons learned the hard way from companies like Ford Motor Co., Marriott International Inc., Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and others.

The book goes on to outline five areas it says are critical to understanding what lies ahead. They are:

• How digital transformation inevitably leads enterprises to the cloud.
• What enterprise leaders and the legal compliance community need to know about cybersecurity.
• The right approach to compliance with legal frameworks like the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and other security and privacy regulations.
• How standards help to achieve compliance in the cloud.
• Ways to advocate and help build “a trusted, responsible and inclusive cloud that evenly shares the opportunities of technology.”