Transform to survive
Networking hardware colossus Cisco is helping businesses face disruption in technology to stay relevant, writes Balqis Lim
our children don’t want to own a car as they think it’s really wasteful for something to sit in the garage or parking lot 95 per cent of the time.”
However, discontinuity also creates an opportunity to move forward, and create something new, as well as change organisations.
Citing Kyoto in Japan, Suzuki said the city has transformed and embraced technology to modernise and change with the help of Cisco’s innovation.
With 80 million people visiting Kyoto every year, strategically-located smart kiosks connect tourists with a concierge who can steer them to less congested attractions. This will enable the crowd to be evenly distributed.
Among the examples of the modernisation effort in Kyoto is smart street lighting to monitor foot traffic. The system automatically controls the brightness of the lights when and where it is needed most. With the use of special terminals that monitor multiple cameras, data can be compared simultaneously, making the city safer and smarter. Echoing Suzuki, Cisco’s senior vice president and chief of operations Irving Tan said as artificial intel- ligence and machine learning are transforming experiences for customers, the world is seeing a disruptive power of digitisation in terms of business models.
He cited an example in China where WeChat, often viewed as a social media platform, is also one of the largest purely digital banks.
“It is completely digital, disrupting a well-established institution of financial payments. It supports one billion monthly users and processes more transactions than the entire amount of credit and debit cards in China.
“This shows how even traditional industries like the financial industry can be disrupted and transformed, and the scale and speed at which it is happening,” he said.
That disruption and speed are only going to get even faster with two changes that are happening on the horizon.
“The introduction of 5G networks and WiFi 6 will open unprecedented possibilities,” said Tan.
But as this happens, he explained, it also exposes organisations to more threats and data breaches. Organisations undergoing digitisation need to do it safely and securely.
A recent Cisco study across the Asia Pacific region involving 11 countries found that enterprises have to deal with 10,000 threats daily of which most organisations said they are only equipped to handle 50 per cent of those threats.
“It also requires us to have a different mindset towards security. Away from just pure prevention to rapid detection, which means security has to be applied everywhere and built into the entire digitisation framework.
“Being cybersafe is not a responsibility
It is all about the shared economy, optimising assets and on-demand experiences today.
Miyuki Suzuki