Keep running: Aligning technology with business continuity

Medium-size businesses form a major part of Asia’s economy – more t han 90 percent of businesses here are from this sector and they account for over half of the workforce, contributing significantly to both GDP and exports, according to Asia-pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC).

They are also one of the sectors hardest hit by the current situation. Already faced with skills shortages and difficulties in accessing capital funding, many do not have the technology in place to help them cut costs, automate processes and successfully adapt to supporting both employees and customers from a distance.

Fortunately, many have already started on a digital transformation journey. At the end of 2019, International Data Corporation (IDC) found that t wo-fifths of Asia’s smaller businesses were already executing strategic plans of action in this area, with a similar number planning to start. To help with this, many governments worldwide are pushing policies aimed to help SMBS weather the current business climate.

What can businesses do to stay afloat in the future?

Data is king

With digital taking precedence over physical footprints as friendly, faceto-face interactions are kept t o a minimum, data insight becomes the main way businesses can build customer trust, brand loyalty and maintain business. Every text, email, transaction or contact has the potential to speak volumes, especially if it can be real-time.

Providing corporates an entry into this area are cloud technologies that are making previously enterprise-only capabilities accessible t o the masses by their nature of being quickly and easily available and being highly affordable.

For example, Sunshine Holdings PLC is one of Sri Lanka’s leading diversified conglomerates, in operation over the last 50 years and has become a US $ 100 million company with a strong, energetic workforce of more than 10,000.

To s u p p o r t its growth plans, which included expanding its business operations, modernisation of applications and digital transformation, Sunshine was one of the early adopters of cloud in the region. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has helped the organisation to lower their CAPEX cost and increase flexibility and scalability of their IT platform.

Furthermore, Oracle Cloud’s predictive pricing and high performance has allowed Sunshine to maintain daily operations with close to zero downtime within the required budget.

Innovate (on the cloud) to live another day

While survival, rather than growth, is the priority for businesses in 2020, according to research from Gartner, innovation should stay in mind. In fact, periods of disruption are often the times to embrace opportunity as well as tackle challenges.

Businesses should leverage their agility, steadfastness and innovative heart to harness new tools for their business, where possible. Cloud can provide a viable test bed for businesses to develop, test and deploy new initiatives, such as an online ordering site. Through the right cloud infrastructure, organisations can speed up their dev/test and deploy cycles.

In times when businesses may be struggling with changing regulations, artificial intelligence (AI)powered digital assistants is a way to provide a form of business continuity t o customers and responding to questions with the likes of standard operating procedures or frequently asked questions. Human customer service agents can then prioritise answering feedback that the chatbots cannot answer.

Security risks aplenty

Security is another key area and one that challenges even the biggest organisations. No wonder, according t o the third annual Oracle and KPMG Cloud Threat Report, 92 percent of IT professionals say that they do not trust their organisation’s data centres are well prepared as compared to public cloud services. And with activities that were once fully secured behind corporate firewalls and security monitoring services, moving behind consumer routers, the challenges and risks have only grown.

Technology certainly does not solve all problems but can help businesses to be more adaptable both now and for our rapidly changing future. Cloud and other emerging technologies help give you ways to automate processes and allow you to keep your business open, communicate clearly, engagingly and transparently with customers, employees and stakeholders.

And as technology is helping you keep the lights on – you may now have more time to innovate (exploring other channels to do business for instance) to ensure that any digital transformation is far from lip service and will be essential to your business continuity.