Placing the right bets to go on the offensive in the digital era
Spending on digital technology by organisations in Asia Pacific (Apac) will grow at 3.5 times the economy in 2023, predicts market intelligence firm International Data Corp. Those technologies can help organisations take an offensive digital strategy by optimising operations, addressing current and future business needs, and allowing them to redefine the next decade of the business.
Networks is one area that Apac businesses should look to enhance this year to support the new way of working. A recent study by telecommunications networking solutions supplier Ciena reveals that many Apac business professionals believe their organisations will move away from static collaboration environments to more immersive/virtual reality-based platforms in just three years. They can also foresee the metaverse becoming part of existing work practices.
“To tap into the metaverse opportunity, organisations need to be supported by a robust underlying network, fortified with adaptive technologies that can support the ultra-low latency and high bandwidth that enhanced and virtual reality demands,” says Madhusudan Pandya, Ciena’s senior advisor of international market development.
Network security should also be a priority due to the rise of cyber threats and the consequences on business reputation and customer loyalty, states Chris Rezentes, Lumen Technologies’ director of product management (network practice) for Asia Pacific. “It is likely that we will see a growing interest for SASE [secure access service edge] amongst Apac organisations to transform, simplify and secure their networks. They must look towards working with technology partners with network and security expertise, while also having experience in implementing and managing cloud environments. This will allow the business to move faster, innovate quicker and stay ready to capture new opportunities,” he adds.
Meanwhile, Amit Dhingra, executive vice president of network services at IT infrastructure and services company NTT Ltd, foresees increasing adoption of software-defined intelligent networks — with the added benefits of AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) and automation — among Apac organisations. “Businesses should be taking the opportunity to use the network device life cycle process to transform the network architecture for increasing use of analytics and AI. Network visibility and data analytics will be a big trend in the coming two years.
“AIOps allows more accurate control and operation of networks, especially during a period of disaggregation of multi-vendor network offerings. Apac organisations will also consider using the networkas-a-service model this year to consume and pay for only what they need while gaining access to the latest technology trends,” he says.
Using the cloud to help green operations
Many Apac organisations are now using the cloud to enhance their operational efficiencies and gain business agility. They should also leverage the cloud to meet their sustainability goals, suggests Conor McNamara, managing director for Asean at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
He says: “AWS sees the cloud as an accelerator of innovation on the path to net-zero carbon, helping organisations innovate, reduce energy use and emissions, as well as monitor their environmental footprint. A recent study by 451 Research notes that cloud computing is five times more energy-efficient than on-premises data centres in Asia Pacific and Japan, and a business that migrates its on-premise IT to the cloud can reduce its energy use and carbon emissions by nearly 80%. We now see companies of all sizes demarcating a position in their markets by using the cloud to reduce their carbon footprint and achieve sustainable outcomes for the communities in which they operate.”
Chris Chelliah, senior vice president of technology and customer strategy for JAPAC (Japan and Apac) at Oracle, shares the same sentiment. He explains: “Beyond its inherent business benefits, the cloud offers a more sustainable alternative for companies looking to minimise their environmental impact. We thus also expect organisations to look for data centres which can deliver a sustainable computing platform that is efficient, renewable, and aligned with the circular economy. At Oracle, we manage and maintain a very dense computing environment, attaining much higher utilisation rates than an organisation can achieve with an on-premises system. As a result, Oracle Cloud further reduces its environmental footprint by leveraging state-of-the-art cooling and energy efficiency technologies at our green data centres.”
Getting the most from data analytics
Despite generating unprecedented volumes of data from their digital operations and customer touchpoints, many organisations struggle to unlock the full value of that data. This is because they are using a multitude of disparate solutions, causing data to often be trapped in silos across different environments. “In order to aggregate all the data for analysis, it needs to be done via a single platform that enables analytics at scale and built with a layer of security. Therefore, organisations must be intentional in selecting tools that can eliminate data silos to accelerate time to insights,” says Wing Leong Ho, vice president of solutions engineering for Asia Pacific at hybrid data company Cloudera.
He advises Apac organisations to first leverage modern data architectures like a data lakehouse, data fabric and data mesh to house the data that exist across various platforms. These new architectures not only help to manage data that exist on-premises, public and private clouds, but are also intrinsically designed to handle complexities — such as security and governance-related issues — addressing the common concerns of IT teams when it comes to allowing access to organisational data.
Organisations should then consider moving to hybrid data platforms that can manage the entire life cycle of data analytics and machine learning. “The platforms
must have features of openness and interoperability that allow ease of sharing and enable self-serve functionality — such as the Cloudera Data Platform, which has a built-in shared data experience feature, giving businesses a common metadata, security, and governance model across all their data,” says Ho.
Next, the platforms need to be complemented by a well-defined data strategy framework to further industrialise the development, production and operationalisation of data applications — including AI-powered ones — and extend it across their business faster and more reliably.
Organisations should also consider the systems that they are using. Ho shares: “Building systems such as an adaptive AI system could help organisations distil more benefits, and we anticipate more effort to be put into building it. With the increasing demand for real-time data processing, streaming, and sharing to power data-driven organisations, having an adaptive AI system that adjusts to changes and variances quickly — especially when fed with a large amount of data at frequent intervals — will be beneficial for businesses to make faster and flexible decisions.”
Gavin Barfield, Salesforce’s vice president of Asean solution engineering, encourages Apac organisations to adopt low- or no-code analytics tools to go from insight to decision to action quickly. “Such tools empower employees from non-traditional data roles to derive insights from data directly, without prior coding knowledge. In 2023, we expect to see more business users take up such tools to save valuable time and reduce the workload of their data science teams. The democratisation of insight will allow everyone across the organisation to contribute to the decision-making process and drive the business forward with agility,” he explains.
Faced with storms of disruption brought about by labour shortage, supply chain dynamics, inflation and the risk of recession, Apac organisations need to drive digital-first strategies and continue investing in technologies — like the cloud, networks and analytics — to become more resilient and agile. As prior downturns have shown, industry leaders that boldly invest in initiatives that matter are those that can accelerate in downturns.