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Asia Pacific
Navigating the Storm: Key Technological Capabilities to Master
Organizations, big and small, have entered a potentially long and perfect storm. Leaders of these enterprises are facing a confluence of structural uncertainty - geopolitical, economic, and existential - each reinforcing the other. Nevertheless, for most enterprises, this is an opportune time to focus on strengthening core competencies and becoming more efficient. Besides building resiliency in their business model, navigating successfully through the turbulence will require maturing and mastering technology capabilities in three key areas – data-driven decisions, automation at scale, and zero-trust security.
With increasing market and competitive pressures, access to the right data at the right time is critical to delivering exceptional customer experiences as well as providing valuable business insights
With increasing market and competitive pressures, access to the right data at the right time is critical to delivering exceptional customer experiences as well as providing valuable business insights. However, data that is complete, current, and accurate is imperfectly accessible in most organizations. Real-time decisions and actions require data hosted in multiple locations, stored in different formats, and sometimes only available through intermediaries under restrictive conditions. Combined with data privacy and regulatory requirements, addressing these challenges requires rethinking where and how data is captured, processed, and stored.
A data architecture that supports consistent data capabilities across the organization’s network –on-premises and multiple cloud environments–is needed. The right data should be available “on the tap” at the right time and in the right place.
There should be no expensive movement of data to perform analytics; different business units should own and manage their data without having to consolidate platforms, and decisions can be made more real-time and closer to the point of interaction or engagement. Much of this must be achieved while continuing to maintain enterprise-grade data governance, privacy, and trust.
In March 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 6 million people deceased due to Covid-19 pandemic-related issues, while millions of others are dealing with the long-term effects of the pandemic. This and the emergence of new variants is continuing to cause major workforce disruptions, particularly in the manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare sector. Both employers and employees are dealing with challenges related to immigration disruptions, the shift in workers’ expectations, and mental health issues. Labor volatility is having a direct impact on organizational productivity, economic growth, and probably, society as a whole.
Automation is a viable solution to mitigate risks associated with labor uncertainties and talent supply. The infusion of AI enables the scaling of automation in industries forced to rely on a reduced workforce, or intentionally trying to minimize human interaction. However, this becomes complex in a hybrid world where different parts of a single application or service reside in multiple cloud environments, in a data center on-premises, or at the edge. Managing the processes and resources across these different physical locations and optimizing the performance of the hybrid application to deliver on the expected service level can be challenging.
When the pandemic began, millions of employees started to work from home and are continuing to do so. Every work-from-home employee hybrid worker connecting remotely represents an expansion of an organization’s attack surface and creates new openings for threat actors. Perimeter-centric security models cannot cope with the dynamic nature of this incredibly large attack surface. In addition, these attacks move fast and infect machines in seconds. The problem is exasperated with multiple different security tools in the organization that generate alerts on the same attack, making it difficult to understand the incident
Organizations need to modernize their threat detection and response capability. Silos need to be eliminated to gain visibility across data sources – from the cloud to core systems. Workflows must be unified without the need to pivot between tools. With the zero-trust security approach, every person, device, and application is blocked from accessing every part of the network until the person, device, and applications are all authorized. This strategy, combined with automation and AI, will empower organizations to continuously monitor for attacks, accurately detect threats, and rapidly orchestrate a response to contain, remediate and recover from security attacks.
Strengthening core capabilities in data, automation, and security is critical to enabling companies to better serve their customers and find new sources of value during this period of change and uncertainty. The above competencies are also the foundation for accelerating innovation by leveraging other exponential technologies like 5G, edge computing, Web3, and quantum computing. They are equally important to support new business imperatives like sustainability. These are extraordinary times, and it is important that we consciously and purposefully rethink architectural and technology decisions, not just to weather the storm but to come out better and stronger
