Asia has been a tech-forward region and businesses are still hungry for transformation to gain an edge.
While 2023 looks uncertain, CEOs I speak to say their need for IT tools and technologies to help with their digital transformation hasn’t waned.
That said, they are prioritising. Spending isn’t going away, but it is shifting to focus on two priority areas that would be critical to staying ahead of future demands.
Strengthening security and resilience
The increased malicious activity we saw in 2022 is no surprise – and will only continue to grow in 2023. Coupled with growing regulation in sectors such as finance and government, businesses are turning to cloud services to strengthen their defences and close the cybersecurity risk gap.
In 2023, we can expect to see increased investment in IT modernisation, especially as malicious activity continues to rise in sophistication.
Defence in depth gives them the ability to protect against threats that one might be hard-pressed to detect with one’s own suite of tools.
With modernised IT environments, security will become a “built-in” element of infrastructures instead of an “add-on” – so even with short-term challenges, the long-term benefits of IT modernisation are paramount and key to mitigating evolving cyber threats.
Similarly, how responsive one is to a cybersecurity incident is also critical. Here, again, the cloud can help businesses scale to meet new threats quickly, by patching vulnerabilities across thousands of servers, cleaning up malicious code and preventing further damage.
Unifying data across multiple sources and platforms
Besides cybersecurity, senior leaders I speak to are also looking critically at how they can better understand and use data across their organisations.
Data is the most valuable asset in any digital transformation. Yet limits on data are still too common and prevent organisations from taking important steps forward — like launching a new digital business, understanding changes in consumer behaviour, or even utilising data to combat public health crises.
Data complexity is at an all-time high and as data volumes grow, data is becoming distributed across clouds, used in more workloads, and accessed by more people than ever before.
Companies that have already invested in AI and machine learning are looking to build more sophisticated AI/ML tools to give them an edge.
Many businesses are shifting priorities from new customer acquisition to deeper engagement with existing customers. Understanding their consumers better will be critical to unlocking incremental headroom for growth and delivering superior service and boosting revenue in the long term.
Here, cloud-native AI and ML tools are making a big difference for businesses across sectors, because they do not have to reinvent the wheel and develop new capabilities from scratch.
To give some examples of how it can be used, AI can enable advanced query understanding and produce better search results and recommendations. ML-powered object recognition can provide real-time results of similar or complementary items from a product catalogue.
Just as importantly, Recommendations AI can understand nuances behind customer behaviour, context, and SKU (stock-keeping unit) to boost engagement and get customers what they want. These tools are not science fiction but are ready-to-use tools that exist today.
For companies that do not have a team with strong coding expertise, their industry solutions are also readily available, fully managed, and ready to go. They don’t require users to pre-process data, train or hyper-tune ML models or worry about the infrastructure to handle unpredictable spikes.
Embracing openness will be key to success
In all of this, what will be critical as businesses move forward into 2023 is building on an open platform that frees them from vendor lock-in, and enables them to develop software faster, innovate more easily, and scale more efficiently — while also reducing technology risk.
The CEOs I speak to want autonomy and control over their data and infrastructure — and open, connected ecosystems are essential. We believe it’s going to be a defining differentiator for cloud providers going into the future.
Conclusion
Just as the cloud helped businesses adapt to the pandemic’s disruption, it will be a continued source of strength in the year ahead.
The leaders in a post-pandemic economy will be the ones that invest in and accelerate their cloud-first strategy, bolster their cybersecurity, and invest in an open data cloud strategy.
