• About
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
    Login
  • Management Leadership
    • Growth Strategies
    • Finance
    • Operations
    • Sales and Marketing
    • Careers
  • Technology
    • Infrastructure and Platforms
    • Business Applications and Databases
    • Big Data, Analytics and Intelligence
    • Security
  • Industry Verticals
    • Finance and Insurance
    • Manufacturing
    • Logistics and Transportation
    • Retail and Wholesale
    • Hospitality and Tourism
    • Government and Public Services
    • Utilities
    • Media and Telecommunications
  • Resources
    • Whitepapers
    • PodChats
    • Videos
  • Events
No Result
View All Result
  • Management Leadership
    • Growth Strategies
    • Finance
    • Operations
    • Sales and Marketing
    • Careers
  • Technology
    • Infrastructure and Platforms
    • Business Applications and Databases
    • Big Data, Analytics and Intelligence
    • Security
  • Industry Verticals
    • Finance and Insurance
    • Manufacturing
    • Logistics and Transportation
    • Retail and Wholesale
    • Hospitality and Tourism
    • Government and Public Services
    • Utilities
    • Media and Telecommunications
  • Resources
    • Whitepapers
    • PodChats
    • Videos
  • Events
No Result
View All Result
No Result
View All Result
Home Technology Big Data, Analytics & Intelligence

Investment priorities for APAC businesses in 2023

Karan Bajwa by Karan Bajwa
December 19, 2022
Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sticky-notes-on-board-3782235/

Photo by Polina Zimmerman from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sticky-notes-on-board-3782235/

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.

Related:  Spending more on cybersecurity does not up your protection
Tags: 2023 PredictionscybersecurityGoogle Cloud
Karan Bajwa

Karan Bajwa

Karan Bajwa was appointed Vice President for Google Cloud in APAC in January 2021. He leads all revenue and go-to-market operations for Google Cloud, including Google Cloud Platform and Google Workspace (Gmail, Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drive, Meet) across all APAC markets. Google Cloud’s field sales, partner and customer engineering organizations also report to him. He is based in Singapore. Bajwa first joined Google Cloud in March 2020 as Managing Director for India. A senior leader with over three decades of leadership experience, he previously served as managing director for India and South Asia at IBM. Prior to IBM, he worked with Microsoft for nine years, his last role being the managing director for the company’s operations in India. He has also worked with Cisco Systems in India and Singapore. Karan holds a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Guru Nanak Engineering College, Punjab University, Ludhiana.

No Result
View All Result

Recent Posts

  • Agentic AI-powered AppSec platform launched for the AI era
  • IDC forecasts GenAI alone will grow at a 59.2% CAGR
  • Dataiku brings new AI capabilities to create and control AI agents
  • Microsoft reveals the rise of a new kind of organisation in the AI era
  • St Luke’s ElderCare enhances data security and user experience with Juniper

Live Poll

Categories

  • Big Data, Analytics & Intelligence
  • Business Applications & Databases
  • Business-IT Alignment
  • Careers
  • Case Studies
  • CISO
  • CISO strategies
  • Cloud, Virtualization, Operating Environments and Middleware
  • Computer, Storage, Networks, Connectivity
  • Corporate Social Responsibility
  • Customer Experience / Engagement
  • Cyber risk management
  • Cyberattacks and data breaches
  • Cybersecurity careers
  • Cybersecurity operations
  • Education
  • Education
  • Finance
  • Finance & Insurance
  • FutureCISO
  • General
  • Governance, Risk and Compliance
  • Government and Public Services
  • Growth Strategies
  • Hospitality & Tourism
  • HR, education and Training
  • Industry Verticals
  • Infrastructure & Platforms
  • Insider threats
  • Latest Stories
  • Logistics & Transportation
  • Management Leadership
  • Manufacturing
  • Media and Telecommunications
  • News Stories
  • Operations
  • Opinion
  • Opinions
  • People
  • Process
  • Remote work
  • Retail & Wholesale
  • Sales & Marketing
  • Security
  • Tactics and Strategies
  • Technology
  • Utilities
  • Videos
  • Vulnerabilities and threats
  • White Papers

Strategic Insights for Chief Information Officers

FutureCIO is about enabling the CIO, his team, the leadership and the enterprise through shared expertise, know-how and experience - through a community of shared interests and goals. It is also about discovering unknown best practices that will help realize new business models.

Quick Links

  • Videos
  • Resources
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Cxociety Media Brands

  • FutureIoT
  • FutureCFO
  • FutureCIO

Categories

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use
  • Cookie Policy

Copyright © 2022 Cxociety Pte Ltd | Designed by Pixl

Login to your account below

or

Not a member yet? Register here

Forgotten Password?

Fill the forms bellow to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Management Leadership
    • Growth Strategies
    • Finance
    • Operations
    • Sales and Marketing
    • Careers
  • Technology
    • Infrastructure and Platforms
    • Business Applications and Databases
    • Big Data, Analytics and Intelligence
    • Security
  • Industry Verticals
    • Finance and Insurance
    • Manufacturing
    • Logistics and Transportation
    • Retail and Wholesale
    • Hospitality and Tourism
    • Government and Public Services
    • Utilities
    • Media and Telecommunications
  • Resources
    • Whitepapers
    • PodChats
    • Videos
  • Events
Login

Copyright © 2022 Cxociety Pte Ltd | Designed by Pixl

Subscribe