With more than 20 years of experience spanning sales, market, and business development, Raen is responsible for driving revenue growth across key markets in the region. She is passionate about using technology to help organizations move forward in their digitization journey and realize outstanding business outcomes.

During my career, meeting with fellow business leaders, CTOs, and CISOs across Asian tech hubs has provided valuable insights into how they manage to stay ahead of adversaries while simultaneously fostering innovation. These conversations revealed three salient points about how Asian businesses are reshaping their strategies to succeed in the long run.

AI/ML becomes a Top Priority

Internal constraints as well as macro factors have made adopting and implementing AI/ML into a key strategy, and advantage, for businesses in Asia. A surge in data volume and tech talent shortage have propelled these technologies to the forefront.

Data generated from distributed environments is often fragmented, making it complex for organizations to extract meaningful insights from them. To address this challenge, businesses are leveraging AI/ML as an effective solution to cluster complex information streams. This enables more success in threat detection and task automation, reducing the strenuous manual intervention required to manage distributed data.

Before the hype around generative AI, AI, and ML had already been a part of cybersecurity teams’ toolkits, empowering them with enhanced threat detection, analysis, and response. These technologies are now also playing an important role in observability, addressing the challenges of growing complexity and scale within the enterprise infrastructure. Leaders are also starting to recognize that the deployment of AI/ML technologies with 'human-in-the-loop' support enhances their teams’ effectiveness. Connecting domain expertise to relevant information helps accelerate human decision-making.

The Significance of Total Visibility in Building Digital Resilience

In today’s ever-connected world, a surge in streams of information increases the risk of a data deluge. If not handled effectively, this can present challenges in achieving complete visibility across infrastructure and application stacks.

This phenomenon has become more commonplace as organizations move towards edge computing, as it is a more convenient option that brings data transfer and storage closer to the source, thereby reducing delays. However, organizing large quantities of data emanating from disparate sources increases operating costs and impacts productivity.

To be digitally resilient, organizations must invest in tools that can help collect, distribute, and analyze the data across physical or virtual, IT and OT environments, securing end-to-end visibility. This plays an important role in reducing the chance of unplanned downtime due to infrastructure outages and even ransomware. When it comes to downtime, the stakes are high. Splunk’s Digital Resilience report reveals that each hour of downtime can cost an organization around US $365,000, so within a year an organization can expect to face an average of US $87 million in downtime costs from losses in productivity and revenue.  

Investing in complete visibility can empower businesses to surpass their existing capabilities and reach newer heights in efficiency, customer experience, and security.

Breaking Down Silos

Fragmented teams and complex environments are a common set of challenges for organizations across Asia. Overcoming these constraints calls for the adoption of unified and integrated solutions, where data, tools, and user experiences across hybrid environments are consolidated and allow users to operate at scale. A unified platform, incorporated with workflow automation tools, enhances productivity for security, ITOps, and engineering teams and simplifies collaboration.

Collaboration breaks down barriers between teams and helps build and sustain business resilience. Our latest CISO report reasserted this fact, where security leaders recognized cross-team collaboration as an important extension of their security practices.

Building smoother cross-collaboration does take some time and effort but the benefits can be seen over time. Respondents from our CISO report observed that increased collaboration led to more than 35% improvement in visibility across attack surfaces as well as time spent on evaluating risks.

These three takeaways that have emerged from my engagement with the business community across Asia may appear to be obvious, but require full commitment from an organization, and is key to future success. As businesses experience a surge in growth and expansion, they must lean into unified solutions and leverage emerging technologies like AI to build long-term resilience while also innovating at scale.