Business Transformation Asia Issue 05

MARCH 2022

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A TOUGH BALANCING ACT Managing a distributed enterprise is more than just a technology issue.

It is also a people and process transformation challenge, including change management and process reengineering.

MAHADHIR AZIZ CEO, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation

ZUBIN KARKARIA CEO, VFS Global

SIVARAMAN GANESAN Global Head, Microsoft Business Unit, TCS

#

PRESENTS

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APR 23, 2022 M A K I N G B U S I N E SS S U S TA I N A B L E

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GET RID OF THE TUMOUR NOW MANAGING DIRECTOR Tushar Sahoo tushar@gecmediagroup.com CHIEF EDITOR Arun Shankar arun@gecmediagroup.com EDITOR Shubhendu Parth shubhendu@gecmediagroup.com CEO Ronak Samantaray ronak@gecmediagroup.com GLOBAL HEAD, CONTENT AND STRATEGIC ALLIANCES Anushree Dixit anushree@gecmediagroup.com EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR GEC MEDIA GROUP CO-FOUNDER, BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION ASIA Sundip Sibal Sundip@gecmediagroup.com GROUP SALES HEAD Richa S richa@gecmediagroup.com PROJECT MANAGER Anshuman Jyothiprakash anshuman@gecmediagroup.com EVENTS EXECUTIVE Gurleen Rooprai gurleen@gecmdiagroup.com Jennefer Lorraine Mendoza jennefer@gecmdiagroup.com SALES AND ADVERTISING Ronak Samantaray ronak@gecmediagroup.com DIGITAL TEAM Deepika Chauhan - Digital Content Lead Vijay Bakshi - IT Manager Hemant Bisht - SEO & Digital Marketing Analyst BUSINESS LEAD Ankit Vats ankit@gecmediagroup.com Ph: +91-9999756403 DESIGNED BY

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March 8 is an important day celebrated annually to mark women’s cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements. It also draws attention to gender inequality, lack of reproductive rights, and violence and abuse against women. As we review the status of women and their contribution to business and the economy in 2022, it comes as a shock that the share of female inventors among all applicants for international patents in 2021 stands at a meagre 17%.

From the Asia perspective, only the Philippines (38%) and China (24%) scored better than the global average of women patent applicants. Interestingly, the World Intellectual Property Organisation report lists Japan as very low amongst the developed nations, with only 10% of women inventors. The report also lists India and Indonesia amongst the lowest scoring nations in Asia.

The disparity in contribution towards economic activity between men and women becomes starker when we compare their earnings.

According to the World Bank report, ‘Women, Business and the Law (WBL) 2022’, globally, the difference between total expected lifetime earnings of men and women stands at $172.3 Trillion. This is nearly double the volume of the world’s GDP. The disparity also stems from the inequality in legal rights between men and women. Globally, women still have only threequarters of the legal rights compared to men. The WBL shows an aggregate score of 76.5 out of a possible 100, which denotes complete legal parity on eight indicators – mobility, workplace, pay, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, asset, and pension. The inequality is further established by the fact that more women dropped out of paid employment during the pandemic than men since they had to take on responsibilities for increased care of children and the ill.

The World Bank report points out that “women, both employees and entrepreneurs, were affected more adversely than men with regard to business closure, reduced demand for products or services, and financial distress.” Overall, even though the average WBL score in 2021 improved by half a point over 2020, nearly 2.4 billion working-age women still do not enjoy the same economic rights as men.

What is, however, more distasteful is the “legislative reforms” that the report lists as noteworthy: Cambodia brings parity in pension benefits; Vietnam eliminates all restrictions on women’s employment; Pakistan lifts restrictions on women’s ability to work at night. The report also mentions that “Gabon stands out with comprehensive reforms to its civil code and the enactment of a law on the elimination of violence against women.”

To accept that these restrictive laws existed in the 21st century is not just an insult to women but also indicative of the mindset that has gotten used to the rot. It is essential that the world realises and takes collective action to remove the malignant tissue, rather than treating it on a piecemeal basis and clapping for it.

Shubhendu Parth shubhendu@gecmediagroup.com

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CONTENTS MARCH 2022

06 ENTREPRENEURS START-UP ECOSYSTEMS

ARE BUILT OVER DECADES

08 INTERVIEW “A FAIR AMOUNT OF

12

ISLAMIC FINTECH STEMS FROM MALAYSIA” MAHADHIR

INTERVIEW

“TCS IS CHAMPIONING GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION FOR RETAILERS”

24

TRANSFORMATION THE GLOBAL VISA MAN

16 HUMAN TRANSFORMATION

SEIZE MIND TRAPS TO UNLOCK YOUR SUCCESS POTENTIAL

30-33

A TOUGH BALANCING ACT

COVER STORY

36

Managing a distributed enterprise is more than just a technology issue. It is also a people and process transformation challenge, including change management and process reengineering.

TRANSFORMATION

DIGITAL, LOW CODE, AND ELEPHANTS

52 AI

NOW IS THE TIME TO GET READY

37 PHARMACEUTICAL

TAKING A STEP TOWARDS INDUSTRY 4.0

40 SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

62

GET READY TO HANDLE SIX CYBER THREAT ACTORS

UNPACKING THE GROWTH AND NATURE OF NEW CRIME

CYBERSECURITY

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E-CRIME

GEOSPATIAL

SERVICES

EMERGING VALUE SYSTEM FOR EMERGING TECHNOLOGY BUSINESSES

60

56

44

ASIA GOES HIGH ON LOCATIONAL POWER

GROWTH, JOBS, EMPLOYMENT: THE ETERNAL TRIUMVIRATE

65

66

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO ENABLE SDG

ATTENTION, PLEASE!

LOOKING GLASS

LAST PAGE

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PEOPLE | ENTREPRENEURS

START-UP ECOSYSTEMS ARE BUILT OVER DECADES The best start-up ecosystems are not built-in years, they are built over decades, which is why Silicon Valley’s start-up ecosystem is as big as it is.

S

BY NIRANJAN GIDWANI Consultant Director, Charter Member Tie Dubai, Member Superbrands Council

tart-up ecosystems are popping up all across the country and the world, with varying levels of success. Let us focus on the mix of ingredients that are needed to make a good start up ecosystem thrive over time. These are not any hard and fast rules, but rather good guiding principles which one can observe in great and successful start-up destinations in the world.

Some of the key ingredients of a truly good start-up ecosystem are as follows.

# IT ALWAYS STARTS WITH GREAT IDEAS WHICH TURN INTO GREAT BUSINESSES

It takes a couple cheerleaders at the top that are going to plant the flag and have everyone rally around those goals.

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Start-up ecosystems must have access to great ideas. Going forward, and into the future, we would seriously need to think building super platforms over features and loads of wisdom over just interesting widgets.

The ratio of successes is very small. Therefore, working on really big ideas would be of immense help.

# ACCESS TO TALENT, AND OVER TIME, BUILDING UP OF STRONG BENCH-STRENGTH OF BUDDING ENTREPRENEURS

Also, entrepreneurs who have learned from prior mistakes, are ultimately going to dictate the success of their businesses, and in turn, the success of the ecosystem.

# THE BEST IDEAS AND THE BEST TALENT ARE USELESS WITHOUT THE CAPITAL TO FUND THEIR VISION

It is critical that the capital is available to embrace each stage of development, from seed to early to growth stages of businesses. Having seed stage, but not Series A or Series B stage, is a recipe for a likely flame-out of that start-up when they hit the wall in that level of their growth.

# ACCESS TO CUSTOMERS

To me, this is the most important piece. Customers drive revenues.

Revenues impress investors.

Investors fund growth. Growth leads to big exits. Big exits lead to a robust ecosystem. This often means that there need to be tight partnerships between early-stage ideas with later stage companies to buy those services. Especially those who are supportive to helping the local start-up community.

Some of the key stakeholders of a robust ecosystem are:

ENTREPRENEURS

A good ecosystem would need experienced teams running start-up businesses. With a good balance of needed skill sets from planning, strategizing, use of technology and understanding a fair amount of financing.

MENTORS

First time entrepreneurs need to be able to ask questions from experienced leaders, to help get them up the learning curve, without making the same mistakes of their predecessors.

A good pool of mentors who are willing to give back in some form to build up a strong legacy.

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UNIVERSITIES

KEY TAKEAWAYS If we learn lessons from Silicon Valley, it prides itself on failure as a badge of honour.

The lessons learned in one bad start-up, will apply to the next good start-up.

A lot of the super business ideas are born from the research and ideas inside of universities.

Start-up ecosystems must have access to great ideas.

A lot of the super business ideas are born from the research and ideas inside of universities.

Having a healthy technology transfer process for these ideas to be monetised by business leaders is key.

CORPORATIONS

Big companies can help in many ways. They invest through corporate venture capital funds.

They become potential customers of new local start-ups. They have pain points of their own, that a local start-up can build and solve for them. They are often the exit for start-ups that have gotten large in size.

EVENTS

There are many groups in town that help organise and propel the ecosystem. This could be industry trade associations, venture capital associations, entrepreneur networking groups and chambers of commerce.

GOVERNMENT

These could be small individual angels, organised angel networks, venture capital firms, private equity firms, family offices, corporations or other funding sources.

A steady and well understood money flow begins to build confidence in the ecosystem.

Whether it is at the city, county or state level, the local government can and does play a very important role. That could include providing tax incentives for start-ups to launch in their city, tax free profits on any capital gains in a start-up to help stimulate investment, passing ecosystem friendly laws like free access to the internet, or establishing venture capital funds with a portion of their treasury, granting of long-term residency visas to lock in potential talent.

INCUBATORS

SERVICE PROVIDERS

INVESTORS

They could facilitate everything from shared office spaces for start-ups, going to formal start-up accelerator programs with formal educational curriculum. The breed of entrepreneurs tends to learn from each other when they are in close proximity to each other.

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The lawyers, accountants, bankers, recruiters, agencies, advisors, and consultants in the community, all play a role. The more experienced they are with start-ups, the better advice they will bring to the ecosystem.

Once a start-up is successful, money that simply goes into the bank account, or into safe real estate investments, does

A good ecosystem would need experienced teams running start-up businesses.

not help the ecosystem. The money needs to round trip back into the community.

If we learn lessons from Silicon Valley, it prides itself on failure as a badge of honour, as the lessons learned in one bad start-up, will apply to the next good start-up. It takes a couple cheerleaders at the top that are going to plant the flag and have everyone rally around those goals for the community.

Preferably, somebody that can put their money where their mouth is and can lean on their deep reservoir of key relationships in our region.

It is generally harder to build a robust community in smaller towns. There simply isn’t enough activity, breadth of industries or depth of expertise in any one industry to be effective. Better to be in a town big enough to support an ecosystem or prepare for a fair amount of travel between a bunch of smaller regions that have been aggregated into one community.

The best start-up ecosystems feed off each other. Ecosystems are not built-in years; they are built over decades. That is why Silicon Valley’s start-up ecosystem is as big as it is; they have literally been working on it since the 1970’s, a fine-tuned machine after 40 years of optimisation.

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“A FAIR AMOUNT OF ISLAMIC FINTECH STEMS FROM MALAYSIA”

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recognised industry leader, Mahadhir Aziz, Chief Executive Officer of Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), has vast experience across financial services, oil and gas, IT and media, serving organisations such as Deloitte Consulting, Kodak, PETRONAS and AmInvestment Bank.

He set up Futurise, an agency under the Ministry of Finance, in 2017 to drive the National Regulatory Sandbox (NRS) in Malaysia, and was later handpicked in March 2020 to be part of the founding team at the National Economic Implementation and Strategic Coordination Agency (LAKSANA) under the Ministry of Finance. Earlier, in his role as the General Manager of Cyberview, he was instrumental in developing Cyberjaya Global Technology Hub Blueprint and its implementation and setting up the City Innovation Council to manage Smart City implementation, including the Cashless Cyberjaya programme.

Mahadhir has also served on various committees such as the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs Advisory Panel and the Malaysian Industry4WRD Regulatory Panel of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI).

In an interaction with Shubhendu Parth, he talks about the initiatives taken by the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia and MDEC to make Malaysia digital-ready, the opportunities for investment in the country, Industry 4.0 initiatives and efforts towards driving the Islamic FinTech ecosystem. Excerpts:

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MAHADHIR AZIZ Chief Executive Officer, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC)

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Where does Malaysia stand vis-àvis other Asian countries in terms of digital readiness, and how do you plan to improve it?

Malaysia’s digital readiness is at least equal to, if not better than, most of our Southeast Asian neighbours. The digital economy contributes 22.6% to the Malaysian national GDP. It is targeted to reach 25.5% by 2025, according to the Twelfth Malaysia Plan (12MP). COVID-19 has driven higher digitalisation in Malaysia.

According to the e-Conomy SEA Report 2021, Malaysia has seen three million new digital consumers since 2020. The report noted that 94% of pandemic consumers continue to use digital services, with 98% intending to continue going forward. It’s a permanent shift in digital adoption in Malaysia.

While the shift means that the digital consumers are there to stay, we need to do more work to digitalise our businesses. A July 2020 study by Workday found that only a quarter of Malaysian organisations have accelerated their digital transformation plans, while 60% have slowed down. In August 2020, the SME Association of Malaysia revealed that only 26% of local SMEs had chosen digitalisation or eCommerce platforms as their post-pandemic survival strategy. Additionally, of the 43% of respondents who reported having embarked on a digitalisation journey, about a third said their digitalisation efforts had been unsuccessful. This highlights that there is still a lack of urgency among Malaysian SMEs in terms of adopting digitalisation.

So, what are you doing to motivate businesses to adopt digital technologies?

We are hard at work to ensure businesses are ready to take advantage of the digital economy.

We have several initiatives and programmes to help with that. Our Go-eCommerce Onboarding and Shop Malaysia Online initiatives

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Smart Automation Grant provides a matching grant of up to 50% of the project cost, a maximum of RM 200,000, to help services companies automate business processes.

aim to support Malaysian businesses from various sectors to onboard eCommerce and ePayment platforms. This features 32 eCommerce partners on the campaign, including Boost, Dropee, Lazada, Fave, PrestoMall, Shopee and Touch ‘N Go eWallet.

Also, as of October 2021, we have successfully onboarded more than 500,000 businesses generating over 85 million transactions with a Gross Merchandise Value of over RM 4.6 Billion.

We have introduced a Digital Guidebook and Quick Guide for the SMEs to help players in the retail and F&B sectors reassess their digital opportunities and readiness.

It also provides a step-by-step guide on enhancing current digital capabilities and beginning their digital transformation journey.

We also have various grants and initiatives that help businesses become digital-ready.

MDEC helped facilitate the SME Digitalisation Grant, an initiative where the Malaysian Government provides a 50% matching grant of up to RM 5,000 per company for the subscription of digitalisation services. We also have the Smart

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Malaysia Digital, the successor of MSC Malaysia, will introduce a new framework centred around three primary components: agility, flexibility, and relevance.

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Automation Grant (SAG), which provides a matching grant of up to 50% of the total project cost and a maximum of RM 200,000 to help services companies automate business processes.

Besides, we have the 4IR Catalyst Grant (4ICG) designed to increase the development and use of IR4.0 technology in key business verticals.

The Ministry of Communication and the MDEC also focus on creating substantial digital economic spill-over through equitable access to digital tools, knowledge, and income opportunities. What are you doing to achieve this?

People are the principal benefactor of our initiatives.

Access to digital tools, knowledge and income opportunities must help uplift them and boost Malaysia’s economy.

Our programmes and initiatives under the #SayaDigital campaign have four main aspects: skills and knowledge, business digitalisation, startup catalysation, and digital investments. Programmes such as Let’s Learn Digital, Digital Skills Training Directory, and MyDigitalWorkforce Workin-Tech (MYWiT) is meant to provide workers with means to reskill and upskill themselves for the digital demands of today’s workforce.

We have programmes such as the #MyDigitalMaker and Digital Innovator Programme (DIP) to teach digital skills among the youth. We have also partnered with the tertiary education institutions as part of our Premier Digital Tech Institutions (PDTI) initiative to cultivate the next generation of digital experts. Our programmes, such as eUsahawan, eRezeki, and Global Online Workforce (GLOW), aims to help people earn an additional income online and through digital means, while initiatives such

as Founders Grindstone and the Global Acceleration and Innovation Network (GAIN) is helping tech startups grow.

For 25 years, MDEC has facilitated digital investments into Malaysia through MSC Malaysia.

With the introduction of Malaysia Digital (MD), the successor of MSC Malaysia, we are set to expand this further. MD will introduce a new framework centred around three primary components: agility, flexibility, and relevance. One of the catalytic programmes under Malaysia Digital is DE Rantau, which is designed to support Digital Nomad hubs, Digital Nomad communities and the ecosystems.

The programme has a spillover effect across various other industries. There is an estimated RM 1.26 Billion local spending by foreign Digital Nomads, which will boost local economies such as tourism, recreation, and health and wellness. Digital Nomad hubs can encourage knowledge, experience and skills sharing, creating a more robust digital workforce.

We recently led a delegation of 20 tech companies to Expo 2020 Dubai, helping them expand their reach internationally. Our programmes helped cultivate local unicorns like Carsome and soonicorns like Fave. Their growth means more local digital solutions for the people and more jobs and income opportunities. It has also helped us develop new industries for Malaysia. The Digital Creative Content industry is a case in point, encompassing video games and animation.

How will you describe the opportunity for investors in Malaysia? What value proposition are you offering to attract new digital investments?

Investors can look forward to the new Malaysia Digital (MD) initiative. Malaysia Digital offers greater agility for local and international tech companies by providing more options and flexibility to choose from

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competitive fiscal and nonfiscal incentives. MD also seeks to expand beyond designated locations into a nationwide initiative, providing more flexibility and opportunity for companies to grow, expand, or reinvest from anywhere in Malaysia. Lastly, initiatives are being taken to improve governance and processes to meet the industries’ diverse needs at speed.

MDEC programmes helped cultivate unicorns like Carsome and soonicorns like Fave. Their growth means more local digital solutions and more jobs and income opportunities.

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What about the adoption of Industry 4.0? Where does Malaysia stand on this front?

MDEC is well on track in cultivating 4IR adoption in Malaysia. We have programmes and initiatives that support the National 4IR Policy, the guiding principle for Malaysia to stay ahead of the 4IR curve.

While I mentioned 4IR Catalyst Grant and Smart Automation Grant earlier, we also have the DataKITA initiative to drive data development and adoption in Malaysia. We are also pushing for digital agriculture technology (Agritech) via our eLadang programme, which has borne some fruit. Our partnership with Pertubuhan Peladang Kawasan Kuala Langat (PPKKL) to introduce Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled fertigation systems led to improved productivity and income and reduced operational costs by over 20%. It also helped increase the overall yield of Grade A chillies by up to 90%.

MDEC has also collaborated with CIMB Islamic Bank Berhad to introduce a micro-financing programme to enable farmers to adopt technologies like IoT, Big Data Analytics, and AI. We have also partnered with P2P financing platform microLEAP and Bank Pembangunan Malaysia Berhad (BPMB) to provide RM10 million in Shariah-compliant microfinancing for Malaysia’s agriculture community to adopt Agritech at scale.

Our efforts towards expanding 4IR technology and other catalysing programmes have allowed Malaysia to become regional leaders in some areas within 4IR. Today, Malaysia is home to the world’s leading DroneTech companies such as Aerodyne and Poladrone. These companies are also producing 4IR solutions for challenges in Malaysia and the region.

An important aspect of technology development in Malaysia was its integration with Islamic Finance.

How is it evolving as a framework?

We have seen a fair amount of Islamic FinTech stemming from Malaysia. According to Dinar Standards’ Global Islamic Fintech Index 2021, Malaysia ranks first in market maturity and stands among the top five Islamic FinTech markets based on transaction volume. Malaysia has a growing number of Islamic FinTech companies like microLEAP, HelloGold, Global Sadaqah, The Noor, and Wahed Technologies with unique offerings and solutions.

MDEC has several programmes and collaborations to develop Islamic FinTech in Malaysia.

The Fintech Booster program is designed as an offshoot of a survey conducted by BNM from their sandbox program to address the pain points of fintech companies.

It has secured 11 legal firms and Shariah advisers as partners for the program. Our FIKRA Islamic FinTech Accelerator is a joint initiative by Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) and the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) to further enhance the Islamic capital market ecosystem by identifying and scaling innovative fintech solutions in Malaysia. MDEC is an Ecosystem Partner of this. We also have an industry-led collaboration network, i-Connect Fintech in Islamic Finance, that aims to create and nurture a conducive innovation ecosystem in Malaysia towards increasing disruptive innovation.

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“TCS IS CHAMPIONING GROWTH AND TRANSFORMATION FOR RETAILERS”

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SIVARAMAN GANESAN Global Head, Microsoft Business Unit, Tata Consultancy Services

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n IT industry expert with more than three decades’ experience, Sivaraman Ganesan, Global Head, Microsoft Business Unit of TCS, has proven expertise in building units from the ground up and delivering high-growth and positive business outcomes across a multitude of different services and units. His team focuses on harnessing the innovation and capabilities of Microsoft’s products and services to help enterprises navigate complex digital transformations, drive operational efficiency, and leverage business process automation. His unit also leverages the capabilities of TCS’ business and technology services across areas such as cloud, analytics and insights, cyber security, internet of things (IoT) and automation to deliver Business 4.0 outcomes through a Machine First Delivery Model and location-independent agile delivery.

In an interaction with Shubhendu Parth, he talks about the retail sector trends in Asia, the shift towards cloud, the CIO and CDO pain points and nuances of the TCS-Microsoft partnership, and the recent Microsoft Cloud for Retail solution. Excerpts:

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We have seen a significant uptake in cloud adoption during the last two years. What does this transformation mean for the retail sector, and how is the industry in Asia evolving?

The role of the cloud and technology has increased manifold during the last two years, especially for the retail industry and certainly in Asia. We have seen increased consumption of all cloud capabilities and the technology associated with the cloud offer.

Retailers have, therefore, been trying to take advantage of these capabilities. One way is to make sure that they do not lag when they benchmark against other startups in the retail space.

Fortifying their supply chain from resilience and a velocity perspective is a close second, if not an equal first.

Omnichannel has been around for a decade but has come alive in a big way with the advent of digital as a critical trend. How a customer consumes a retail brand, allowing for frictionless and greater efficacy of sales in that space, is absolutely a trend we see. Another point is how fast can you get inventory to a consumer. Can it be near realtime? Then we need to look at sustainability, which could be in packaging, green IT and everything in between. There is also a need to see how to cater to the increasing demands of customers who want to take advantage of newer brands and enable sales through different channels.

From a pure technology perspective, TCS is championing the cause of growth and transformation for retailers in Asia and globally, constantly taking advantage of the cloud. At TCS, we talk of horizon one, two, and three journeys. Repurposing the digital core on the cloud is horizon one. Enabling business model transformation and innovation is horizon two, and

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Omnichannel has been around for a decade but has come alive in a big way with the advent of digital as a critical trend.

purpose-driven ecosystem play for these retailers is horizon three. We have seen incredible traction and opportunity in terms of embracing these new challenges and trends that retailers are confronted with.

So, what are the major pain points that the retail sector CIOs and CDOs deal with in this journey?

The pain points straddle pure business, pure tech and the intersection of business and technology. We, at TCS, see digital as fundamental, the plumbing and wiring of everything to run the show. From a business point of view, CIOs and CDOs have to contend with different aspects of the value chain such as assortment in merchandising, space management, making online payments quicker and responsive, and elevating the shopping experience for the customer.

Phygital seems to be coming of age where one can browse online, buy offline or converse.

From a retailer’s profitability standpoint, they are concerned about making sure abandoned shopping carts are minimal.

Consumers must click to pay since retail operates on thin margins, and every time they fail to do so, it is a loss. Then there is the security aspect, i.e. verifying the buyer’s

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From a retailer’s profitability standpoint, they are concerned about making sure abandoned shopping carts are minimal.

Consumers must click to pay.

authenticity and ensuring the proper checks and balances are present. And lastly, how to maximise profitability, especially on inventory that can probably deliver more profits than others.

What about the massive flow of data?

We live in an era of abundance.

About 20-30 years ago, data was a trickle. Today it’s a flood. Now, how do you take advantage of this reservoir of data? How do you mine the nuggets to deal with some of the pain points? How do you, in a secure way, understand customer behaviour and make sure you serve the customer better? How can you maximise your topline and bottomline by inferring that data?

These pain points can be addressed from the veracity or accuracy of data, data quality, ability to touch and feel the texture of data, work from an analytics and intelligent analytics perspective, and a cognitive perspective. I wouldn’t say these are silver bullets but are indeed slivers of hope.

So how does the TCS-Microsoft partnership help organisations handle digital transformation pains better?

We had set up the Microsoft Business Unit in TCS almost two and a half years ago. By taking advantage of the Microsoft cloud, we’ve delivered a lot of growth and transformational impact to customers, from the Edge to the cloud. The Edge refers to all the technologies we use on devices that we carry in our pocket or use at our workspace. So, Microsoft Teams, Office 365, and Power Platform are all attributes of the Edge. From a customer standpoint, we have three types of journeys unfolding for them, all underpinning our growth and transformation.

The first one is how we repurpose their existing on-

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premise capacity onto the cloud.

We could do that in a hurry as the customer desires or in a calibrated way by looking at the nuances of the journey. That’s horizon one. Number two is how do you take advantage of all the cognitive data, compute and storage capabilities of a cloud that Microsoft releases afresh and features native to Microsoft Azure, Teams and Dynamics, and deliver more growth, transformation and business model innovation to customers. Number three is how do we look at inclusivity and get different institutions like retailers, banks or insurers connected to a larger ecosystem of participants in the value chain of their transaction, be it in B2B or B2C paradigm, and make them islands of connectivity and not islands of isolation.

Coming to retail, a plethora of problem statements, including opportunity propositions, exist for all retailers. At the Edge, they would like to empower their store associates and give them access to real-time information.

That’s where Teams comes in, allowing them to be in touch with their supervisor or peer group.

Dynamics allows for CRM and other propositions. It’s a fit-for-purpose solution that we deploy for retailers to address specific pain points in their value chain. When it comes to Azure, apps, data, ERP, and IoT come into play. Let me give you three examples.

Our latest Clever Energy offering is about sustainability, and it has been implemented at one of the largest retail chain stores. It’s about committing to reduce their carbon footprint and therefore allowing deployment of green IT and other green processes from a business standpoint. And that’s launched on the Azure cloud. In Asia, we have executed one of the largest ever SAP migrations to Azure, allowing retailers to take advantage of the latest cloud capabilities. We’ve also performed Dynamics 365 rollouts for some customers in Asia. Our Algo Retail initiative has been way

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ahead of its time because even before the cognitive capabilities of the cloud hit primetime, Algo Retail was out there waiting to take advantage of it.

Data was a trickle about 20-30 years ago. Today it’s a flood. It is crucial to understand how to mine the nuggets of data and deal with the pain points.

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On the cloud services front, TCS has been focusing on partnerships with Microsoft, AWS, and Google in a big way. Where does the recent engagement with Microsoft Cloud for Retail fit the overall TCS strategy?

Our partnership with Microsoft is primed for growth and transformation from an Edge to a three-horizon cloud journey perspective. Microsoft’s increasing focus on industry segments and creation of a retail industry cloud have been right up to our script. Why? Because we have been in business for over 53 years and retail has been a long part of that journey.

Our institutional wisdom, the contextual knowledge in the domain heritage in retail and CPG supply chain, etc., is deeply woven into our retail industry practice. So, when we found Microsoft launching an industry cloud, we were among the first to talk to them and be their launch partner. That means our already strong technical knowledge, be it on the Edge, Teams, Power Platform, Office 365, Dynamics 365 or Azure, comes into a combinatorial play with our domain knowledge and knowledge of several other products in the retail industry.

A great marriage of all this creates a deeper partnership with Microsoft, not just from a technology perspective but also a marketplace perspective, and that’s where the partnership in terms of the retail cloud and our recent engagement with Microsoft comes alive. We work with Microsoft for many retailers worldwide, including in Asia, with well-known names like Walgreens and Marks & Spencer.

In Asia, we have executed one of the largest ever SAP migrations to Azure, allowing retailers to take advantage of the latest cloud capabilities.

What about the Cloud Exponence management platform? How does it integrate with the Cloud for Retail solution?

When it comes to Cloud Exponence, this has been our flagship product for more than 5-6 years now. We were one of the earliest to launch this kind of solution, which allows supporting the cloud and looking at advanced aspects such as FinOps early on.

The retail industry cloud from Microsoft includes all Microsoft cloud technology products, and partners like us can bring everything we have built outside of it to that cloud. Now, some will naturally fit in, while others will supplement it. Exponence supplements the whole retail industry cloud by allowing customers to run their cloud shop efficiently and with a lot of availability and all other efficiency levers from an industrial-strength perspective that you might expect.

One example is a large retailer in the US that has taken advantage of Cloud Exponence to take care of their immunisation services, vaccine registration, scheduling, etc. Another large retailer in the UK has leveraged Cloud Exponence to support the rollout of its next-gen POS system.

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SEIZE MIND TRAPS TO UNLOCK YOUR SUCCESS POTENTIAL The mind can sometimes build distortion through words, thoughts, and stories and hinder your growth. Here are six mind traps one should be wary about.

BY EKTAA SIBAL India’s number one Inner-self Transformation Specialist, International Meditation Expert, Global Executive Leadership Coach and Gifted Energy Healer with inborn intuitive abilities

Mind or thinking traps lead to a thought process where one overexaggerates the threat and underestimates the ability to cope with it.

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T

he ever-rising complexity of today’s business world presents leaders with the bane of knowing and preparing oneself for the unknown.

While the leaders try to work on the external intricacies to thrive, at the same time they are also challenged to deal with and decode the

internal complexities of the human brain. For leaders to reach their success potential, it is important for them to be conscious of their thoughts at all times.

Our brain has the function of thinking, reasoning, deciding, feeling and so much more which is sometimes difficult to comprehend as well. While our brains are designed to make sense of everything we experience and draw connections between thoughts, ideas, actions or consequences.

But sometimes what we think or how we think can be misleading or wrongly perceived or negatively reflected by us.

In this article, I address how our mind sometimes creates traps through the words, thoughts, and stories we tell ourselves which leads to building distortions.

WHAT ARE MIND TRAPS?

Mind or thinking traps are those irrational thought patterns that conceal reality and may lead to making errors in your decision making or judgments. It leads to a thought process where you tend to over-exaggerate the threat and underestimate your ability to cope with it. The premise is that while we look at life in general from the lens of it being quite simple, but the brain that is functioning and making us think can turn a simple situation into a complex one.

These irrational thought patterns can make you easily jump to conclusions and often prevent you from seeing the bigger picture. This leads to trapping you in a vicious cycle of negative thoughts with the potential of altering your mood and the way you experience life.

These thinking traps are most often difficult to identify at first, as they are usually misconstrued with overthinking and they are generally normalised no matter how crippling they might be.

These thinking traps are cognitive distortions, which don’t actually reflect the present situation of an individual.

Here are the top six thinking

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KEY TAKEAWAYS While leaders try to work on the external intricacies, they are challenged by the need to decode the internal complexities of the human brain.

While our brains are designed to make sense of everything we experience, sometimes what we think or how we think can be misleading or wrongly perceived or negatively reflected by us.

Mind or thinking traps are those irrational thought patterns that conceal reality and may lead to making errors in your decision making or judgments.

traps or mind traps that one needs to be conscious about. #1 Fortune Telling: Predicting that something bad will happen, without any evidence. We get stuck in this thinking trap when we over analyse the possible outcomes of a situation and convince our self that one particular outcome is guaranteed.

Example: I have to deliver this presentation and I know that I’ll mess up. #2 Over Generalisation: Thinking that a negative situation is part of a constant pattern of bad things that always happen. People who over generalise often use words like “always” or “never.”

Example: I thought I’ll get a good

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appraisal this year, but didn’t get it. This always happens to me! I always have to struggle and still don’t get what I deserve! #3 Mind reading: Jumping to conclusions about what others are thinking, without any evidence.

Example: My senior colleague didn’t say hello to me, maybe she’s not happy with my work.

A therapist and expert can help you challenge and overturn the thinking patterns that are holding you back so you can begin to realise your full potential.

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#4 Filtering: Focusing only on the negative parts of a situation or a person and ignoring anything good or positive.

Example: Since the time I joined this organisation, even though my work was appreciated but I’ve mostly been unhappy with my work. #5 Catastrophising: Believing that the worst-case scenario is the inevitable outcome of a situation. Responding to a situation by greatly exaggerating the severity of a situation.

Example: My throat hurts what if I’ve got infected with COVID 19 and what if I die.

#6 Labelling: Wrongly attributing a negative label to either yourself or someone else.

Example: I made a mistake in my presentation, I’m so stupid.

The basis of bringing yourself out of these traps is by recognising if you’re repeating a pattern of negative thoughts and then taking action on it so that you address the mind trap and overcome the vicious pattern of destructive thinking. It is important to challenge a mind trap by realizing what’s happening, slowing your thoughts and considering if your thought process is rational or if there is any evidence of it being true. Often thinking more carefully, and giving yourself mental space can be a great tool to use against thinking traps.

Work yourself through by challenging the thinking traps, try to think of a more balanced thought to replace the old thinking traps.

Let’s use the following example. l Situation: My friend said she’d call me tonight to figure out plans for the weekend, but she didn’t. l Thought: She’s so inconsiderate. Or maybe she just doesn’t like me anymore l Thinking Trap: Labeling and Mind-Reading Thinking Trap l Find the Evidence: Well, last week we hung out a lot. She called me and never changed our plans. l Balanced Thought: I know right now she’s dealing with stress at work and some relationship problems. Maybe she’s just overwhelmed with everything.

I’ll wait until we talk again before jumping to conclusions about our friendship.

If left unchecked, thinking traps can escalate and leave us feeling trapped. If you’re feeling down or like you’ve fallen into a pattern of habitual negative thinking, it’s really important to seek help.

A therapist and expert can help you challenge and overturn the thinking patterns that are holding you back so you can begin to realise your full potential.

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CHINA

Huawei launches IntelligentRAN wireless architecture Huawei has unveiled a wireless network architecture, IntelligentRAN, designed to help carriers build autonomous networks using service operation intelligence, experience optimisation, and simplified O&M. The new architecture also enables networks to realise zero services waiting, consistent experience, zero network faults, and optimal experience and energy efficiency, Huawei’s President and Chief Marketing Officer for Wireless Solutions Gan Bin said.

“Intelligence improves wireless networks greatly by supporting correlative data analysis and prediction to make decisions more adaptive. This is where IntelligentRAN comes in,” he said, adding that using Mobile Intelligent Engine (MIE) will help better coordinate data, models, and decisions between base stations and networks, paving the way to wireless intelligence.

“It allows intelligent air interfaces to use key technologies such as smart grids, scheduling dictionaries, and channel graphs. With these tools, they can intelligently configure air interface resources and achieve optimal user experience and capacity,” a company press release stated. Service prediction

Gan Bin, VP and CMO - Wireless Solutions, Huawei launching the IntelligentRAN wireless network architecture.

with IntelligentRAN also guides non-real-time spectrum and channel selection on the network side and real-time symbol scheduling and transmit power configuration on the base station side. This significantly reduces energy consumption across the entire network.

In addition, IntelligentRAN enables intelligent SLA site planning, where parameters are dynamically configured, and models can be adjusted flexibly in response to service changes.

Networks can also benefit from the intelligent O&M, and they can self-learn the features of faults to improve fault detection accurately and root cause analysis. This replaces passive responses with proactive maintenance, bringing us a step closer to zero-fault wireless networks.

INDIA

Accenture to enable digital transformation at Aditya Birla Fashion Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited (ABFRL) has announced its collaboration with Accenture for a digital transformation program designed to drive growth, increase business agility and improve operational efficiency. “As part of its transformation strategy, ABFRL has chosen Accenture to design, develop, and deploy an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system based on SAP S/4HANA to streamline business processes and improve visibility and accessibility of data across the organisation,” a company release stated.

Praveen Shrikhande, Chief Digital and Information Officer at ABFRL, commented, “The consolidation and digitisation of our core ERP system will help us improve agility and responsiveness in a digitalfirst world, even as we expand our operations and integrate new businesses to grow our brands and

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product portfolio, enter new consumer segments, and expand into new markets.”

The new ERP system will support ABFRL, which owns brands such as Louis Philippe, Van Heusen, Allen Solly and Peter England across stores in India, to manage multiple fulfilment channels and consolidate disparate technology systems efficiently.

It will be designed to enhance customer service by combining ABFRL’s manufacturing and retail functions into a digital core using SAP S/4HANA for fashion and vertical business.

Additionally, ABFRL will use Accenture myConcerto to define a transformation vision and build a value case that guides its manufacturing, delivery and change management operations and underpins its continuous innovation.

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INDIA

Infosys Finacle powers Union Bank of India’s WhatsApp banking

Infosys Finacle, part of EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys and Union Bank of India have announced the availability of its banking services on WhatsApp following the successful implementation of Finacle Conversational Banking, Finacle Remote Banker, and

Finacle Mobile Teller solutions.

The new service from the bank, Union Virtual Connect (UVConn), will help provide retail customers personalised, daily banking services at their preferred time, place, and in seven languages.

With Finacle, the bank has also transformed its branch

banking experience by optimising branch and teller performance, minimising queues, enabling relationship manager mobility, and improving operational efficiencies, a company release stated. The Finacle Conversational Banking and Remote Banker ensure an engaging conversational experience throughout a customer’s digital journey with the flexibility of human assistance when required.

The capabilities include text, voice, and video messaging and sharing of images, documents, and other content, Infosys stated.

The solution enables the bank’s customers to safely connect on the official number via an end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messaging interface from their registered mobile numbers with added levels of authentication. Union Bank will also be able to onboard new customers remotely and instantly via secure messaging on WhatsApp in a quick, frictionless, and digitised manner.

JAPAN

Shonan starts cancer treatment with Hitachi’s compact system Hitachi Ltd has announced that Shonan Kamakura Advanced Medical Center at Shonan Kamakura General Hospital has commenced cancer treatment using the company’s compact proton therapy system. This is the first order for Hitachi’s dedicated compact proton therapy system.

Driven by the growing worldwide demand for smaller proton therapy systems, Hitachi has developed a device specifically designed for a single treatment room. The system is a compact proton therapy system which, by optimising the layout of the machine, reduces the installation area to about 70% of that of conventional solutions, making it possible to install the system on a limited site in an urban area and reducing the cost and time involved in its installation.

The compact proton therapy system is equipped with advanced technologies such as spot scanning irradiation technology, which allows the proton

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beam to be delivered according to the shape of cancer, a 360-degree rotating gantry with cone-beam for highprecision positioning, and real-time image Gated Proton Therapy, making it both compact and highly functional.

Particle Therapy is advanced cancer radiotherapy, where protons extracted from hydrogen atoms or carbon ions are accelerated up to 70% of the speed of light. This energy is concentrated directly on the tumour while minimising radiation dose surrounding healthy tissue. Particle therapy improves the quality of life for cancer patients since the patient experiences no pain during treatment and the procedure has very few side effects compared to traditional radiotherapy. In most cases, patients can continue with their normal daily activities while undergoing treatment.

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JAPAN

Rakuten launches marketplace and sales platform for NFTs

Rakuten Group Inc has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace and sales platform, Rakuten NFT. The marketplace will enable users to purchase NFTs and peer-to-peer buying and selling of NFTs in a range of areas such as sports and entertainment, including music and anime. It also features a unique, one-stop

platform that enables IP holders to build their website for issuing and selling NFTs. Rakuten ID can be used when making purchases, allowing users to earn and spend Rakuten Points.

Any NFTs purchased can be added to a collection on the buyer’s web page and can also be put up for sale in the marketplace and sold.

A service for peer-to-peer issuing and selling of NFT content is planned for launch in 2023 or later, which will support IP holders in Japan and worldwide to issue NFTs and spur further development of a global market for NFTs. Plans also call for the introduction of a diversity of additional payment methods.

Rakuten NFT is also planning to produce and sell the J League NFT Collection Players Anthem, the J League official NFT collection, and develop the Rakuten NFT Art Gallery, a selected collection of original NFT artwork by Rakuten NFT. To mark its opening, the Rakuten NFT Art Gallery will host a selection of digital artwork, including works by Orihara, image creator for singer Ado. Rakuten NFT Art Gallery sales are expected to commence in May 2022 or later.

MALAYSIA

Kenanga launches AI-driven robo financial advisor Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad has launched Kenanga Digital Investing (KDI), a fully automated Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven robo-advisor designed to simplify how Malaysians save and invest. According to Kenanga, by introducing the robo-advisors the bank aims to simplify investing by removing the guesswork in stock and fund picking.

The company stated that it employs technology to monitor global markets and react to new investing opportunities. It also highlighted that the technology analyses thousands of data points each day, incorporating information from across continents and asset classes to develop investment portfolios without the influence of human emotions. These portfolios aim to generate sustainable returns while managing risk.

Ian Lloyd, Group Chief Digital Officer, Kenanga Investment Bank Berhad, said KDI is another step in the company’s vision to make investing accessible to everyone. “The AI monitors global market conditions and rebalances customers’ portfolios automatically, giving them peace of mind

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that their portfolio is being taken care of around the clock,” he explained.

Lloyd claimed that KDI’s innovative portfolio design is a game-changer for wealth management. The system selects suitable portfolios to help customers achieve their investment goals according to their personal risk preferences. KDI Invest is free for investments below RM 3,000, while investors above that will be charged a management fee between 0.3% to 0.7% per annum.

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PHILIPPINE

NTT Data to help PAL on its digital transformation flight Philippine Airlines (PAL) is set to modernise the company’s key business processes, including finance, procurement, supply chain, and human resources, by partnering with NTT Data Philippines to fully implement SAP solutions. The partnership brings together NTT Data’s best-in-class global IT services with SAP’s intelligent enterprise solutions to support PAL’s goal of achieving complete digital transformation.

“Being a pioneer in the aviation industry, we are intent on implementing 21st Century technological solutions to improve our business processes,” Nilo Thaddeus Rodriguez, PAL Chief Financial Officer, said. “A true digital transformation will strengthen interdepartmental collaboration and promote sound decision-making as we tackle the challenges of global competition. This will benefit our customers who look to us for reliable service as the nation’s flag carrier and largest international airline.”

“We expect the new business solutions from NTT Data and SAP to help equip our PAL leaders with the right data at the right time to make sound decisions that will allow the airline to quickly adapt

SOUTH KOREA

Researchers develop sensory receptors for humanoid robots

Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed an intelligent sensory receptor device that can selectively detect dangerous sensations such as pain caused by excessive pressure, external forces and extreme temperatures. The sensor device can be used in the

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to change,” said Alvin Kendrich Limqueco, PAL Senior Vice President for Supply Chain Management. “This project will help make PAL stronger, more agile and more resilient as we continue to fulfil our mission of bridging the Philippines and the world with our signature Buong Pusong Alaga or heartfelt service,” Limqueco stated.

Verena Siow, President and Managing Director, SAP South East Asia, also called the collaboration ‘bold’ and ‘courageous’ as it had started during the COVID-19 pandemic. She also emphasised the importance and significance of this strategic relationship; “It is not just a one-off project but a strategic partnership that we truly envision, one that is market-making and well beyond the Philippines, South East Asia and SAP globally.”

components of humanoid robots such as artificial skin, artificial organs and other robot parts.

According to KIST, the receptor devices use memristors based on the surface migration of silver (Ag) on silicon dioxide (SiO2) nanorods (NRs). The surface-dominated diffusive memristor allows the direct emulation of biological receptors. A memristor is a non-linear two-terminal electrical component capable of memorising the electrical current and voltage direction even when the power is cut.

“This research holds a great meaning we have succeeded in having a device quickly adapt to weak, anodyne sensations while feel pain to strong and harmful sensations,” KIST Head Researcher Kang Chong-yun said. According to KIST, the smart sensory receptor device will contribute to the development of artificial skin, artificial organs and humanoid robots.

Sensations are signals sent by sensory receptors to the brain to feel the environment around a person.

When the environment is too hot, cold, or hostile enough to apply external force onto the body, receptors start to continuously send strong signals to alert the brain. The waves of strong signals are called pain. When a person feels pain, they take action to ease the pain by avoiding such an environment.

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WORLD

Jaguar Land Rover, Nvidia to develop next-gen automated cars

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has formed a multi-year strategic partnership with Nvidia to jointly develop and deliver nextgeneration automated driving systems plus AI-enabled services and experiences for its customers.

Starting in 2025, all new

Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles will be built on the Nvidia Drive software-defined platform, delivering a broad spectrum of active safety, automated driving and parking systems, as well as driver assistance systems. The system will have AI features

inside the vehicle, including driver and occupant monitoring and advanced visualisation of the vehicle’s environment.

This full-stack solution is based on Nvidia Drive Hyperion, which features Drive Orin centralised AV computers, Drive AV and Drive IX software, safety, security and networking systems, and surround sensors. Drive Orin is the AI brain of the car and runs the JLR Operating System, while Drive Hyperion is the central nervous system, Nvidia stated in a press release.

Jaguar Land Rover will also leverage in-house developed data centre solutions with Nvidia DGX for training AI models and Drive Sim software built on Nvidia Omniverse for real-time physically accurate simulation.

JLR’s software-defined features and its end-to-end verification and validation architecture will enable the delivery of innovative assisted and automated driving services throughout the vehicle’s life via over-the-air software updates.

WORLD

Veritas introduces new cloud solutions for data management Veritas Technologies has announced the launch of its cloud-optimised, autonomous data management, which will simplify the way businesses manage data and automate protection from threats, such as ransomware. In a statement, Veritas laid out its strategy for autonomous data management.

“NetBackup will harness artificial intelligence (AI) and hyper-automation to self-provision, self-optimise, and self-heal in multi-cloud environments,” it stated.

The company also unveiled Veritas Cloud Scale Technology, a new generation of the industryleading NetBackup architecture, modernised to operate web-scale. This state-of-the-art technology will be available with the newest version of the company’s flagship NetBackup software.

Greg Hughes, CEO of Veritas, said: “Accelerated digital transformation and cloud adoption is delivering benefits to businesses around the

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world. However, a joint advisory from the US, UK and Australian security services, released this month, highlights hackers are increasing the impact of their ransomware attacks by targeting cloud services and data. Veritas is laying out its strategy for how we solve that challenge for our customers, starting with tools available today that will help to reduce cloud footprint and costs, keep data safe from ransomware and pave the way to autonomous data management.”

According to the company press release, Veritas Cloud Scale Technology, powering NetBackup, will be the foundation that delivers this strategy. CloudScale Technology also enables a containerised, programmable, and AI-powered microservices architecture that provides autonomous unified data management services across any cloud.

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THE GLOBAL VISA MAN A firm believer in karma, Zubin Karkaria is the most soughtafter outsourcing and technology services man by governments and diplomatic missions worldwide.

BY SHUBHENDU PARTH

H

ZUBIN KARKARIA CEO, VFS Global

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e is a man with a lot of patience and a strong belief in God. Coming from a middleclass Parsi family of priests in Mumbai, Zubin Karkaria has travelled a long way to success, the latest and the biggest being VFS Global, the company he has been leading as the founder and CEO since 2001. From a project meant to take care of the “pre-decision” visa documentation work to the world’s largest outsourcing and technology services company for governments and diplomatic missions.

So, how did VFS happen, I ask him.

“It emerged from the need to address the pain of those seeking visas and make it easy for officers taking decisions. The idea was to streamline the process and also reduce our risk as a tour operator,” Karkaria says. “The biggest challenge for people travelling abroad 20 years ago was the visa. As a tour operator, we had to pay for airlines, cruise liners, hotels in advance, and if

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the person did not get the visa or if it was delayed, it was a big risk for us.”

That was the idea that he sold to the bosses at the US Embassy in Mumbai: experts from Kuoni will pre-check all documents and send them to the embassy before the person came for an interview, making the process more efficient and effective.

“Our focus was not on exploring a new revenue stream but on addressing a more significant problem with visa application processes back in time. For me, the most significant takeaway of this journey is how this disruptive innovation revolutionised the visa application process,” he reflects.

THE TRANSFORMATION

The introduction of biometric enrolment capability was a real gamechanger.

It played a significant role in improving the overall security of the visa application process.

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With the US Embassy agreeing to a pilot in Western India – Mumbai, Pune, and Ahmedabad – the ball was set rolling for the disruption that changed the way visas and government documents were processed and opened up a new business opportunity for the private sector players.

After six months, Washington sent State Department staff to verify the security checks and the process and extended the pilot to a year. Later the US Embassy came up with the tender, and the rest is history.

“Today, we handle almost the entire non-judgemental and administrative part of the process, starting from accepting the visa application to returning passport to the visa applicant post the decision-making process by the embassy or consulate,” Karkaria says.

In between, VFS also adds a vast array of services to enhance the experience of visa applicants at its Visa Application Centre (VAC) and make the process efficient and secure for client governments. This includes booking appointments,

verification of documents, data entry, fee collection, biometric enrolment, forwarding documents to the embassy and consulate, and sending documents back to visa applicants.

The company also pioneered the concept of Joint VACs shared by multiple client governments.

This enabled it to increase visa submission points significantly.

VFS Global has processed more than 236 million visa applications since 2001 and over 104 million biometric enrolments since 2007.

Over the years, VFS has also evolved and moved much beyond visa service, from registration of migrants to passport renewal for expats, attestation and verification services for embassies, and remote publishing of tamperproof visa stickers. It also has services for family reunification checks in conflict areas and for migrants, including DNA testing to verify the claims.

On the personal front, Karkaria highlights four events, including the setting up of VFS that transformed him. One, when he was sent to a boarding school. Two, when he went through the ritual of becoming a Zoroastrian priest at the age of 12. Three, getting married and having children.

“While the boarding school taught me the true meaning of being independent, the 30 days I spent alone at the Fire Temple while training as a priest ingrained the belief in good thoughts, good words and good deeds. Marriage and children brought a sense of work-life balance in me.”

“VFS, of course, was a complete game-changer for me, in terms of what we can create from India; we formed a new industry, we created something out of nothing and made it truly multinational.”

And his success mantra is simple: madly believe in the idea, be determined and keep on hammering the nail till you fix it, build a good team, and consistent hard work.

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VFS was a complete game-changer in terms of what can be created in India and become truly multinational.

What is the size of the global outsourced visa application market, and where does VFS Global stand vis-a-vis competition?

In 2019, the total visa market was around $170 Million, of which only 32% were outsourced, which still offers good growth potential. VFS Global is the clear market leader with over 18% of the total visa market share and the most trusted and preferred service provider by governments worldwide.

What steps has VFS Global taken during the last 20 years to change the customer experience?

Besides enhancing the applicant or customer experience, we have pioneered some innovative and sophisticated services such as Premium Lounge, which offers a convenient experience within the Visa Application Centre and Visa at Your Doorstep. This personalised service enables people to submit their visa applicant from the comfort, convenience and safety of their home or office. Of course, our extensive network of Visa Application Centres (VAC) has also allowed us to transform the customer experience.

We have always believed in leveraging technology to develop innovative services and solutions to enhance customer experience. The introduction of biometric enrolment capabilities was the real game-changer for us. It played a significant role in improving the overall security of the visa application process and led to the evolution of new-age VACs. The growing demand for DIY (do it yourself) technologies led to us introducing the electronic mode of visa or eVisa services.

How has VFS Global evolved on the digital path with everything moving to online and mobile platforms?

Traditionally, the visa application process has been largely paper-

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based, mostly involving physical interaction such as document check and submission, payment, and biometric enrolment at VACs. Our appointment management system (AMS) allows customers to find their preferred VAC, visiting time, and services.

Listening to our customers, we have worked towards reducing the interaction time in our physical touchpoints by offering digital document checks ahead of the visa submission or providing our services remotely altogether with our highly popular Visa At Your Doorstep (VAYD) service. By enabling a customer to book the entire visa application process, including biometric enrolment at a location of their choice, the service has observed a 3x increase in demand since 2020, a trend we expect to grow with travellers prioritising safe travel in the future.

Similarly, Location Independent Document Processing (LIDPro) enables governments to process visas from a remote location, sometimes from another country altogether, saving significant time and resources for the local diplomatic mission to make a visa decision. This was another important milestone in our digital transformation.

Technology facilitates the management of large application volumes by removing the requirement for government resources being physically present in source countries with high application volumes, effectively transforming the visa application process into an almost entirely digital one while still maintaining the security and integrity of the process.

In terms of VFS Global’s business in Asia, how many countries are you present in, and what has been the company’s experience of doing business in the region?

Asia, as a continent, has accounted for a significant share of revenue flows over the last few years and is expected to remain one of the key

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Location Independent Document Processing (LIDPro) enables governments to process visas from a remote location, sometimes even from another country.

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source markets for VFS Global.

We have 1851 application centres in 43 Asian countries serving 57 client governments.

We are also a trusted partner of 16 Asian client governments; our partnership with some of them spans over a decade, such as the Republic of Singapore, India, and the People’s Republic of China. We have been serving UAE for almost two decades. The importance of Asia for VFS Global is also endorsed by the fact that our Global Head Office is based in UAE, whereas our Global Support Office is based in India.

advanced PII Discovery and Compliance tools to ensure data stays protected throughout its lifecycle. The project also involves enhancing Cyber Incident Response Plan and tabletop exercises to ensure a well-rehearsed response to any cybersecurity incident.

Data Protection and Information Security are two separate businesscritical functions at VFS Global.

Over the years, we have invested significant resources in building these functions with very robust systems and controls. We are strongly committed to maintaining the highest levels of cyber security.

The company has faced some major data breach issues in the past. What has been the learning, and what is VFS Global doing to ensure data security in this hyperconnected digital world?

VFS Global serves 63 client governments in 143 countries and must comply with various data localisation, privacy, and protection laws, including GDPR. Although the pandemic escalated data security risks in a world working remotely, VFS Global deployed numerous cuttingedge security solutions against potential cyber threats. Most importantly, data security is fully embedded within the design and functioning of our processes. A case in point is the continuation of the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification that demonstrates a high level of assurance throughout our information security processes.

Handling personal data is central to VFS Global. Therefore, there are no compromises in this area. We place great importance on continuous improvement to the cybersecurity framework. We invest millions of dollars every year in this area. Having already demonstrated our robust Defense in Depth strategy, we are currently implementing a project to improve cyber-maturity. This includes new cybersecurity technologies at the endpoint level and implementing

So, where is VFS Global headed in the next five years?

The coming five years will witness renewed growth impetus at VFS Global. We believe that the worst of the pandemic is behind us and that the general recovery trend will only strengthen, albeit with some volatility. Going ahead, our focus will be on further strengthening and consolidating our position in our core business of outsourced visa services while simultaneously focusing on diversification opportunities in high growth potential businesses such as outsourced Passport services and eVisa services. We also see more governments integrating biometric enrollment in their visa application process to further increase the security of the process.

We are ready to support them with multiple biometric solutions to meet their requirements.

With our underlying goal to make cross-border mobility more seamless, we aspire to create deep brand affection amongst our customers, colleagues, investors, and communities whilst developing our business and enhancing shareholder value in a sustainable and secure manner.

We are convinced that the mid-tolong-term outlook for VFS Global remains positive.

For full interview check www.asia. biztransform.com

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COVER STORY

A TOUGH BALANCING

ACT With the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, new-age distributed enterprises are creating challenges and opportunities alike.

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COVER STORY

BY SHUBHENDU PARTH

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ntil a few years back, global organisations were considered the benchmark for a dispersed workforce. In a connected world, it was a given that companies would battle operational challenges from multiple locations that criss-cross international boundaries. However, the pandemic suddenly changed the rules of engagement and accelerated the pace at which enterprises had to align with the massive shift towards “work from home.” The new digitalfirst enterprise strategy has pivoted towards a model that is different from the traditional location-centric concept of an organisation.

This shift has put the spotlight on some of the key aspects of the enterprise, including applications and security. Thus, any discussion on distributed enterprise strategy today evaluates cost and complexity vis-a-vis the organisations’ goals.

Cloud and edge computing have now become key infrastructure components for modern enterprises.

Managing a distributed enterprise is more than just a technology issue. It is also about people and process transformation.

EMERGENCE OF DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISES

The first few months of the pandemic were defining from every perspective, be it the enterprise, the workforce or the customers.

For many businesses, operations had to run from home as much as possible. “This was the

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moment when everybody got creative and tried to manage the situation. A lot of work where physical presence was mandatory was impacted,” says Sandeep Lodha, Co-Founder at Netweb Technologies.

However, this change also brought about a reality check and hence the transformation that is redefining enterprises.

“At the back of the mind, enterprises are aware of the gaps in their systems to meet such contingencies. There is more acceptance of work from home, and organisations are widely implementing it.

Also, businesses have started investing in a disaggregated team so that people can join the remote setup,” adds Lodha.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will use disruptive technologies to drive business innovation.

The research firm says that automation, edge computing and other technology trends will enable IT to drive business value rather than simply responding to business needs. At the same time, I&O leaders are also looking to retool processes, add skill sets, and encourage innovation and risk-taking.

“Currently, we are in an environment where our employees’ end-to-end journeys have been adjusted to support hybrid working.

Since many epidemiologists and infectious disease experts predict that the COVID-19 could become endemic in 2022, businesses are embracing flexible hybrid working patterns to bring their workers back to the office,” says Girish Chandangoudar, VP VP – Head of Infrastructure Management Services, Happiest Minds Technologies.

“Many businesses have accelerated digital transformation, especially those that had delayed their

KEY TAKEAWAYS There is more acceptance of work from home.

Businesses have started investing in disaggregated teams so that people can join the remote setup.

Organisations are moving away from location-centric device and software configuration management tools to a cloud-based device management platform.

Hybrid, multicloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models.

digital strategies and journeys before the outbreak of a pandemic.

Shifting business models, the need for business resiliency and the threat of a post-pandemic world are driving the current changes enabled by the ability to tap into a distributed talent pool,” he adds.

CHALLENGES VS TECHNOLOGY

In a distributed enterprise set-up, the challenges are manifold. The pandemic changed the nature of workplaces overnight, sharply increasing the tribe of remote workers. Thus, security has become a major concern.

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“Technology like metaverse is picking.

We may soon have a virtual office where a colleague can walk up to a persona and have a casual talk or quickly gather for a huddle.”

SANDEEP LODHA

Co-Founder, Netweb Technologies

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“There are several challenges in this new way of working.

Some are technology challenges, while others are policy-related. Organisations are worried about data security in this new WFH environment.

As for the infrastructure, there are solutions available, including from our company, where you can have a centralised architecture that is easy to scale and manage. You can set up the backup and other safety and security features to fortify it,” says Lodha.

The identity and access management (IAM) challenges for businesses couldn’t have been greater. The remote work environment that has transformed workplaces forever will further accelerate the growing trend of Cybersecurity Mesh that helps implement a Zero Trust Architecture by securing all data and systems accessed securely regardless of their location.

The need for Cybersecurity Mesh Architecture (CMA) is further aggravated with the increase in hacking and ransomware attacks.

Gartner predicts that in the future, cybersecurity mesh will support the majority of IAM requests and enable a more explicit, mobile, and adaptive unified access management model. It says that by 2024, organisations adopting CMA to integrate security tools to work as a cooperative ecosystem will reduce the financial impact of individual security incidents by an average of 90%.

“Endpoint and edge network security is a major concern since IT teams can only manage the company-issued IT assets.

The home network remains unmanaged. It is necessary to use a mix of solutions to mitigate security threats, including next-generation cloud-based anti-virus, antimalware, and web gateway

solutions deployed and managed by security and IT teams. Solution based on Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) can be considered for securing the edge network,” says Chandangoudar.

Businesses wanting to free themselves from the shackles of traditional cloud-based networks are readily embracing edge computing platforms that enable a zero-touch, secure, distributed computing architecture for applications and data processing at or near the edge. According to IDC, the global edge computing market will reach $250 Billion by 2024, registering a compounded annual growth of 12.5%. Besides fulfilling the need for predictive maintenance and intelligent processes, other benefits for businesses include cutting costs while delivering application services and the ease to offer better user experiences with bots and voice-enabled assistants.

As the breath of cloud offerings and capabilities continue to grow, the adoption of cloud services is on the rise. According to Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services will grow 21.7% to reach $482 Billion in 2022. Increased agility, innovation and resilience that the cloud delivers to business coupled with faster time to market and efficient scalability makes a strong case for the cloud to be the vehicle for digital transformation.

Hybrid, multi-cloud and edge environments are growing and setting the stage for new distributed cloud models.

In addition, recent wireless communications advances, such as 5G R16 and R17, will push cloud adoption to a new level of broader, deeper and ubiquitous usage, adds Gartner.

MULTIPLE DEVICES, MULTIPLE PROBLEMS

It came as a knee-jerk reaction across all sectors, irrespective of company size. When the pandemic began, organisations immediately distributed laptops

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COVER STORY

to employees who had been using desktop computers only.

And employees with personal devices were also able to access enterprise applications through Virtual Desktops.

“As of today, all employees receive laptops as a standard.

To reduce the load on the VPN, Intranet applications were made accessible over the Internet with security controls in place, such as cloud-based multi-factor authentication. To ensure seamless file sharing and conferencing across the organisation, we consolidated our collaboration tools and platforms into a single cloud-based Team Collaboration platform,” says Chandangoudar.

“To ensure seamless device management, we have moved away from a location-centric device and software configuration management tool to a cloud-based device management platform.

Cloud-based Internet and web gateway solutions deployed on the user devices were enhanced with zero trust features to provide contextualised network access,” he adds.

End-user device management is another critical element of the distributed enterprise. To enable work from any location using any device, modern cloud-based device management solutions enable seamlessly unified management of devices regardless of their location or ownership (corporate or personal). Similarly, with more organisations adopting cloud-based solutions, there is a need to rationalise the tools and applications deployed for communication and collaboration.

Organisations can deliver seamless experiences to their employees by using a cloud-based approach.

PEOPLE MATTERS

People are at the heart of a distributed enterprise as flexibility and balance associated with remote work is a big positive.

The pandemic has blurred the lines between personal and

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professional life and created a new normal with respect to people and policies.

Businesses that adopt hybrid working models garner employees who are on average 30% more productive than their in-office counterparts.

Distributed enterprise solutions are also cheaper to maintain and offer multiple hiring options and benefits for organisations. One of the most important advantages is workplace engagement which builds positive associations and connections to work-based environments and cultures.

According to Gartner, a dispersed workforce is the most effective way to build a 21st-century business because it allows for greater worker autonomy, increased productivity, and better engagement.

“In our organisation, human resources, learning and development, and talent acquisition policies evolved quickly to address the needs of remote work, encompassing the entire employee journey. To meet the needs of the pandemic, employee engagement programs and health and wellness policies were also modified,” Chandangoudar points out.

“Policy-wise, there are templates, and every organisation will need to keep on tweaking to make it work better for them. Technology like metaverse is picking up, and maybe soon we will have a virtual office on metaverse where a colleague can walk up to a persona and have a casual talk or quickly gather up for a huddle,” says Lodha.

Distributed enterprise as a strategy is picking up momentum in Asia and across the world. The hybrid workforce will continue to grow, and its high time organisations align themselves with the new-age work environment.

“Endpoint and edge network security is a major concern since IT teams can only manage the companyissued IT assets. The home network remains unmanaged.”

GIRISH CHANDANGOUDAR

VP – Head of Infrastructure Management Services, Happiest Minds Technologies

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PEOPLE | LEISURE

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PEOPLE | LEISURE

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ESCAPE

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Whether one is seeking relaxation, aquatic and island adventures, wellbeing, fitness or just family time, this 264-room beach resort has something for everybody, including one of the longest outdoor pools in the Maldives, football pitch, tennis and volleyball courts, Aquaholics water sports and dive centre, and Aroma art studio. Situated in the Dhaalu Atoll, the island is a thirty-minute flight from Velana International Airport, followed by a twenty-minute boat ride.

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DIGITAL, LOW CODE, AND ELEPHANTS Organisations need to break down business problems into bite-size solutions and orchestrate them together to deliver the perfect made-to-order solution.

BY RITESH VARMA Global Head - Business Solutions, Newgen Software

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ith Delta still prevailing, and Omicron in the midst, we welcomed the year 2022 with a new COVID variant, Florona. They say these variants are less fatal and on the verge of making COVID a common virus. Or is it so?

While many countries are opening up and many others plan to remove restrictions, economies are still hampered with the slightest hint of an increase in new cases with the new variant. Businesses have quickly realised that they have to live with it, and the only way to survive the unexpected is to become increasingly digital.

ACHIEVING DIGITAL, THE LOW CODE WAY

Digital, in today’s terms, has become superfluous; it changes by the day, and so do business realities.

The only way to keep pace with the rampant change is by approaching digital the low code way. Today, it seems that every software company calls itself a low

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code provider. But the difference is in the way the whole solution is architected.

“The only way to eat an elephant is to cut it into bitesize pieces,” were the words once shared by a wise guru, an industry stalwart, an individual who digitally transformed a bank using the power of low code.

Allow me to clarify; it is not that one is interested in eating an elephant or cutting it into bitesize pieces. Here, the elephant represents the business problem at hand, and the bite-size pieces represent how it needs to be broken down into manageable pieces. Low code is the ideology, and just like the business problem, low code itself has to be flipped on its head.

Let me try and explain this a bit more.

TIME FOR THE PERFECT SYMPHONY

We all view low code as a tool or an all-encompassing application that would have answers to all our questions. It should, however, be looked at as an orchestrator of components. The components here represent services that have their APIs and data sets.

There can be various types of services – internal or external.

Internal would mean something that the tool presents, and external would mean something that the environment and ecosystem provide.

Internal services could be interfaces, rulesets, masters, etc.

Each of these services has its API and data sets and is independent of each other with minimum dependencies. On the other hand, external services would be like the core banking, ERP, core insurance, loan management

system, or even simpler systems such as MS Word. Again, these would have their APIs and data sets. These services would do their part at the relevant stages of the application and processes as demanded.

The process or application has to be looked at as an amalgamation of these services into relevant stages by a concept referred to as an ‘orchestrator.’

Depending on the organisation and its current state, the internal services may be heavy (more utilised), or the external services may be heavy. However, these are just orchestrated to provide the end state. For instance, if we take the example of banking and lending, the lending application stages remain the same.

Depending on a bank or a financial institution, how and what components are called for can vary, making each application different. An organisation with a portal may not require investing in a portal service, but another may need to subscribe to an internal portal service. Similarly, a financial institution that invested in credit scoring and underwriting may plug in its external credit service compared to another that subscribes to an internal credit service.

The end objective is to understand how an organisation “componentalises” or “servicifies” the entire application and orchestrates them together to deliver the perfect made-to-order, custom-fit app. That, in turn, helps the organisation transform and get that leverage to address the ever-changing business environment.

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PROCESS | PHARMACEUTICAL COVER STORY

TAKING A STEP TOWARDS INDUSTRY 4.0 The pharmaceutical factory of the future is as much a digital entity as it is a mechanical one.

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BY PERRY ZALEVSKY Senior Director, Industry, Aveva

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he global population’s health has always depended on the pharmaceutical industry, but never so pointedly as it did at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The world needed inoculations on a massive scale, and it needed them yesterday. Rarely is so much asked of industry in such a short timeframe and at such perilous stakes.

In the face of this once-ina-generation demand, vaccine producers became increasingly aware that they would need to reimagine their operations and embrace recent advances in process digitisation. We know how it turned out from there,

of course, because many of us are the proof of their success. As you read this, the odds are good that you are either vaccinated or soon to be, thanks to the remarkably swift development of life-saving COVID-19 vaccines.

Process development (PD) in the pharmaceutical industry now involves more data-driven decision-making and risk assessment than ever. Under new PD models, companies use more data, automation and modelling to reduce risks and establish a holistic, transferable control strategy.

Industry time-to-market is as short as ever, and development cycle times are shrinking. These process improvements prepare

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the industry to meet whatever unprecedented need comes next, meaning a safer, healthier future for all.

FACTORIES OF THE FUTURE

In tomorrow’s factory, data drives action. While complex processes are underway, sensors and devices create a constant flow of data, resulting in a real-time snapshot and digital history of the process. Data analysts and process managers can then use this digital history to create machine-learning approaches to machine

KEY TAKEAWAYS

maintenance and optimisation.

This is the vision of ‘plug and produce’, a world of smart devices that are not separated in silos but communicate seamlessly across companies, partners, platforms, sites, and processes.

In the last few years, the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering has hosted a plug and produce working group, part of a larger initiative to implement Pharma 4.0 manufacturing concepts across the industry.

Today, gradual and significant collaborative change is occurring across the entire pharmaceutical ecosystem, including equipment manufacturers, software solution providers, and regulators.

As more tools and solutions become available to support plug-and-produce manufacturing, businesses with enterprise-wide approaches to digital data will be able to integrate new equipment easily and move towards data-driven decision-making to optimise their operations and reduce costs.

THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Process development in the pharmaceutical industry now involves more data-driven decision-making and risk assessment than ever.

A gradual change is occurring across the entire pharmaceutical ecosystem, including equipment manufacturers, software solution providers, and regulators.

From advanced analytics to AI, numerous technologies have the power to transform the way pharmaceutical factories operate.

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Laying the groundwork for digital transformation is no small endeavour, but the potential payoff is enormous. A factory that operates on a single source of data can perform deep real-time analysis, which enables it, in turn, to drive significant outcomes, such as a shorter time to market and less costly drug development. This leads to savings for consumers and society-at-large and better collaboration and data sharing between innovators and contract manufacturers.

This can also lead to a shift from scheduled maintenance to more efficient conditionbased, and later, predictive maintenance strategies while offering a greater ability to

The International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering has hosted a plug and produce working group to implement Pharma 4.0 manufacturing concept.

identify phases or transitions in continuous processes and assign KPIs. Besides, companies can also expect increased visibility into product quality during the entire manufacturing process, not just at the end of the cycle.

THE JOURNEY TO PHARMA 4.0

From advanced analytics to artificial intelligence (AI), numerous technologies have the power to transform the way pharmaceutical factories operate. By taking small steps, manufacturers can use new techniques to meet Pharma 4.0 standards, increase throughput, and reduce cycle times while maintaining product integrity.

Define goals: The factory of the future will be shaped by business goals and priorities. Whether OEE or other KPIs, factories must work toward clear and measurable goals. Pharmaceutical companies are as prepared as ever to cross ambitious milestones thanks to new tools and technologies. By setting a combination of shortand long-term goals and aspiring

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of trained individuals capable of pioneering new strategies.

to stretch goals, companies can push the boundaries of what’s so far been possible.

Manufacturers can use new techniques to meet Pharma 4.0 standards, increase throughput, and reduce cycle times while maintaining product integrity.

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Match culture and technology: Meeting Pharma 4.0’s new standards for quality management requires a team effort. The factory of the future demands an engaged workforce, including everyone from CEOs to workers on the shop floor. To be fully engaged, stakeholders need access to process data in real-time. Access to real-time data gives stakeholders critical insights into their operations, enabling them to solve pressing problems. Increasing the number of people who can access realtime data will be a cultural shift for many companies. But, by giving every user the autonomy to make decisions, manufacturers can empower more of their people to bring real, beneficial change.

Focus on people and capabilities: Transforming a factory with people and technology requires a team with the right technical abilities. Whether that’s a technical team to plan and deploy new systems or the end-users who ultimately adopt them, it’s important to build teams

Close the loop on the production floor: When working towards factory-of-the-future goals, it’s essential to pay attention to the people on the production floor.

It’s about more than just seeking user adoption; organisation-wide, workers need to understand how technology and process changes will benefit them. Will it make their jobs easier? Will it give them the visibility that they didn’t have before?

After all, the people on the production floor understand the process best. These people will benefit from this new data and the new insights it affords.

Pharmaceutical companies need the feedback and expertise of their subject-matter experts to create connected strategies that serve the bottom line.

Plan big, execute small: Manufacturing facilities have natural constraints and can only scale at a certain pace. Although it’s tempting to jump on every new process, procedure and tool right away, meaningful transformation can’t happen overnight. Planning a series of modest, incremental steps allows an operation to measure its success and make modifications along the way.

Starting small, though, doesn’t mean you can’t plan big. Reaching the factory of tomorrow will require a big-picture approach that prioritises enterprise architecture, basic infrastructure, and scalability. A long-term plan serves as a roadmap for the future and helps companies lay the proper groundwork on which to build.

For the first time, pharmaceutical companies are democratising data and insights to streamline processes, increase efficiencies, and create advanced cures in a shorter amount of time. With the help of the right tools and change management strategies, 4.0 philosophies can drive true organisational transformation.

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EMERGING VALUE SYSTEM FOR EMERGING TECHNOLOGY BUSINESSES As much as we hear about polarisation, much of the world remains in the centre, steering away from the toxic fringes of the left and right.

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Relentless polarisation presents a severe crisis for the digital giants that hold up the world’s digital economy. To escape the wrong side of history, product managers must stop putting the customer before society.

But, as the giants struggle to manage the headlines, aimed squarely at issues caused in part by their products and service strategies, perhaps the door is ever so ajar for the medium-size tech provider.

For medium-size brands, maintaining a sufficiently positive brand perception is of the utmost importance. For many brands, being talked

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about, even in a controversial context, can be a good thing, as it implies relevance.

However, being consistently associated with politically divisive issues and even outright toxic communications, such as hate speech, is something that medium-size brands must desperately avoid. The prevalence of such unconstructive — and unprofitable — forms of relevance increases as the level of polarisation increases.

With many consumers feeling like big tech has tuned their voices, perhaps it is time for medium-size tech providers to delight these disenchanted customers. There are so many voices, but the voice of society,

BY BARIKA L PACE Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

can yield significate insights if we stay firm to our organisations core values.

What keeps today’s digital economy running is a critical mass of highly monetisable and digitally engaged consumers whose digital personas

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PROCESS | SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

There are so many voices, but the voice of society, can yield significate insights if we stay firm to organisation core values

reside in a sort of Goldilocks zone of monetisation: not too hot, not too cold.

The key for medium-size tech providers, avoid the toxic and elusive fringes and remain firmly centre.

As headline news mounts against larger tech providers and consumers question their intentions in the public domain, medium-size tech providers with moderate corporate values remain able to seize on new opportunities in the Goldilocks zone.

Gartner’s survey data below indicates continued sustainable engagement in social advocacy is growing, with consumers ranking equally loyalty and authenticity as their top values. The key take away, avoid the toxic fringe With these values in mind, many have abandoned larger tech providers, calling out several issues: l Bias in design l Hate-for-profit concerns l Diversity, equity and inclusion issues in hiring l Pricing concerns for those facing the digital divide l Sustainability concerns If you are thinking about where to start social engagement with consumers, investors and employees, note that consumers are thinking about a few select areas from tech providers.

#1 PANDEMIC RESPONSE

Consumers are paying close attention to how brands are responding to the COVID-19 crisis: 69% say they’ll remember how companies respond, and those that put profits before people will lose their trust forever. In addition, consumers are appreciative of their collective increased awareness of companies’ social responsibility practices.

#2 SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability-savvy brands can support the environment, attract ESG-conscious investors, attract top talent and innovate

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KEY TAKEAWAYS Their digital personas reside in a sort of Goldilocks zone of monetisation: not too hot, not too cold.

The key for mediumsize tech providers, avoid the toxic and elusive fringes and remain firmly centre.

Gartner’s survey data indicates continued sustainable engagement in social advocacy is growing.

Consumers are ranking equally loyalty and authenticity as their top values.

The key take away, avoid the toxic fringe.

in new technology markets.

Recent research in these areas points out that the growing pressure and urgency regarding environmental sustainability is ushering in fundamental changes to technology markets.

These trends present product leaders with both new challenges and new opportunities across three themes: changing fundamentals, zero-waste operations and existential breakthroughs.

Here are a few areas that medium-size tech companies should look at: l Showcasing sustainability benefits and features in product offerings by exposing sustainability features and metrics in product and service interfaces

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l Software tools that enable increasingly complex and comprehensive sustainability reporting, analytics and accounting — especially for carbon footprints l Consulting capabilities to measure the financial risk and liabilities associated with sustainability issues and to deliver change programs, for both enterprises and investors

#3 DIVERSITY, EQUITY AND INCLUSION

What keeps today’s digital economy running is a critical mass of highly monetisable and digitally engaged consumers.

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With equality toping the consumer values list, many are aware of tech companies’ slow response to addressing DE&I issues. Furthermore, the number of women leaving the workforce is complicating most organisations’ DE&I goals.

However, tech companies have fared better than most in terms of retention during this pandemic era.

Working from home and flexible work arrangements are more suited to the tech industry than some others, which has helped to stave off attrition. So, any plans of going back to the old days may merit

additional consideration.

So, what can medium-size tech companies do? l Invest in developing talent pools of underrepresented candidates by partnering locally, developing training programs, offering apprenticeships and exploiting multiple recruiting channels to build your future talent pipelines. l Build an employer-of-choice brand for women candidates by partnering with marketing and human resources to establish and evangelise your commitment to both product designs and a culture that is inclusive of women. l Bridge digital divides affecting users by using voice of the customer VoC insights to account for technology adoption barriers and bias in existing CX data. l Transform barriers into product design opportunities and create an optimal inclusive experience for communities challenged by digital deserts. l Consider leveraging a combination of human-centric design approaches, such as design thinking and inclusion design, and pay attention to consumer pricing.

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#changemakers #2022trailblazers

#iamacatalyst

Honoring the best

PROCESS | SERVICES

GROWTH, JOBS, EMPLOYMENT: THE ETERNAL TRIUMVIRATE With a focus on education and employability, economies in Asia need to use new-age technology platforms to achieve their purpose and goals.

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ast month, I spoke about the importance of “Purpose”. India is a land of multifaceted challenges and opportunities.

Our demographic dividend has been extolled by many. Yet some talk about how it can be a millstone around our neck if not leveraged well.

Of late, various surveys have spoken about how a third of India’s educated cannot find appropriate employment.

Many lament that they have not been able to find a job of their choice. Yet the news is not uniformly dismal. Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala have the highest pool of

skilled talent and over 45% of highly employable resources.

Pharmaceutical, software, the Internet and the BFSI sectors continue to attract talent in a big way. The story is the same across most of the other economies in Asia.

On the business side, it is no secret that rural demand has held up well despite the pandemic.

In fact, rural India contributes 10% to 20% of the sales for white goods manufacturers. This is growing at a healthy doubledigit for many products. It is well known that demand in Tier 2 and Tier-3 cities are growing as Indians become more upwardly mobile and demand a better quality of life.

BY MANOJ CHUGH IT Industry Expert

This brings us to another essential or Purpose of the market.

THE MOBILE-FIRST STRATEGY

While both offline and online retailers do brisk business, the need for high-quality after-

High-quality service drives sales velocity.

The better the quality of service, the more the sales; this direct co-relation is a well-known fact.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS While digital engagement has effectively driven sales across sectors, the concern of providing quality services has been nagging product firms.

With the world fast adopting mobile technology, a key to high-quality after-sales services lies in adopting the mobile-first strategy.

Dheeraj Khatter and his team cracked the problem of building scale to service customers across the country by crowdsourcing skills.

sales services is not lost on their customers. In India, for example, we know that half of the Internet users in the country come from rural areas since the majority of new mobile subscriptions are coming from its six lakh villages. Naturally, a mobile-first strategy is critical for brands to succeed.

However, a nagging concern that rankles the minds of many product firms is that whilst digital engagement helps drive sales, there is no easy answer, however, when it comes to service.

India has a significant thrust on encouraging local homegrown entrepreneurs to “Make in India”. India’s locally designed and produced products are world-class. They offer great value for money in terms of features, functionality, and price. However, when it comes to service, they lack the network, pedigree, and deep pockets of their better-known global competitors who have honed their service networks, methodology and processes over the decades. While local brands do a great job on the product side, winning the hearts and minds of customers, it is a different kettle of fish from a services perspective.

Installation and warranty services are an integral part of the product “feature set” which customers evaluate. This becomes even more important in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns.

This is where Dheeraj Khatter and his platform is making a difference.

CROWDSOURCING SERVICES

In 2018, Khatter, who, along with his Co-founders, had been delivering field support services to Telecom Service Providers in India, recognised the potential of building scale to service customers across the country by crowdsourcing skills.

The team decided to build the

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My Mobiforce platform and started with dogfooding. They decided to use it to serve their customers, for a start. Once they tasted success, Dheeraj and his co-founders decided to devote themselves to the “purpose” of delivering high-quality services, at scale, by leveraging the pool of skilled technicians by bringing them on to their platform and providing meaningful opportunities.

Employability with dignity has been a big issue for many skilled entrepreneurs and professionals.

For My MobiForce, the co-founders had found their Purpose. And for emerging brands, this was god’s answer to their prayers.

MAKING QUALITY SERVICES VIABLE

Sales with all its enablement engines have always been a lesser challenge than services; the lack of a predictable services model for install and warranty support continues to be an enigma.

Emerging brands look for breadth of reach at minimal investment and low unit cost. Today’s products are built with high reliability and are designed for remote support. They do not need a “rocket science” level of knowledge and skill to service.

While business-to-consumer (B2C) space has been disrupted in terms of enabling quick and easy delivery, thanks to Gig workers, the same does not hold true when it comes to service. In the past, franchisee services models delivered well. They were able to meet and exceed customer expectations adequately. However, with the accelerated breadth and reach of the sales channels, service franchisees could not keep pace and were soon spread thin. Costs continued to mount, impacting the quality of their Service.

Crowdsourced Gig Platforms can offer a viable alternative and deliver high-quality support services.

For example, My MobiForce, serves 6,000 Pin Codes across all states in India, thanks to the Skill India program that has made available a pool of talent across

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professions, from electricians, carpenters and plumbers to other professionals who have been trained and are ready to serve. My MobiForce connects them with customers and help monetise their skills.

They have access to more opportunities and offer OEMs and brands the benefit of speed.

When brands sell more, they help create wealth for everyone in the value chain. High-quality service drives sales velocity. The better the quality of service, the

Gig Workers are hungry, and with more brands penetrating the heartland, the opportunity to excel through better service continues to grow.

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more the sales; this direct corelation is a well-known fact.

PAVING THE WAY FOR CHANGE

Covid has changed many things. Service Franchisees can no longer afford the payroll and overhead costs. This, in turn, provides an impetus to crowdsourced, services-led, Gig Platforms. Today, wellknown mega brands agree that the world has changed, and they need to revisit the services model.

Gig Services, today have become very well accepted and recognised even by the best of product firms. The Net Promoter Scores (NPS) has been climbing, and entrepreneurs like Dheeraj, today, deliver an NPS that rivals what older, asset-heavy models would deliver. Gig Workers are hungry, and with more brands penetrating the heartland, the opportunity to excel through better service continues to grow.

Some sectors that have seen tremendous success through this model include telecom networks, IT products like laptops, desktops, printers, networking products, and white goods like fans, toasters, geysers, washing machines, and televisions.

Similarly, EV charging stations and solar energy solutions offer considerable opportunities

in the future.

Dheeraj and his team focus on providing upskilling to their technicians. An electrician can be easily upskilled to install satellite antennas. This enables them to earn more without undergoing a metamorphosis. As charging stations come up across the length and breadth of India and Indian farms get powered by microgrids, the opportunity will only grow.

They have 50,000 providers on the platform today. The quality of the technicians and their skill level is not a constraint.

For a long time, the employability and relevance of India’s youth have been under question. With smarter products, which are lightweight, the talent available is adequate to meet market needs. Besides, soft skills will ensure that talent in Asian countries like India can meet customers’ exacting demands. A strong commitment, discipline and work ethic will be critical to the long-term success of such models.

A passion for service delivery, backed by high-quality training, incentives, rewards and recognition, will help. Constant engagement and the traditional warmth of “familylike” approaches will enable long term success.

My MobiForce has been a pioneer in scaling the Crowdsourcing Gig Services Platform model. With marquee brands rushing to their platform and skilled technicians lining up to provide services to dozens of products across industry segments, “Make in India” will see a considerable impetus. It will also drive economic growth, enabling a win-win for producers, customers and job seekers!

In the meantime, Dheeraj continues to trudge thousands of Pin Codes looking for skills to feed the need to services the range of new products making way to millions of upwardly mobile “rurban” (rural-urban) masses.

The author is an ICT Expert with four decades of industry experience.

The views expressed are his own.

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NEWS

BANGLADESH

Bangladesh e-commerce market to triple by 2023: ADB The e-commerce sector in Bangladesh is likely to touch Tk 26,000 crore ($3 Billion) in 2023, up from the current Tk 8,500 crore ($1 Billion), according to an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report on the country’s cottage, micro, small, and medium enterprise (CMSME) sector.

With the advent of the pandemic, Bangladesh has been experiencing a massive shift in shopping trends, with more people getting used to buying things online. Additionally, the growing mobile financial services (MFS) industry has enabled consumers to buy products online even more efficiently, boosting the e-commerce sector.

At present, there are about 2,500 e-commerce companies in the country and at least 50,000 business pages on Facebook. According to the e-Commerce Association of Bangladesh (e-CAB), there has been a revolution in the e-commerce sector in Bangladesh, especially from July to September 2020. During that time, online sales increased by 70-80%.

The ADB report also found that businesses that have increased their use of information technology, especially MFS, are on track to recovery. Businesses in the CMSME sector that rely on MFS saw 10% more recovery, while turnover increased by 60%. The report also states that 31% of the companies surveyed have access to MFS, and the transaction for 74% of such companies have gone up. Additionally, the survey found that during March-May 2020, only 42% of pre-pandemic sales volume was recovered, a rate which increased to 77% in January-March 2021.

The report recommends adopting a special policy in this regard in the future, saying that small factories or businesses should be able to use digital platforms to survive in a big crisis such as that of the pandemic.

CAMBODIA

China’s Sailun to set up all-steel tyre project in Cambodia Sailun Group, the Qingdao, China-based company, has announced that it will be setting up a CNY 1.4 billion ($268 Million) all-steel radial tyre plant in Cambodia to expand overseas operations. The new plant, to be built at the company’s existing facility in the Qilu Special Economic Zone in Svay Rieng city, in southeastern Cambodia, will have the capacity to produce 1.65 million allsteel radial tyres per year, the company stated in a press release.

The project is expected to be completed in 17 months and specifically targets the European and North American markets. Sailun started producing semi-steel tyres in Cambodia in November 2021, with an output of 8,000 units per day. Once fully operational, the plant will manufacture nine million semi-steel passenger car tyres units.

Commenting on the decision, the company notes that the Cambodian location offers abundant labour, low-cost natural rubber, and preferential import and export tariffs according to its feasibility

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study. The project will be operated by Sailun’s subsidiary Cart Tyre and is expected to achieve an average annual operating income of CNY 1.8 Billion and an average annual net profit of CNY 309 Million.

The facility in Cambodia is Sailun’s second overseas production unit, after Vietnam, which started operation in 2013.

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NEWS

CHINA

Tencent unveils plan for carbon neutrality by 2030

China’s Tencent Holdings has announced its plans of achieving carbon neutrality in its operations and supply chain by 2030. The company, whose businesses range from messaging app WeChat to games and cloud-based services, also pledged to use green power for 100% of all electricity consumed by

the end of the decade.

To reach its net-zero goal, Tencent will work to improve resource efficiency, increase the proportion of renewable energy it uses, and adopt carbon offsets.

The company also stated that it is also looking to help consumers, businesses and society to go green

by fostering open innovation and knowledge sharing, leveraging the reach and influence of its platforms and products.

Tencent informed that it would actively participate in green power trading and adopt carbon offsets for some business segments. It will also promote a low-carbon ethos to its consumers and businesses.

An internal review found the company’s total greenhouse gas emissions were equivalent to 5.111 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2021 last year, it said.

“It is Tencent’s responsibility as a global technology leader to help the world achieve carbon neutrality, and it’s also an essential part of our vision to use tech for good,” the company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Pony Ma stated in a press release. “Not only do we believe this is the right thing to do for society, but we are eager to play our part as the global community progresses towards a carbonneutral and more sustainable future,” Ma added.

INDIA

Dabur ties up with IndianOil for direct-to-home sales FMCG major and ayurvedic products company Dabur India has signed an exclusive partnership with IndianOil to provide direct access of its products to over 14 crore Indane LPG consumer households across the country. As part of the tieup, IndianOil’s Indane LPG distributors will become retail business partners for Dabur. They will help sell the latter’s range of products directly to their consumer households through the network of delivery executives. Both companies are working on technological system integration for seamless supplies across the value chain.

Dabur India Chief Executive Officer Mohit Malhotra said this is the first time an FMCG company has joined hands with IndianOil for such a partnership. “This will bring us closer to millions of Indane LPG consumers across urban, semi-urban and rural areas and is an integral part of our multi-

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Dabur India and IndianOil leadership team after signing the ‘Direct2Home’ sales agreement.

channel go-to-market strategy,” Malhotra said.

Sharing details IndianOil Executive Director (LPG) SS Lamba said, “This new go-to-market route will enable convenience and ease of buying for our customers through Indane LPG distributors and their network of the delivery personnel.” IndianOil, with 12,750 plus distributors and over 90,000 delivery personnel, caters to 14.3 crore households across the country.

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NEWS

INDONESIA

Bio Farma to make COVID-19 vaccines with WHO tech transfer

Indonesia could start making its mRNA vaccines after the World Health Organisation (WHO) picked it to receive a technology transfer to become Southeast Asia’s COVID-19 vaccine hub. According to media reports quoting the Enterprises Ministry, state company Bio Farma is likely to produce mRNA doses soon. The Ministry, however, did not name the brand. The company is one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the region, with a capacity to produce 3.2 billion doses a year.

“It is the kind of solution that developing countries need, a solution that empowers, a solution that strengthens our self-reliance, a solution that allows us to contribute to global health resilience,” Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said on Twitter.

The country had sought global support for making its COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate the population and ship to neighbouring countries. A lack of supply has led it to give out half-doses for its booster

programme to ensure it has enough for all 270 million citizens. The WHO plans to set up tech transfer hubs across developing countries to help them produce mRNA vaccines.

Meanwhile, the country recently started testing its homegrown COVID-19 vaccine on humans after getting the green light from the drug regulator.

Research on the Merah Putih (Red-White) vaccine, named after the colours of the Indonesian national flag, is led by Airlangga University and Biotis Pharmaceutical Indonesia. Authorities hope the vaccine, which has suffered delays since 2020, will be authorised for use by mid-2022.

JAPAN

Alvotech, Fuji Pharma expand partnership in Japan

Biopharmaceutical company Alvotech Holdings and Japanese pharmaceutical company Fuji Pharma have announced a strategic partnership to develop and commercialise biosimilar medicines in Japan.

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Fuji will get exclusive commercial rights to a biosimilar currently in early phase development as part of the agreement.

According to the Alvotech press release, the company will receive an upfront payment and be eligible for subsequent milestone payments tied to development progression, as well as a share of the in-market sales.

The agreement adds another biosimilar candidate to the partnership between Alvotech and Fuji, first announced in 2018, bringing the total number of proposed biosimilar products that the companies are partnering on to six. The Japanese market ranks third in overall pharmaceutical spending globally.

“Fuji has a been a pioneer in biosimilars in the Japanese market,” Takayuki Iwai, President and CEO, Fuji Pharma, said, adding that the expansion in its partnership with Alvotech demonstrates the commitment to patients and Fuji Pharma’s focus on healthcare sustainability.

Talking about the agreement Robert Wessman, Founder and Chairman of Alvotech, said that a global approach to biosimilars is fundamental to his company story. “We believe the dynamics in the Japanese market will favour biosimilars in the long-term as the health care system balances cost and patient access,” he noted.

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NEWS

MALAYSIA

AirAsia to lease 100 vertical take-off aircraft

Tony Fernandes, CEO of Capital A (left) and Dómhnal Slattery, CEO of Avolon, at the MoU signing ceremony.

AirAsia Aviation Group Ltd (AirAsia), the aviation arm of Capital A Bhd, has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MoU) with international aircraft leasing company Avolon to take on a lease a minimum of 100 VX4 electric vertical takeoff and

landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

Tony Fernandes, CEO of Capital A, said that the eVTOL aircraft would allow AirAsia to revolutionise air travel by providing advanced air mobility to a whole new range of passengers, connecting more efficiently in everyday lives. “In addition to the

eVTOL aircraft, Avolon, through its investment and innovation affiliate Avolon-e, will partner with AirAsia to commercialise zero-emission eVTOL aircraft and develop an industry-leading urban air mobility (UAM) platform in Southeast Asia,” he said during the MoU signing ceremony.

Fernandes said Avolon and AirAsia would form a working group to pursue local certification and conduct research to understand potential market opportunities and infrastructure requirements for UAM. He also stated that AirAsia would also leverage its successful travel and lifestyle mobile app, AirAsia Super App, to help support and build an eVTOL ride-sharing platform with Avolon.

The four-passenger and one pilot VX4 aircraft are projected to have speeds of up to 321 Km per hour, a range over 100 Km near silent when in flight, zero operating emissions and low cost per passenger mile. It is expected to open up advanced air mobility to a whole new range of passengers and transform travelling.

PAKISTAN

Fintech startup NayaPay raises $13 Million Pakistan-based fintech startup NayaPay has raised $13 Million in a seed funding round led by Zayn Capital, global fund manager MSA Novo and early-stage VC Graph Ventures from the Silicon Valley. Other investors included Singapore-based Saison Capital, Waleed Saigol’s Maple Leaf Capital, Empower Finance CEO Warren Hogarth, and Pakistani conglomerate Lakson Group.

The funding is one of the largest seed rounds in South Asia. The company plans to use the investment to roll out its payments and messaging platform, financial management tools and products for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

NayaPay is the second company to receive approval from the State Bank of Pakistan to commercially launch an e-money institution in the country. It is set to roll out chat-let wallets for consumers and

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merchants, and NayaPay Arc, a software as a service platform for merchants to accept payments via cards and online. The platform will also offer universal payment acceptance and financial management tools for SMBs. According to Danish Lakhani, CEO of NayaPay, the inapp messaging options will lower the learning curve and increase adoption. It will also give context to payments as all communication related to it would be done on a single application. NayaPay plans to deploy 150,000 points of sales (POS) machines at merchant outlets in the next five years.

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NEWS

SINGAPORE

Sabana REIT gets SGD 150 Million green loan from HSBC

Singapore-based Sabana Industrial Real Estate Investment Trust (Sabana REIT) has secured SGD 150 Million as its maiden sustainability-linked loan from HSBC. The loan comprises a fouryear tranche of SGD 75 Million and a five-year tranche of the same amount. The Loan aligns with the company’s focus on strengthening its environmental,

social and governance (ESG) commitments.

According to reports, the interest rate will be pegged to predetermined annual energy and water intensity targets for Sabana REIT across its portfolio. The company will also be entitled to lower pre-agreed interest rates on the facility if these targets are met.

Commenting on the loan Sabana

Industrial REIT Chief Financial Officer Lim Wei Huang said: “Beyond giving us greater financial flexibility, this loan underscores our commitment to integrate sustainability in our operations, minimise our environmental impact and deliver growth in a responsible manner.”

All of Sabana REIT’s loans will be unencumbered with this facility in place, a company spokesperson said, adding that the proceeds of the loan will be used to refinance existing indebtedness and for general corporate purposes, asset acquisitions, asset enhancement initiatives and working capital requirements.

“The pathway to a low-carbon future requires businesses across all sectors to review their approach to their operations. We have identified specific water and energy targets which, if fulfilled, will reduce interest repayments and will enable the REIT to make a measurable step on their sustainability journey,” HSBC Singapore Head of Commercial Banking Regina Lee said.

SOUTH KOREA

Kolmar Korea to ship Halalcertified beauty products Cosmetics ODM company Kolmar Korea has signed a contract with the International Beauty Industry Trade Association (IBITA) to ship cosmetics products to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Under the agreement, Kolmar will develop and produce cosmetics for its brand clients in the Middle East region while IBITA will focus on local marketing and distribution.

Kolmar Korea has established a halal assurance system at both of its Sejong Skincare Cosmetics Factory and Bucheon Color Cosmetics Factory in Korea and both companies plan to create a system to help Kolmar’s brand companies to enter the market.

Halal certification is required for companies to enter the Middle Eastern market as it ensures that the product is safe for Muslims to consume and use. The Halal certification is strictly regulated, and

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products cannot contain any prohibited ingredients such as pigs, and they must have their own production lines.

“The effort will help Kolmar Korea expand its overseas footing beyond China and North America to MENA,” Kolmar Korea President Choi Hyun-kyu said. The Middle Eastern cosmetics market has great growth potential and is expected to grow to $ 24.6 Billion by 2022.

IBITA is a non-profit business that was established

by Korea’s Ministry of SMEs and Startups in 2012 to help Korean cosmetics companies’ forays into overseas markets. Since IBITA signed a contract with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government in 2018, it has been on the front line to promote Korean cosmetic companies in the Middle Eastern market.

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TECHNOLOGY | AI

NOW IS THE TIME TO GET READY Building an AI-first company can be a daunting task. A simple three-stage approach by enterprises can go a long way in making this transition smoother.

T

he Global AI Adoption Index 2021 conducted by IBM indicates that COVID has accelerated the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across organisations in response to the changing business needs. The report states that approximately onethird of the companies are integrating their businesses with AI, and 43% have accelerated their AI initiatives’ rollout due to the pandemic.

Organisations plan to invest in AI solutions and relevant skills over the next 12 months.

According to an Accenture research report, while 84% of

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the C-suite executives believe AI to be integral for the timely achievement of their growth objectives, nearly 76% state that they are struggling to find a suitable way to scale AI. While experts believe that AI and machine learning (ML) can be the game-changer, it takes time, skill, and expertise to unlock the full potential and optimum ROI of AI and ML. Companies scaling their AI and ML projects strategically generate 5X more returns than those unable to scale. However, scaling these comes with its own set of challenges. While some large organisations have begun to see the results of their

efforts in the field, most of them struggle to scale.

Here is a three-stage approach to the adoption of AI and ML.

LAYING THE AI AND ML FOUNDATION

It takes both technology and business experts to lay out an organisation’s AI and ML roadmap. This stage involves procuring and setting up the various hardware, software, and human resources required for the AI and ML projects. The data repositories are restructured per the new project requirements.

Building AI and ML take time.

The data science team needs to understand the requirements clearly, collaborate with the

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business experts, and build and deploy models targeted at the prioritised business problem.

This has been traditionally done by procuring hardware, including GPUs, setting up software like Python, Tensorflow, Apache Spark, or Keras.io. Modern AI platforms automate this by hiding the build and deployment behind a UI studio that contains an inbuilt ML Ops.

KEY BOTTLENECKS TO BUILDING AIML FOUNDATION

Huge upfront investment: It takes a huge upfront investment from hardware and software infrastructure to resources and management to incubate AI and ML initiatives in an organisation. Moreover, resources are required to compensate for the maximum requirement irrespective of whether such needs will arise minimally during a period, even though crucial.

So, what should enterprises do?

Organisations should look at SaaS-based AI and ML platforms that allow for quick adoption and rapid scaling, as per their requirements. This

Organisations should look at SaaS-based AI and ML platforms that allow for quick adoption and rapid scaling, as per their requirements.

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Business Value

TECHNOLOGY | AI

Making AI Ubiquitous

AI

Scalling AI

Laying Foundation

Enterprise AI Adoption Stages Source: Now is the Time to Be Ready for AI/ML Revolution, Newgen Software

reduces the upfront investment cost and reduces the risk of unknown ROI. Organisations can quickly start their AI and ML journey and see the results sooner rather than later, allowing them to visualise what AI and ML can do for their business and manage expectations accordingly.

Lengthy process: With data being generated at an everincreasing pace, the average time of two months for building an ML pipeline and more than a month for ML model deployment seems to be too long. By the time the deployed model comes online, it becomes outdated due to the changed market conditions, increasing the risk for monetary loss.

What should enterprises do?

A real-time data modelling capability is crucial to any AI and ML system. Users should quickly adapt to the changing data definition and volumes.

This allows faster data analytics and frequent model training to provide accurate, timely results.

SCALING AI AND ML

This stage focuses on applying AI and ML at the enterprise level. Multi-disciplinary teams take diverse implementation environments and exponentially increasing data into consideration. Efforts are put into solving the difficulty and technical complexity of scaling AI to the enterprise level.

Scaling AI and ML to the enterprise level require

leveraging the data to create continuous actionable insights and make data-driven decisions.

But most organisations find it challenging to know the extent of their internal data as it often resides in standalone silos in different systems and departments.

Unstructured data in different formats: Data is often available in audio, text, video, image, live feeds, and more. A tremendous amount of information is present in images and visuals as unstructured data.

Even if you have a clear view of the data available, chances are it is not cleansed and ready for use in building AI solutions.

As per industry reports, data scientists spend nearly 51% of their time improving the data quality by collecting, labelling, cleaning, and organising it. The process, however, is inefficient and slow, which hampers the ability to generate real-time insights.

Moreover, with the ever-changing nature of data, AI and ML models quickly degrade and become obsolete if not regularly re-trained on the latest data.

Modern AI and ML systems have built-in data cleanup and multichannel ingestion capabilities.

These can take different data types and build a pipeline to transform the data into meaningful analytics and AI algorithms inputs. This translates into faster execution and better business insights for your business processes.

Need for trust and explainability: AI and ML have seen adoption in various industries, across

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TECHNOLOGY | AI

information sensitive and critical use cases, including credit decisions, fraud detection, medical diagnoses, and more. The ethical issue concerning these domains makes it necessary to explain algorithms’ reasoning behind automatic decision-making.

However, the explainability of a model decision is directly related to the algorithm’s complexity. The users need transparency to understand

the models to completely trust AI and debug them upon failure in real-world applications. The greater the trust in the created model, the quicker it can be used in real-world business scenarios.

An AI and ML platform where users can quickly understand why the ML model behaved the way it did provides crucial insights into business decisions. This helps identify algorithmic biases and reduce financial impact due to wrong or biased decision-making by the AI and ML models.

MAKING AI AND ML UBIQUITOUS

Scaling AI and ML to the enterprise level require leveraging the data to create continuous actionable insights and make datadriven decisions.

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This is where AI and ML integration with a business is complete. At this stage, AI and ML provide insights and help make informed decisions and streamline business processes. Citizen data scientists can quickly build and deploy AI models and see the results immediately.

The COVID-19 pandemic has propelled businesses into a concentrated digital space, with AI/ML proving to be a key differentiator for growth. More and more companies are looking to integrate the technology into their business. However, building an AI-first company can be a daunting task.

According to Accenture, 75% of

business leaders fear going out of business if they do not scale AI in the next five years. With diverse implementation environments and exponentially increasing data, the difficulty and technical complexity behind building AI and ML at scale increase manifold. Consequently, organisations now need far greater infrastructural resources in the form of storage, memory, and computational power that can help them expand without breaking the bank. Model efficiency is critical to achieving the above goal as the computational debt, and resource consumption of inefficient models hamper the credibility of AI initiatives.

Making the most of exponential data volume: According to IDC, by 2025, the worldwide data will explode with a 61% compound annual growth rate to 175 Zettabytes. Organisations are deploying models to understand the data and capture insights, preferably in real-time, drawing out its full potential. Although, when you are dealing with a 100x increase in the data volume, the technical complexity behind model development increases drastically.

AI and ML systems that have inbuilt data modelling and pipeline building capabilities help

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TECHNOLOGY | AI

KEY TAKEAWAYS It takes both technology and business experts to lay out an organisation’s AI and ML roadmap.

Rolling out AI involves procuring and setting up the various hardware, software, and human resources required for the AI and ML projects.

Building AI and ML take time. The data science team needs to understand the requirements clearly, collaborate with the business experts.

A real-time data modelling capability is crucial to any AI and ML system. Users should quickly adapt to the changing data definition and volumes.

organisations get a grip on their ever-growing data repositories. Through their multi-source ingestion and pipeline building capabilities, they can absorb large amounts of data and transform it in run time to provide accurate and real-time business insights.

Leveraging cloud to manage intensive computing: Training and running AI and ML at scale requires huge and expensive computational power. Drawing out realtime insights using AI and ML requires heterogeneous computing so that each of the inferences triggered when interacting with customers worldwide is computed

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simultaneously and instantly.

Building a large number of computational resources inhouse involves huge upfront costs, as well as uneven utilisation during model building, training, and execution stages.

Cloud infrastructure addresses both the requirements of ondemand scaling and uneven resource utilisation. Capability can be scaled up and down as per computing requirements. This makes a SaaS-based AI and ML platform a must-have for any organisation looking to scale up its AI and ML journeys.

Enabling wider adoption with citizen data scientists: Building AI and ML requires domain knowledge and expertise from years of training. Large organisations pay more than $1 Million every year for industryleading AI and ML experts.

However, the talent pool is inelastic, with a slow increase in the number of professionals, leading to businesses being unable to hire the talent they need.

Although it is very important to have dedicated experts manage large amounts of data and guide the organisation on their journey, it is not essential to have AI and ML experts scaling this journey.

Citizen data scientists with the right AI and ML platform can effectively build data pipelines, build ML models, and deploy these models for real-time business insights. Organisations should look for AI and ML platforms that are drag-drop based and provide immediate visualisation of analytics and modelling results.

Driving innovation and collaboration across enterprises: According to Accenture, 92% of the companies with a strategic approach towards scaling AI leverage multi-disciplinary teams to ensure success. In addition to the technological

Citizen data scientists with the right platform can effectively build data pipelines, build ML models, and deploy these models for real-time business insights.

changes required for AI and ML integration and scaling across business units, there is also a need for fundamental shifts in the organisation. Interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to success behind every AI and ML initiative.

The widespread and multi-faceted business problems need to be appropriately framed into AI and ML problems.

An environment is required that allows the technical experts, operational teams, and business leaders to solve such problems efficiently. An AI and ML platform that supports a variety of user personas, from experts to data gurus and citizen data scientists to application and infra monitoring users, can prove invaluable to any organisation as they move to scale this technology journey.

Organisations should look for platforms that support multi persona users and provide the proper role and access management.

This is an abridged version of the whitepaper Now is the Time to Be Ready for AI/ML Revolution by Newgen Software

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TECHNOLOGY | GEOSPATIAL

ASIA HIGH LOCATIONAL GOES

ON

POWER Countries in the region are taking major policy initiatives to integrate geospatial technology into their national strategies. It is time for the businesses to act.

BY SHUBHENDU PARTH

& VIMARSH BAJPAI

I

f ambition had wings, India’s geospatial technology has already taken to the skies and will likely drive its adoption in Asia. The country is on course to prepare digital maps of all its 6,00,000 villages and pan-India 3D maps of 100 cities using geospatial technology and drones, as part of its Survey of Villages and Mapping with

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Improvised Technology in Village Areas (SVAMITVA) initiative that was launched in April 2020.

So far, drone surveys have been conducted in over 1,00,000 villages, and maps of 77,527 villages have been given to states.

This comes close on the heels of the Indian government bringing in new policy guidelines for the geospatial sector last year.

This announcement of new guidelines was a watershed moment for India’s public and private sectors. The government did away with the need for prior approval, security clearance, licence or any other restrictions on the collection, generation, preparation, dissemination, storage, publication, updation and digitisation of geospatial data and maps within the Indian territory. Simultaneously, the

government also updated the SpaceCom and Space Remote Sensing policies, liberalising the traditional satellite communication and remote sensing sectors. Add to this the release of new rules for drones, and you have a “trinity” of sorts that will unleash a new future of India’s economic progress.

AIMING FOR THE STARS

The global space economy is currently valued at about $360 Billion. Despite being among a few spacefaring nations globally, India accounts for only about 2% of the space economy. The SpaceCom Policy aims to promote the private sector, enabling the Indian space program to remain cost-competitive within the global space market and thus create several jobs in space and other related industries.

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TECHNOLOGY | GEOSPATIAL

As part of the policy, the government has set up the National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) to act as a singlewindow, independent, nodal agency. The government has also enhanced the role of New Space India Ltd (NSIL), which will serve as the exclusive public-sector aggregator for both demand and supply of space assets and services on a commercial basis, including imaging, communication transponders, launch services etc.

“The NSIL would be the commercial arm of ISRO. It will help facilitate the launch of satellites by the private sector.

Although we are still looking for more clarity about its role as far as its interface with the private sector is concerned,” says Lt. Gen. AK Bhatt (Retd), Director General, Indian Space

KEY TAKEAWAYS The demand for spacebased services is on the rise in India and across the globe.

Geospatial technologies find application in diverse sectors such as infrastructure, manufacturing, health, agriculture, urban planning, highways and service delivery.

The geospatial analytics market in Asia-Pacific is likely to grow at a CAGR of 15.71% during 20202028, with significant growth coming from the Asia region.

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Association (ISpA), an industry body that is made up of space and satellite companies from the space domain. The members of ISpA include government bodies like Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), NSIL and IN-SPACe. Its founding members include Bharti Airtel, Larson & Toubro, Nelco (Tata Group), OneWeb, Mapmyindia, Walchandnagar Industries and Alpha Design Technologies.

“The new policies will act as an enabler and allow the industry to embark on the path of innovation and create the next generation of technical workforce and prepare our youth to meet the challenges of the next century in the space domain. As ISpA, our role is to provide a conducive environment for the private sector in India to help India become a global player in the space economy,” says Bhatt.

Since the government announced the new spacesector policies, the number of Indian space technology startups have been rising consistently.

According to an estimate, funding into this sector jumped 198.67% in 2021 to touch $67.2 Million across 11 rounds, up from $22.5 Million in 2020 across nine rounds. These include satellitebased services and applications start-ups Pixxel, Dhruva Space and Astrome. Space launch vehicle manufacturing start-ups AgniKul and Skyroot were also the frontrunners in fund-raising.

The demand for space-based services is on the rise in India and across the globe. While the sector is at a nascent stage, the future looks promising, with India becoming the next big frontier in offering these services to the world, and a model for other countries in Asia to replicate.

Highlighting the benefits of the liberalised remote sensing policy, Dr Subrata Nityaranjan Das, Scientist/Engineer, ISRO, said, “Satellite remote sensing is one of the most affordable

The SpaceCom Policy aims to promote the private sector, enabling the Indian space program to remain costcompetitive within the global space market.

techniques for carrying out development activities within the government or in the private sector. The central government mostly uses remote sensing data for regional level planning and for formulating various projects and policies at the national level.

The role of the private-sector players is important as they can carry out remote sensing activities and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to analyse satellite data and provide to the government.”

The reforms have tasked ISRO with identifying and announcing future opportunities in selected science and exploration missions for private sector participation.

Such participation will be promoted through part funding by the government. ISRO will also share best practices, protocols, and other relevant technical expertise with the private sector to enhance capacity for space activities.

IN-SPACe has received close to 40 proposals from large industries, MSMEs, startups and academia. The proposals cover a broad range of activities, cutting across both upstream – launch vehicle

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and satellite manufacturing – and downstream like earth observation applications and communications.

MAKING BIG MOVES IN ASIA

Geospatial technologies find application in diverse sectors such as infrastructure, manufacturing, health, agriculture, urban planning, highways and service delivery.

It plays a critical role in dayto-day activities, and most of the applications we use today are significant use cases of this technology. From weather forecasting, route mapping to traffic navigation, the technology can become all-pervasive.

The demand for ready-to-use GIS-based solution products and content in forest management, disaster management, electrical utilities, land records, water distribution and property taxation are on the rise.

And the demand goes beyond just India, with counties from the Asia region leveraging the power of geospatial technology.

“Countries are taking significant steps towards integrating

In India, the funding into the sector jumped 198.67% in 2021 to touch $67.2 Million across 11 rounds, up from $22.5 Million in 2020 across nine rounds.

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geospatial data into their national policies and strategies.

As this technology rapidly grows, these countries are also opening up international corporations. And at the same time, they are demonstrating that the socio-economic benefits of this technology are experienced at the global level,” says Barry Nagel, CTO, UP42.

According to Inkwood Research, the geospatial analytics market in Asia-Pacific is likely to grow at a CAGR of 15.71% during 2020-2028, with significant growth coming from the Asia region. The report also indicates that the demand for GIS software in Asia is expected to rise due to the transition from 2D to 3D based mapping, increase in penetration of mobility, and increase in adoption of GIS technologies in India, Japan, South Korea, and China. Moreover, the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and big data is likely to augment market growth in the region.

In Indonesia, for example, favourable government initiatives to promote geospatial projects is driving the growth in corporate usage, and the government is taking further measures to develop an effective, functional, and advanced data infrastructure.

In Thailand, reliable data is required for agriculture and stock farming. A geospatial data, and analytics company, Planet, has signed a deal with GISTDA, a government agency under Thailand’s Ministry of Science and Technology, to provide satellite images for regular monitoring.

The Vietnam market, too, is witnessing stable growth due to rapid urbanisation and growing initiatives towards earth observation and remote sensing. On the other hand, the Singapore government is planning to invest in the smart

nation initiative, which will boost the use of geospatial technologies in the country.

BETTING ON LOCATIONAL POWER

Businesses are waking up to the power of location. Knowing the location of your customers, dealers, employees, etc., is the new form of data currency. “This realisation that you can harness the power of location, which is attached with the data, you discover the value that you can derive from it. While retail organisations use that data to offer targeted messages to their clients, the data can also help them decide where to set up their new outlets,” says Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India Technologies, a leading provider of geospatial solutions based on ArcGIS. Similarly, logistics in e-commerce is a new ball game altogether. The sheer volume of products shipped across continents is humongous, and businesses are using geospatial technology to track and trace inventory and shipments.

Geospatial Decision Making (GeoDec) systems accurately integrate satellite imagery, three-dimensional models, textures and video streams, road data, maps, and point data. Such systems are very effective and help handle logistics, especially container tracking. According to a survey by Vanson Bourne, mapping technology has had a significant impact on transport and logistics organisations. While 67% experienced better customer engagement, 46% improved productivity and efficiency, and 46% saw a reduction in costs.

The insurance sector uses location intelligence to better model risk, set accurate premiums and accelerate claim management.

Geospatial technologies are also used to map out risk areas, anticipate potential disasters, and help with fraud detection.

Companies use radar and hydrological modelling to map out areas more prone to flooding and

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TECHNOLOGY | GEOSPATIAL

THE GEOSPATIAL USE CASES Agriculture

Intelligent geospatial solutions can foster crop yields, help farmers effectively manage field use, and save resources in an industrial farming environment.

Environmental Protection

Thanks to geospatial data and analytics, businesses can measure the impacts of climate change, monitor destructive activity, and predict geological risks.

Singapore is planning to invest in the smart nation initiative, which will boost the market use of geospatial technologies in the country.

Infrastructure and Utilities

Businesses in this sector can remotely manage, monitor, and optimise critical, high-value infrastructure, such as pipelines and utilities. Vegetation management around railways and powerlines has significantly benefited from geospatial insights, saving lives and costs associated with power outages.

Insurance and Financial Services

Geospatial data and analytics enable data-driven investment decisions by identifying risks, trends, and opportunities, particularly construction and real estate.

Land Use and Management

Experts rely on geospatial technology to understand activity in urban, rural, and forest locations to inform and optimise land management decisions.

Maritime

With satellite imagery and algorithms, AIS data, and weather parameters, organisations can track, predict, and optimise maritime activity on a global scale. This is particularly useful for dark vessel detection to fight illegal pollution and fishing.

Oil, Gas, Minerals, and Energy

Geospatial technologies are applied in every phase of the mining lifecycle. On the one hand, geospatial data and analytics enable businesses to detect oil seeps and efficiently build and monitor pipelines. On the other hand, they are fundamental for environmental remediation for returning the project area to its original condition.

Real Estate

From construction to investment opportunities, geospatial data and analytics can enable intelligent, data-driven decision-making in the real estate industry.

Transportation

Integrated geospatial insights in this sector enable global transportation networks to run smoothly, efficiently, and as planned by monitoring and detecting anomalies on their route.

Source: UP42

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drought. Insurance companies are getting good at determining risk using geospatial technologies.

Another use case in the insurance sector includes monitoring driving habits with usage-based car insurance. Car insurance technology equips your car with GPS and telematics equipment.

These GIS tools examine your driving habits every step of the way and supply data back to insurance companies to assess the risk and premium. With the rise of insurtech, companies are using data enrichment and geospatial analytics to provide information on policy coverage in minutes.

GIS, coupled with a global positioning system (GPS), is very useful for search and rescue missions in the disaster relief phase. “If you go back 15-20 years, in case of a cyclone, the death toll would be high. However, with the use of geospatial technology, local administrations can move people to safer locations and results in saving lives,” says Kumar.

Businesses worldwide are using geospatial data that helps them make the right decisions at the right time. It is high time companies in the Asia region leverage this technology to optimise their strategic decisions for efficient operations and sustained business growth.

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TECHNOLOGY | CYBERSECURITY

GET READY TO HANDLE SIX CYBER THREAT ACTORS Understanding the types of threat actors and their motivations is essential in building a robust cyber defence.

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s organisations accelerate their digital transformation, cybersecurity is emerging as a significant concern worldwide. Creating a robust defence relies on an intimate knowledge of the enemy, their motivations, and their goals. Defending against a known attacker is much easier than an unknown one.

Thus, it is essential to know the types of threat actors and be aware of their motivations to create a comprehensive cybersecurity plan.

individuals or groups with malicious intent who aim to exploit vulnerabilities or low cyber security awareness to launch a cyber-attack. Their action is intended to cause harm to the cyber realm, including computers, devices, systems, or networks.

Simply put, a threat actor is an entity responsible for a cybersecurity incident. Threat actors have different educational backgrounds, skills, and resources. Here are six threat actors to watch out for this year.

WHAT IS A THREAT ACTOR?

Motivation: Espionage Nation-states are among

Cyber threat actors are

#1 NATION-STATES

BY NEELESH KRIPALANI CTO, Clover Infotech

the most sophisticated threat actors with dedicated resources and personnel with extensive planning. They are either directed or funded or both by nations and national governments. Some

Nation-states are among the most sophisticated threat actors with dedicated resources and personnel with extensive planning.

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TECHNOLOGY | CYBERSECURITY

nation-states have functional relationships with private sector entities and organised criminals.

KEY TAKEAWAYS A robust defence relies on an intimate knowledge of the enemy, their motivations, and their goals. Defending against a known attacker is much easier than an unknown one.

Some nation-states have functional relationships with private sector entities and organised criminals.

Cybercriminals prefer to use email, typically a phishing email that tries to get your credentials or get you to download a malicious attachment.

#2 CYBERCRIMINALS

Motivation: Financial Gain Cybercriminals are generally understood to have moderate sophistication in comparison to nation-states. They make money by stealing data, tricking you into transferring money, stealing login credentials etc. These threat actors learn fast and constantly evolve their techniques. Their favourite attack is by email, typically a phishing email that tries to get your credentials or get you to download a malicious attachment.

#3 HACKTIVISTS

Motivation: Geopolitical Hacktivists are criminals who unite to carry out cyber-attacks supporting political causes. Their focus is on bringing awareness.

For instance, almost all the information leaked by WikiLeaks resulted from hacktivists who wanted to expose the truth.

#4 THRILL SEEKERS

Motivation: Satisfaction A thrill-seeker is a type of threat actor that attacks a system for the sole purpose of experimentation.

They are interested in learning more about how computer systems and networks operate. They are considered moderate to a low level in terms of sophistication as they usually rely on publicly available exploits that require little technical skill for their cyber-attacks.

#5 INSIDER THREATS

Motivation: Discontent Sometimes, employees turn against employers and become insider threats. They are individuals working within their organisation who are particularly dangerous because of their access to internal networks. However, employees can also become insider threats through their negligence or even through their own unintentional mistakes.

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Hacktivists are criminals who carry out cyber-attacks to support political causes. Almost all of WikiLeaks resulted from hacktivists who wanted to expose the truth.

#6 SCRIPT KIDDIES

Motivation: Fun Don’t let the cute name fool you!

Although script kiddies (aka skiddies) aren’t skilled enough to design penetration tools independently. However, they use tools developed by other attackers to penetrate a network or system. They find the most accessible routes to hacking a system and do not invest much energy into performing an attack.

TAKE THE BEST STEP FORWARD

Understanding the types of threat actors and their motivations is essential in building a robust cyber defence.

Besides being aware of the cyber threat actors, organisations must have a cybersecurity strategy to protect them from these threats.

Creating awareness about cybersecurity is equally and perhaps more critical as negligence can also lead to cyber-attacks, especially in the form of insider threats.

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EXECUTIVE CORNER TECHNOLOGY | E-CRIME

UNPACKING THE GROWTH AND NATURE OF NEW CRIME The sophistication of underground e-crime undermines legitimate business. Here is what you must know to mitigate the threat.

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BY ADAM MEYERS Senior Vice President, Intelligence, CrowdStrike

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ophisticated attacks such as Sunburst and Colonial Pipeline demonstrate the heightened threat organisations face. Our global threat report showed that supply chain attacks, ransomware, data extortion and nation-state threats are more prolific and sophisticated than ever. In fact, on the heels of unprecedented growth in e-crime over the past year, there is a hidden world of strength, volume and sophistication in the cybercriminal market that rivals

the legitimate business world for astute judgements, collaboration, adaptability and strategic direction.

Ransomware adversaries proliferated starting a few years back, and in 2020 the number of ransomware cases we observed exploded. We saw cybercriminals take the opportunity provided by the pandemic to flex their muscles and show the honest world of business what sophisticated and corrupt e-crime looks like.

CrowdStrike Intelligence observed several dramatic changes in targeted e-crime.

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TECHNOLOGY EXECUTIVE| E-CRIME CORNER

RANSOMWARE: THE ‘GO-TO’ THREAT

KEY TAKEAWAYS Cybercriminals have started to take advantage of the pandemic to flex their muscles with sophisticated technologies and new ransomware versions.

Access brokers have begun to play a pivotal role in the e-crime ecosystem, supporting those engaged in big game hunting (BGH).

Visibility and speed are critical for blocking attackers. This includes cloud environments, just as with on-premise systems.

Given the changes, we labelled the e-crime groups as Spider since they are not affiliated with state-sponsored activity.

Carbon Spider shifted from point-of-sale (POS) campaigns favouring big game hunting (BGH) with ransomware campaigns targeting highvalue targets. Ultimately, this led to the group introducing their ransomware, DarkSide.

Established e-crime actors like Mummy Spider, Wizard Spider and Carbon Spider continue to drive innovation in the world of malware development. Over the year, there has been a rise in the use of open-source obfuscation software and the targeting of virtualisation environments pioneered by these adversaries, including financial services, manufacturing and healthcare.

The e-crime ecosystem remains vast and interconnected. They are the underground mob families of the cyber world.

Access brokers have begun to play a pivotal role in the e-crime ecosystem, supporting those engaged in BGH ransomware.

Access brokers are threat actors that gain backend access to various organisations and sell this access to other parties. This eliminates the need for criminals to spend time identifying targets and gaining entry.

To take one example, Twisted Spider’s adoption of data extortion tactics was noted in late 2019 as a direction other e-crime actors might pursue to capitalise on ransomware infections. It proved a preview of what would become an explosion of such activity moving forward.

These e-crime actors were especially attracted to the allure of BGH. At the same time, BGH trends also disrupted traditional targeted e-crime behaviour, as seen by threat actor Carbon Spider’s shift away from targeting POS systems to join the successful BGH ranks.

Since Boss Spider, the original BGH adversary, was identified in 2016, it has been observed that both established criminal actors like Indrik Spider and Wizard Spider and ransomware operators are adopting and reimagining BGH tactics.

Throughout 2020, BGH was a pervasive threat to all companies worldwide. CrowdStrike Intelligence identified at least 1,377 unique BGH infections.

STEAL, RANSOM, LEAK

The year 2020 saw a growing trend for ransomware operators threatening to leak data from victims and actively doing so.

The tactic was likely intended to put pressure on victims to make a payment but is also a response to improved cybersecurity

Established e-crime actors like Mummy Spider, Wizard Spider and Carbon Spider continue to drive innovation in the world of malware development.

practices by companies that could mitigate the encryption of their files by recovering from backups.

What marks a departure from previous BGH operations and is truly unique about recently observed behaviour is the accelerated adoption of data extortion techniques and the introduction of dedicated leak sites (DLSs) associated with specific ransomware groups. At least 23 ransomware operators adopted these approaches in 2020.

BGH adversaries took different approaches to release data onto a DLS, with many staggering the release of victims’ stolen data to extend the likelihood of ransom deliveries. Twisted Spider became the most adept at this technique, spacing out releases in percentages of the total exfiltrated dataset.

An alternative approach is to release the datasets in numbered parts, a technique preferred by Riddle Spider and Viking Spider.

Carbon Spider developed an automated system that displays a predetermined publication time set by an automated countdown timer.

Less commonly observed is the release of data by type, where

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confirmed that 18 BGH ransomware families infected 104 healthcare organisations in 2020.

The most prolific was Twisted Spider using Maze and Wizard Spider using Conti. It appears that some adversaries proceeded to attack pharmaceutical and biomedical companies during the pandemic, regardless.

KNOW YOUR RISK AND PLAN ACCORDINGLY

the adversary creates datasets for personally identifiable information (PII), financial records, sensitive company data, and information about partners and customers and releases these at intervals.

For some victims with high brand recognition, each release can trigger renewed reporting on the incident, calculated to embarrass. Viking Spider adopted this approach, as have affiliates of Pinchy Spider for

The e-crime ecosystem remains vast and interconnected.

They are the underground mob families of the cyber world.

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some REvil victims. Whichever release method is chosen by the adversary, the intent is to increase pressure on the victim to pay up.

BGH AND HEALTHCARE TARGETING

Before 2020, healthcare faced significant threats from criminal groups deploying ransomware under normal operating conditions. On the night of September 11, a man died in a German hospital under a ransomware attack, which caused delays in critical care - although police eventually decided the attack did not amount to legal causation of this patient’s death. Alongside the possibility that such attacks may cause terrible real-world consequences, ransomware operations have a secondary threat that exfiltrates data before ransomware locking up systems.

Some tracked adversaries, like Twisted Spider, Viking Spider, Graceful Spider, and Traveling Spider, announced that they would not target frontline healthcare entities during the early pandemic. Doppel Spider said that any unintentional infections would be resolved without requiring payment.

Despite these proclamations, CrowdStrike Intelligence

Understand the risk to your sector.

Although most ransomware operations are opportunistic, last year, we identified the highest number of ransomware-associated data extortion operations in the industrial and engineering sector (229 incidents) and manufacturing industries (228 incidents).

Manufacturing is particularly vulnerable to ransomware operations, where a disruption in day-to-day operations can create an enormous cost to the core business.

Look to vulnerable services.

The significant vulnerabilities observed throughout 2020 were characterised by relationships with internet-exposed remote services.

These vulnerabilities are attractive because they can grant initial access to target networks. We also observed repeated exploitation of several different VPN services and web applications such as Microsoft SharePoint (see CVE2019-0604). These compromises enabled “exploit chaining” with other vulnerabilities for privilege escalation and network pivoting.

See it, understand it. Visibility and speed are critical for blocking attackers. This includes cloud environments, just as with on-premise systems. It is also essential to create a culture of cybersecurity. While technology is critical in the fight to detect and stop intrusions, the user remains a crucial link in the chain to prevent breaches. Awareness programs will help combat the threat of phishing and related social engineering techniques.

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LOOKING GLASS

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO ENABLE SDG The pandemic has demonstrated how fast new technologies can change the world. Thanks to digital technologies, scientists could quickly develop the COVID-19 vaccine at a never-before speed. Going ahead, digitalisation will have a profound impact on societies and nations as they move on to meet their SDG targets by 2030, particularly in meeting six significant goals of improving human capital, responsible consumption and production, green energy, healthy and affordable food, and clean water, sustainable cities and digital government.

Decarbonized and renewable energy:

Human capital:

Smart industry:

Advances in education and healthcare that enable people to live self-determined, healthy lives, find decent work, and generate income to sustain themselves, but also to strengthen resilience and undertake climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Responsible consumption and production through initiatives that facilitate the uptake of more service- and circular-economy business models including mobility as a service and recycling in the production cycle.

An integrated network with clean, affordable energy for all through efficiency, renewables, electrification, and carbon capture by 2050.

Digital agriculture:

Smart cities:

Digital government:

Sustainable cities and communities with high-quality services with low environmental footprint thanks to high connectivity and ‘smart’ infrastructure to meet the demands of growing urban populations.

A digital revolution with the convergence of innovative technologies harnessed to support the SDGs while mitigating negative impacts on work, social cohesion, and human dignity.

Achieving access to healthy, affordable food and clean water while protecting the biosphere through investments in more technologically-advanced sustainable food systems.

Source: The new technology frontier for developing economies; KPMG, 2022

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The new technology frontier

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LAST PAGE

ATTENTION, PLEASE!

Thanks to a plethora of gadgets offering to help make your life easier, we have got everything sorted. The only things missing are time and attention.

BY ASHISH MEHTA

I

am writing this on a Word document, on a computer with many tabs open on the screen.

WhatsApp on the web, one cannot do without (the editor sent his instructions and reminders on it). Two email accounts, personal and professional, must be on. A news portal is on; too many things are happening these days, and one must remain updated.

The phone, an indispensable organ of our bodies, is never outside the five-foot range. As

Being in the flow makes the work rewarding in itself. That has become a luxury now due to all the gadgets and apps that promise to make life easy.

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I start the next sentence, there’s a ping sound. Excuse me, I have to check that notification from one of the countless apps on the phone. By the time I complete this paragraph, a school-time friend has shared a joke on a messenger app, and many have reacted with smilies (ping ping ping). More pings in a family group to wish an uncle a happy birthday. The courier rings the doorbell, the cooker whistles for the second time. Or was it third?

I have something so prevalent that it has an acronym now. Fear of missing out or FOMO; missing out on so much happening elsewhere, on sharing emojis and condolences. Not to mention missing the fifth whistle and the deadline for this article.

That, I believe, is the story of most professionals working from home, though offices are not distraction-free either. So many triggers are pulling us in so many directions. It used to be called multi-tasking, something to be proud of. It is now a pain in the neck, often literally. The only thing missing in this work style is the most important thing: a state of undivided attention to the task on hand, being so engrossed one forgets oneself, a Zen-like state. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who died last October) called it

‘Flow’. Being in the flow makes the work rewarding in itself. That has become a luxury now due to all the gadgets and apps that promise to make life easy.

If we want to find out what ails society, we can check a lot of data or check the titles of self-help books.

Attention is a hot keyword in that segment these days. Among the trendsetters was ‘Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life’ by Nir Eyal. The beauty of this book’s pitch is that the author had earlier written ‘Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.’ He was a consultant to firms for designing products that would help build loyalty and let people come back. It is like the YouTube recommendations that dish out more Lata Mangeshkar classics after you listen to one, and then you can’t resist just one more.

Eyal thus helped, as it were, develop a problem and then create a solution.

Not a bad business strategy, creating a market twice over.

The latest best-seller is ‘Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention’ by Johann Hari. The title is on one of the many lists on post notes next to the computer, crying for my attention. When I find quality time – even quantity time will do – between two bouts of incessant scrolling, I plan to read it. But I wonder if the book has an app version.

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