Run and Transform — Emerging Stronger from the Pandemic

This article was contributed by Stephen McNulty, President of Asia Pacific and Japan, Micro Focus and member of BritCham’s Information & Communications Technology Committee.

Amid the ongoing upheaval as the world settles into a ‘new normal’, organisations in Asia are on the precipice of unprecedented change. This article continues the ongoing series of informative pieces provided by the ICT Committee.

2020 will be remembered as the year the world stood still. Amid the ongoing upheaval as the world settles into a ‘new normal’, organisations in Asia are on the precipice of unprecedented change. Facing the need to advance digital transformation plans by five years just to survive in a postpandemic world, businesses must look ahead—beyond recovery—to gear up, transform and emerge even stronger.

For instance, Singapore has shifted its economic strategy in 2021 from “from containment to restructuring.” The country is dedicating S$24 billion to accelerate structural adaptation to the changing competitive landscape, which involves helping businesses innovate, transform and scale up.

Likewise, emerging Asia Pacific markets are expected to see a 4.7 per cent surge in IT spending in 2021. Despite the uphill task of navigating tighter budget constraints, the opportunity lies in maximising the return on IT investments in the longer run.

This means deploying emerging technologies to augment existing digital systems and applications while they continue running, prioritising smart processes to optimise resources, and ensuring network security to protect businesses from additional disruptions.

Present meets future

With the dramatically increased digital demand triggered by the pandemic, there is no time like the present for undertaking new modernisation projects. Instead of continuing to defer IT maintenance on core business systems, IT leaders need to look to strategic modernisation. The ideal approach involves bridging existing core business applications and inhouse skills sets to new solutions rather than rip-and-replace.

Plenty of solutions come equipped with built-in data lake and associated analytic capabilities — think AIOps and SecOps. Connecting these data lakes makes it possible to automate and optimise organisations with the next generation of data analytics, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions. For instance, correlating the Identity Management and Enterprise Service Management data lakes will help to identify misuse or governance issues.

Many businesses will continue to use the mainframe for business-critical applications and data in the current economic climate, but this creates challenges around circumventing mounting digital risks and complying with the ever-evolving regulatory requirements. Having the relevant security controls in place is not enough—organisations will need to ensure that enterprise-level security is extended to the mainframe to protect access control, data privacy, and endpoint hardening.

A winning formula

A case in point — Jaguar Racing recently welcomed Micro Focus as its official digital transformation, business resiliency and analytics partner to support the push for greater success on the racetrack. Under this strategic partnership, Micro Focus will deliver advanced analytics and machine learning to ensure top performance among the Jaguar Racing team. In addition, Micro Focus will conduct a cyber resilience assessment workshop to help Jaguar Racing identify potential gaps in their cyber security posture and deliver tools and support to accelerate software development. Similar to Jaguar Racing, many APAC organisations have approached a critical juncture where they can no longer settle for the status quo. To stay ahead of the rapidly intensifying competition in the digital space, it is imperative to look beyond the immediate horizon and pursue smart digital transformation to make the most of present and future opportunities.

ABOUT THE COMMITTEE

The ICT committee’s mission is to inspire, educate and engage Chamber members and non-members on the transformative capabilities of Information Technology to their business. The goal of the committee is to add value to the Chamber and its members through activities that demonstrate the value of ICT solutions to their business; educate them on future ICT trends that will impact their business; offer member networking opportunities to better enable business across the region; share knowledge and insights, and attract new members to the Chamber. Visit britcham.org.sg/committees/ict for more information.