Pick the Right Technologies to Build Your Business Resilience On

As an extraordinary year draws to a close in a few months, many businesses will look beyond the initial, urgent response to the pandemic to prepare for long-term recovery. They are aiming to be resilient to new challenges that are certain to emerge; they range from a slowing global economy to uncertain customer demand, depending on the sector one is in.

Technology plays an important role in helping organisations achieve the new end state. 40% of organisations worldwide are taking a proactive approach to purchasing new technology, becoming leaders and early adopters, according to the 2020 IDC-Maxis Digital Technology Assessment.

These technologies should provide organisations with a secure digital environment that can process elastic, on-demand needs with real-time data for actionable insights.

To this end, IDC has identified four technologies – cloud, software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of Things (IoT), and cybersecurity – that will help Malaysian organisations meet today’s challenges. The IDC-Maxis Digital Technology Assessment 2020, commissioned by Maxis, throws the spotlight on where Malaysian organisations stand when it comes to these four technologies.

The study found that Malaysian organisations are still showing strong demand for cloud services, which aligns with worldwide trends. However, they still struggle with cloud migration, and a lack of talent and education about cloud services.

Here is the clincher: 93% of those surveyed say they have adopted cloud technologies but 60% still operate on a legacy infrastructure, which results in inefficient performance and security challenges.

What many of these cloud adopters lack are organisational leaders who can support the standardisation of processes across the enterprise, enabling consistent data protection and security while addressing business needs. Many also must deploy and manage hybrid and multicloud environments more effectively.

Even before the pandemic, organisations worldwide have been expanding their network geographically, decentralising network architecture frameworks to cater to a mobile and remote workforce.

This comes with challenges: A quarter (25%) of respondents in the IDC-Maxis survey say IT operations need to be more responsive to business demands, while 33% are worried about growing cybersecurity threats with decentralisation.

Other challenges were:

• The inability to incorporate emerging technologies
• Constraints on IT budget, skills and time, and misaligned strategic goals

SDN plays a key role in overcoming these challenges. About 65% of surveyed organisations indicated that they plan to upgrade their networks to SDN technology, despite Malaysia still being in the early phases of SDN adoption.

The disruption of supply chains and demand patterns has made it imperative for organisations to use real-time analytics for proactive decision-making. In Malaysia, 24% of respondents have already deployed IoT solutions, according to the IDC-Maxis study.

IoT has helped organisations with business continuity and cost optimisation as well as with new revenue streams for the next normal. 

Among survey respondents, 76% cite real-time visibility as their main adoption driver for IoT. Other drivers of IoT in Malaysia are increased productivity and cost reduction.

By now, cybersecurity has become a focus in many organisations around the world, including Malaysia. This year, the increase in remote working and a larger mobile workforce have exposed data and applications to a new and wider spectrum of attacks.

Yet, only 8% of the respondents in the IDC-Maxis survey uses end-to-end security management. Without an integrated approach to security, Malaysian organisations lack full visibility over their suite of security solutions which manage cyber threats. CIOs have to align strategic goals internally and identify the data that needs to be protected.

Malaysian organisations preparing for the post-Covid-19 world need to invest in the four enabling technologies to ‘flatten the curve’.

Just as the world has to persevere in its efforts to combat the coronavirus, organisations must break through their roadblocks to digital transformation to emerge stronger and more prepared for an unpredictable future.

IDC recommends that organisations take these four steps when it comes to adoption of these four technologies:

• Use data to drive strategic priorities
• Deploy your digital technologies end-to-end
  
• Automate your processes
  
• Fast-track DX through partnerships
  

To read the full recommendations and more about the survey, read the full IDC InfoBrief.