2030 may still be several years away, but for companies like Trend Micro, the next few years will be critical in shaping the technologies that will make the future a reality. This year, the introduction of the metaverse has already made many pondering how exactly the future will be as more emerging technologies enable endless possibilities.

IT LEADERS FEEL ORGANIZATIONS STILL COMPROMISING CYBERSECURITY

Aaron Raj | 24 November, 2021

Looking at the cybersecurity industry, threats are only becoming more sophisticated and advanced every year. So its not surprising that by 2030, Trend Micro’s Project 2030 predicts that while connectivity impacts every aspect of daily life, on both the physical and psychological levels, malicious threat actors will evolve to use and abuse technological innovation – as they always do.

According to Goh Chee Hoh, Managing Director for Malaysia and Nascent Countries at Trend Micro, Project 2030 is not a definitive vision of what will be, but a thought-provoking take on what could be. It details a future that is plausible based on current technology and trends.

“We hope this possible future will spark a debate within the security industry and wider society. Only by carefully anticipating future scenarios can we offer governments, businesses, and individuals a way to prepare for the cyber challenges of the coming decade,” added Goh.

The report looks at the world in 2030 through the eyes of a fictional citizen, a business, and a government. But the interesting takeaways from the report is how it predicts cybersecurity in the future.

Among the predictions are:

• AI tools democratize cybercrime on a whole new scale to individuals with no technical skill – this is already happening now and would possibility only get more advanced in the future, especially with advancements in AI.
• Attacks cause chaos with supply chains and physical harm to humans through their cyber-implants – while cyber implants is still relatively new, supply chain attacks are a stark reality of a serious problem in the future.
• Social engineering and misinformation become more visceral and harder to ignore when delivered via ubiquitous Heads Up Displays (HUDs) – advancements in the metaverse and similar concepts will surley contributed to a new form of cyber-attacks.
• Massive IoT (MIoT) environments attract sabotage and extortion attacks targeting manufacturing, logistics, transportation, healthcare, education, retail, and the home environment – the last two years so high adoption of IoT devices, with the technology improving, opportunities for cybercriminals will increase as well.
• AI-powered obfuscation makes attribution virtually impossible, pushing the security industry’s focus towards incident response and IAM at the edge – the edge will surely be where all the action takes place eventually.
• 5G and 6G connectivity everywhere drive more sophisticated and precise attacks – probably the biggest concern from this would be what happens to data privacy.
• “Everything as a Service” turns cloud providers into hugely lucrative targets for cyber-attackers – its already happening and may only get more serious even before 2030.
• Grey markets emerge for those that want tools to confound workplace monitoring – another big concern on privacy and work life balance will be questioned.
• Techno-nationalism becomes a key geostrategic tool of some of the world’s most powerful nations, with the gulf between them and the have-nots widening further – nation state hackers are getting braver, especially with more support pouring in from their nations as well.

For Dr. Victoria Baines, a cybersecurity futurist, the exponential growth of modern technology has brought abundant future possibilities, along with cybersecurity challenges. She believes these scenarios and their associated threats will require changes to the business and regulation of cybersecurity. As such, the cybersecurity industry must evolve both technology and training to prepare for a future in which everything is connected and at risk.

While if it is uncertain if cybersecurity in 2030 will be as predicted, the reality is, cybercriminals will be ever present and continue to cause problems for everyone in the future as well.

The post Trend Micro predicts cybersecurity for the year 2030 appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

When we think of remote working technology, the role cloud computing has played is central. On-premise applications are becoming a less common sight in most companies’ topological maps, and that reality has significant implications for cyber security professionals. If the traditional perimeter is now much less in evidence than it was, how can individuals and their organisations be best protected from the seemingly unstoppable cybercriminal gangs that prey on internet users?

The emerging answer appears to be a zero trust approach to cyber security. This framework begins with the simple edict that no person, system, or machine may be granted access by default to any part of the organisation’s assets. Therefore, authorisation is required at every touchpoint where access is required throughout the working day. Furthermore, the degree of access is controlled too–the simplest example is whether a user must write (or execute) access to a file or just needs read-only access.

“Six plus years ago when I first joined Zscaler, a zero trust conversation was almost unheard of here in Asia Pacific. You know, the term itself had not really been coined.” So said Scott Robertson, the Singapore-based SVP of Zscaler, the world’s leading provider of zero trust cyber security and secure access solutions. “The concept of moving your perimeter from around your network to around the internet was not something that many organisations have necessarily contemplated or committed to. As we see, [over] these last six years, that narrative of a zero trust posture, or zero trust network architecture has accelerated. And of course, it’s only accelerated even faster in these last 18 or 24 months.”

The challenge facing any organisation is adapting to the new patterns of data movements caused by cloud computing and remote working. Spearheading this in most organisations is the trusty stalwart of Microsoft Office, Scott told us. “What really triggered this change over the last few years, in my opinion, is the rapid adoption of Office 365. So, I moved my traditional Exchange Server from an on-prem environment where maybe 40% of my internal email would be going through my internal network. Now every single email wants to go out through perimeter to the internet, and back again.”

There’s also been a change in the way we use the internet, too, relying on it so much more for the services we use every day, both in our private lives and at work. As a result, Scott — ever the cyber security professional — states “All of my traffic is now going through a network which I don’t own, I don’t control, and I can’t secure. […] If you build a zero trust network architecture framework into your organisation, then you’re creating a direct to internet experience for every user whenever they want to access those services.”

Despite the prevalence of XaaS (just about everything as a [cloud] service), there is still room for traditional perimeter and endpoint protection. In fact, these technologies remain integral parts of the overall cyber security toolbox, Scott says.

“[Zscaler] is not expecting to do everything. We have to work with an ecosystem, and the strength of working with an ecosystem of partners is that the winner is the customer: they get the best possible protection and the best possible technology.” To that end, an integrative approach is essential to being more secure from attacks, both externally and internally. “So, we work with many different vendors, whether it be in the firewall space, or wherever. Obviously [we are] working with protocols to have firewalls direct their traffic from the corporate network to Zscaler, whether GRE or an IPsec tunnel, for example. […] We work with many endpoint [protection suppliers for] virus protection and controls that are placed on a mobile phone or computer, [also] orchestration and automation vendors who are providing SD-WAN.”

One of the obvious side benefits of systems that give organisations oversight of the entirety of data movements right across a distributed network, is the access to large amounts of learning data, which is perfect for machine learning applications. So, is there a realistic role for artificial intelligence in cyber security, we wondered?

“Perhaps AI can start to make better policy suggestions for our customers to say: hey look, yesterday ‘Joe’ was doing X and it created a vulnerability incident. You may not be able to visibly see this because you’re managing a network of 50,000 employees! We would recommend that you change the policy or update the policy to do this, this and this, because that would address [the issue].”

Artificial intelligence’s role in cyber security is in its infancy, so the overall shape of how the tech will be deployed remains unclear. Predicting the future is pretty much impossible, especially in technology. But Scott was able to point to what he sees as an emerging area of concern in cyber security practice that relates back to the growing, borderline exponential ramp-up in cloud technology’s use:

“The next frontier that we will see is business to business connectivity of those applications in the cloud […] What happens when we want to have business-to-business integrations enabled in a cloud world where we don’t necessarily manage the infrastructure that our instances are hosted on? And how do we create that business-to-business connectivity securely between customer A and customer B, to be able to make those transactions successfully [and safely]?”

Cloud providers and SaaS vendors do ensure the security of their provision, of course, but it’s security for the discrete infrastructure of the instance, be that hardware, virtual hardware, or application. Outside of those strict definitions, there’s no default protection for data to and from the cloud provider, and as Scott says, in the future’s cloud-to-cloud traffic.

That’s why companies committing to remote services need to examine the nature of their cyber security provisions and ensure that these too have evolved in line with the changes to the technology stack. A zero trust cyber security model is now a critical component of an overall strategy to stay safe. And Zscaler is pre-eminent in supplying these systems to organisations in the APAC (and across the world).

To support your journey to a cloud-first IT infrastructure, reach out to a representative from Zscaler near you today to request a hands-on demo.

The post Zero Trust Security for a Cloudy Future appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

According to Mel Silva, Managing Director for Google Australia and New Zealand, Google’s Digital Future Initiative will focus on three key areas. The first area is focused on building the foundations of the digital economy. Google will invest in the infrastructure needed to help Australians make the most of technology, enabling Australian businesses to have a secure and robust platform for business transformation, as well as become more productive and quickly respond to ever-changing customer needs.

COMMONWEALTH BANK OF AUSTRALIA NOW PROVIDES CRYPTO TRADING SERVICES

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The second focus will be on fostering Australia-made technology and talent, through the launch of the lab. Google will partner with the research community across the country and other Google Research hubs, to build a team of local researchers and engineers to explore ways AI and machine learning can help tackle issues that are important in Australia and around the world.

The third focus will be partnering to solve big challenges. Mel pointed out that Google is working with Australian organizations to apply new technology solutions to urgent challenges faced today, from bushfires to mental health and cancer diagnosis. Understanding that the best and most creative solutions often come from those that are on the ground and closest to the issues and needs of their communities, partnerships are at the heart of the Digital Future Initiative.

“The Digital Future Initiative is an investment in the extraordinary talent and creativity of Australians. It’s about ensuring every Australian has access to technology to realize their potential. It’s about laying foundations for a strong digital economy that can compete globally and support good jobs locally. And continuing Australia’s proud record of world-first innovation, harnessing technology to solve big challenges and create new opportunities for decades ahead,” added Mel.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who attended the event and officially opened Google’s new Australian headquarters in Sydney said the initiative is expected to create some 6000 jobs and support an additional 28000 and is also a vote of confidence to the country’s digital economy strategy.

AI research and development in Australia have been lagging behind other nations in recent times with a lack of infrastructure and research facilities a supposed reason for it. A few days after Google’s announcement, Morrison also announced a new plan to protect and promote technologies critical to the national interest, such as AI and quantum computing. The focus will be on nine critical technologies in a list of 63, which is part of the country’s bid to China’s emerging dominance in key strategic fields.

Interestingly, Google’s announcement comes at a time whereby US tech giants continue to face criticism from Australian lawmakers. In fact, Google Australia threatened to block the search engine in the country after they were requested to pay local news publishers for content that gets shared on their platforms. Australia became the first country in the world whereby big tech companies like Google and Meta have to pay news publishers for news content on their platforms.

While a settlement was eventually reached, the entire exercise has served as a wake-up call for large tech companies, not only in Australia but globally as well. Since then, Google has already agreed to pay with several news outlets globally, including a recent deal with French international news agency, AFP.

The post Google boosts Australia tech scene with US$ 1 billion investment appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

One of the biggest worries surrounding the sticky issue of AI bias, is in facial recognition solutions. As AI works purely on analyzing data inputs that it has access to, the algorithms may at times not provide entirely accurate results. In the case of facial recognition, the particular AI recognized certain races as criminals, causing an uproar in society. More recently, AI chatbots have also been spotted making mistakes, providing wrong and in some cases, vulgar replies to certain queries.

CAN AI EVER BE “ETHICAL”?

Aaron Raj | 27 October, 2021

In the second part of our interview, Seth Dobrin explains how businesses can deal with AI bias.

Can ethical AI help overcome AI bias?

Companies still have a way to go as far as ensuring their AI and the results are carefully audited, maintained, and improved. AI for example is not great at making predictions about once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-lifetime events, like a global pandemic or a record-breaking wildfire – if something has never happened before it’s not going to be reflected in the data –  so there needs to be significant human intervention to refine AI and make it helpful.

To support bias mitigation strategies, businesses should work to create and put into practice AI ethics guidelines, and ensure appropriate governance is in place to provide ongoing review and oversight of AI systems. When done right trustworthy AI can counter our human biases and ensure fairer outcomes for decisions that matter — employment, health, and wealth.

(source – IBM)

There is also a necessary and appropriate role for government policy to establish clear guidelines and promote ethical and trustworthy behavior. IBM’s call to action on Precision Regulation is clear: it is essential to strengthen trust without stifling innovation or limiting AI’s potential to help us make the world smarter, healthier, and more sustainable.

Across ASEAN, we are seeing efforts which are underway to better understand and address legal, moral, and ethical issues raised by the spread of AI systems and services across economic sectors.

For example, in Malaysia, the AI guidelines were set by the central bank in its eKYC (Electronic Know Your Customer) policy in June 2020. We also saw Thailand’s Digital Economy and Society Ministry draft the country’s first AI ethics guidelines, ensuring that technology takes into account equality and fairness. In parallel, Singapore is working with the industry to leverage AI responsibly, and launched the MAS-Veritas initiative framework last year. IBM is engaged with government officials worldwide as they explore the critical questions posed by the advancement of AI.

We believe blanket bans of new technologies would irresponsibly slow innovation, but that focusing regulatory effort on use cases with a high risk of societal harm allows for necessary course correction without hindering the benefits that AI can deliver. IBM’s global call to action on “Precision Regulation for AI” outlines a risk-based framework for industry and governments to work together in a system of co-regulation.

Where does IBM draw the line when it comes to ethics in AI?

IBM’s AI Ethics Board embeds our established ethical principles throughout our global operations — and it has helped create a culture of technology ethics. It provides two-way engagement, promotes best practices, conducts internal education, and leads our participation with stakeholder groups worldwide.

It is one mechanism by which IBM holds our company and all IBMers accountable to our values, and commitments to the ethical development and deployment of technology. Through this group’s work, IBMers at every stage of AI development and deployment are invested in ensuring the technology is designed and used responsibly.

How businesses can implement ethical AI?

One example I can describe is our work with Regions Bank to transform its advanced analytics using modern tools, and new open and transparent methodologies. Regions Bank faced the challenge of having an advanced analytics practice that too often relied on siloed data sets, development teams working in isolation, and disparate and somewhat inconsistent development methods.

To meet this challenge, we worked with Regions Bank to create an analytics Center of Excellence to help bring data into a centralized environment, applied more machine learning and AI techniques, and, above all, adopt an end-to-end business value approach that includes AI quality control.

The results are trusted analytical solutions, built with IBM Cloud Pak for Data, that gave Regions Bank a continuous read on model accuracy using monitor alerts in production, helping them achieve higher confidence in the quality of predictions and further their end-to-end lifecycle management approach — accelerating development of the high quality, trustworthy AI solutions that Regions Bank strives for.

The post Done right, human ethics can ensure AI bias is curbed appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

This trend is set to continue even in a post-COVID world. Australia is at a crossroads in developing a strong digital economy to meet this changing world head-on.

In the words of the computing pioneer Alan Kay, “the best way to predict the future is to create it”.

Australia too needs to grab the opportunity to leverage its research and development strengths in emerging digital technologies and create a “digital future” by amplifying the opportunities for growth in this important sector and strengthen our sovereign capabilities.

But Australia is lagging behind many other nations in shaping this digital future.

NCS EXPANDS TO AUSTRALIA WITH NEW CLOUD CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Jamilah Lim | 2 September, 2021

In a new report released today, the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering have jointly issued an urgent call to action, asking the government and industry to recognize the importance of emerging digital technologies.

The report makes several key recommendations:

1. elevate emerging digital technologies as a national science and innovation priority
2. include research and innovation in emerging digital technologies in the 2021 Research Infrastructure Roadmap
3. recognize emerging digital technologies as an independent growth sector.

What technologies should be encouraged?

The report focuses on emerging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), augmented and virtual reality, blockchain, and 5G networks.

These innovations are already starting to transform industries such as manufacturing, agriculture, waste management, transport, finance, education and health. But they are still considered “emerging technologies” because they have not yet realized their full commercial potential, unlike more established technologies such as 3D printing, mobile computing, or GPS.

AUSTRALIAN BUSINESSES, HERE’S HOW YOU CAN GET AHEAD WITH IOT

Aaron Raj | 15 September, 2021

The next wave of emerging digital technologies, such as self-driving vehicles, smart microgrids, 6G networks, and quantum computing, will further disrupt and transform many sectors of the economy.

Of course, it is hard to predict exactly what innovations will arise in the future. But by ensuring a strong national focus on fundamental science and engineering in this fast-evolving area, Australia can ensure it stays ahead of the curve, no matter what the future brings.

What are other nations doing?

The problem is that Australia is currently doing the opposite. It is falling behind countries such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, and China, all of which are prioritizing digital technologies as a strategy to bolster their global competitiveness.

Digital innovation accounts for only 7.4% of Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP), compared with an OECD average of 11.2%.

Read more:
Australia’s digital competitiveness is slipping. Here’s how we can catch up

The applications of emerging digital technologies will continue to diversify and grow. Research and innovation in emerging digital technologies should not be artificially bound to specific application areas nor overly focus on today’s needs, as doing so limits innovation potential that could otherwise create entirely new industries and jobs.

At the same time, emerging digital technologies continue to outpace social expectations and regulatory frameworks. Australia’s digital divide continues to widen, and individuals with lower income, employment, and education continue to fall behind. This challenge is likely to compound our looming shortage of digitally skilled workers and widen existing inequalities.

CAN THE TECH COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA MAKE IT THE STARTUP CAPITAL OF THE WORLD?

Aaron Raj | 18 August, 2021

Achieving digital literacy and inclusion through education and workforce development are essential for Australia to meet its commitments to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and to ensure the development of a digitally literate, highly skilled workforce.

Australians are early adopters and avid users of technology — a trend that has been accelerated by the COVID pandemic. And the federal government’s Digital Economy Strategy is already putting A$1.2 billion into key digital capabilities such as artificial intelligence and drone technologies.

This investment is welcome, but the government must also clearly recognise the importance of building scientific and engineering capabilities in ways that underpin the entire digital economy, not just particular technologies.

Read more:
Upgrades for myGov and My Health Record sites in budget’s $1.2 billion digital strategy

Elevating emerging digital technologies as a national science priority will lift their importance, both in investment and in narrative, develop research and development strengths, deliver critical research infrastructure, and be a catalyst for creating new tech businesses and supporting existing businesses through enhanced linkages between research and industry. Through recognition of a growth sector, it can help to attract talent and address future skill needs of the nation.

AUSTRALIA’S LOWERING CARBON EMISSIONS WITH NEW TECHNOLOGY

Jamilah Lim | 26 August, 2021

A highly digitised society will demand world-class leadership in developing digital technologies, and reduce our reliance on overseas technology and expertise. Coordinated and strategic support of this crucial sector of our economy will help create a digital future for Australia that is aligned with our social and economic aspirations.

Shazia Sadiq, Professor, The University of Queensland and Thas Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The University of Melbourne

By Shazia Sadiq, The University of Queensland and Thas Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Digital tech is the future, but a new report shows Australia risks being left in the past appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Scientists last month unveiled the most exhaustive database yet of the proteins that form the building blocks of life, in a breakthrough where observers said would “fundamentally change biological research”.

Every cell in every living organism is triggered to perform its function by proteins that deliver constant instructions to maintain health and ward off infection.

Unlike the genome — the complete sequence of human genes that encode cellular life — the human proteome is constantly changing in response to genetic instructions and environmental stimuli.

Understanding how proteins operate — the shape in which they end up, or “fold” into — within cells has fascinated scientists for decades.

But determining each protein’s precise function through direct experimentation is painstaking.

Fifty years of research have until now yielded only 17 percent of the human proteome’s amino acids, the subunits of proteins.

Researchers at Google’s DeepMind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) unveiled a database of 20,000 proteins expressed by the human genome, freely and openly available online.

They also included more than 350,000 proteins from 20 organisms such as bacteria, yeast, and mice that scientists rely on for research.

To create the database, scientists used a state-of-the-art machine learning program that was able to accurately predict the shape of proteins based on their amino acid sequences.

Instead of spending months using multi-million dollar equipment, they trained their AlphaFold system on a database of 170,000 known protein structures.

The AI then used an algorithm to make accurate predictions of the shape of 58 percent of all proteins within the human proteome.

This more than doubled the number of high-accuracy human protein structures that researchers had identified during 50 years of direct experimentation, essentially overnight.

The potential applications are enormous, from researching genetic diseases and combating anti-microbial resistance to engineering more drought-resistant crops.

Protein-folding problem

Paul Nurse, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Medicine and director of the Francis Crick Institute, said Thursday’s release was “a great leap for biological innovation”.

“With this resource freely and openly available, the scientific community will be able to draw on collective knowledge to accelerate discovery, ushering in a new era for AI-enabled biology,” he said.

John McGeehan, director for the Centre for Enzyme Innovation at the University of Portsmouth, whose team is developing enzymes capable of consuming single-use plastic waste, said AlphaFold had revolutionized the field.

“What took us months and years to do, AlphaFold was able to do in a weekend. I feel like we have just jumped at least a year ahead of where we were yesterday,” he said.

The ability to predict a protein’s shape from its amino acid sequence using a computer rather than experimentation is already helping scientists in a number of research fields.

AlphaFold is already being used in research into cures for diseases that disproportionately affect poorer countries.

One US-based team is using the AI prediction to study ways of overcoming strains of drug-resistant bacteria.

Another group is using the database to better understand how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, bonds with human cells.

Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, said Thursday’s research, published in the journal Nature, was a “stunning advance” in biological research.

He said AlphaFold had essentially solved the so-called “protein-folding problem”, which argued that the 3D structure of a given protein should be determinable from its amino acid sequence, and which had puzzled scientists for half a century.

Given that the number of shapes a protein could theoretically take is astronomically large, the protein-fold problem was partly one of processing power.

The task was so daunting that in 1969 US molecular biologist Cyril Levinthal famously theorized that it would take longer than the age of the known universe to enumerate all possible protein configurations using brute calculation.

But with AlphaFold capable of performing a mind-dizzying number of calculations every second, the problem stood no chance when faced with AI and algorithms.

“It has occurred long before many people in the field would have predicted,” Ramakrishnan said.

“It will be exciting to see the many ways in which it will fundamentally change biological research.”

pg/mh/gd

© Agence France-Presse

The post AI’s human protein database a ‘great leap’ for research appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

According to a report by Deloitte, commissioned by Autodesk Foundation, Singapore is the country least at risk from automation, ranking second for preparedness, behind Australia, and ahead of Japan. Heavy investments in education, assist at-risk workers, and support workers’ transition to new roles and industries are some of the key contributing factors towards this.

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The report explored the state of automation and the future of work across 12 APAC countries including Australia, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan are the countries most at risk and least prepared for automation.

For Haresh Khoobchandani, Vice President, the Asia Pacific at Autodesk, “Automation creates opportunities for a better future of work, particularly in APAC where 60% of the global workforce resides.”

With automation, companies can offload jobs that are dangerous, dull or dirty, and focus on more productive and higher-value work. For example, the use of robots can reduce common manufacturing injuries by up to 72%. By leveraging automation intelligently across major industries such as construction, logistics, and transport, productivity can be boosted, hence generating significant economic benefits.

Workforce automation in APAC

Some of the most common automation technologies used in most organizations in APAC include Robotic Process Automation, virtual assistants, and collaborative robots (cobots) — APAC is home to 64% of the world’s industrial robots.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is also enabling organizations to make better data-driven decisions in their productivity. This includes AI-based machine learning algorithms being applied to smart machines in manufacturing plants, smart robotics in logistics, and cloud-based data analytics solutions. Revenue from AI platforms has been forecasted to grow twice as fast in APAC compared to the world between 2019 and 2024.

Businesses need to realize that automation is not just about offloading redundant and dangerous jobs to technology and making processes work faster. Workplace automation also helps address the growing concerns of skills shortage in the region. Countries in APAC, especially Singapore, continue to a face shortage of skilled talents, especially when it comes to working and managing new technologies.

Workplace automation not only helps reduce this talent shortage but also requires less technical skills in handling them as most of the processes will be automated. Companies will be able to spend more time reskilling their existing workforce to deal with more important tasks.

In Singapore, tech jobs are in heavy demand across a multitude of sectors, with around 6,500 newly-created job openings by financial institutions alone. The tech talent dearth is the result of not only the Covid-19 pandemic that has restricted travel into the island-state but also because the Singapore government tightened its hiring policies for foreign skilled workers.

The construction, logistics, and manufacturing industries in Singapore are currently on track to embrace the full potential of automation. Haresh explained that these industries need to recover fast following the effects of the pandemic and automation technology is enabling it by ensuring minimal disruption takes place.

Visitors look at workforce automation robots being used. (Photo by Jung Yeon-je / AFP)

Preparing the workforce for automation

According to Autodesk, new credentialing and certification programs can give employees the skills they need to succeed in this new digital economy. Furthermore, partnerships across the public and private sectors to make workforce development a priority will be essential to growth as well.

Autodesk is not the only organization reskilling employees in Singapore. Most of the tech giants like AWS, Dell and Microsoft are also conducting similar reskilling and upskilling programs not only on the workforce but in educational institutions as well.

Apart from Singapore, other ASEAN nations including Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines have also witnessed increased upskilling programs as businesses there also prepare to embrace more disruptive technologies soon.

The report showed that Indonesia ranks third for risk of automation and seventh for preparedness. As one of the fastest-growing economies in the region, the country still has a very low-skilled workforce that may end up being displaced by automation. Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines are also not fully prepared for automation due to lower implementations, underutilization of the workforce, as well as low internet penetration rates.

Proactiveness to digital transformation essential

Digital change and automation are driving enormous productivity gains in the world of work. The opportunity to usher in a new era of work is tremendous, but countries must take proactive steps to mitigate the negative aspects of this shift. This includes raising the readiness of sectors that are highly at risk of automation and supporting disadvantaged workers, such as individuals with lower education levels.

Having the right infrastructure and skills will mean that countries can create new roles, and transition workers into these roles with the adaptability and resilience required. However, greater technology use will also lead to greater cybersecurity risks.

Organizations need to ensure that when automating workloads, they also have implemented adequate cybersecurity measures to reduce the risks of cyberattacks.

APAC is a diverse region and the challenges facing individual countries when it comes to automation are vastly different. Regardless of geography, automation will create opportunity, if the right support mechanisms are put in place, and the focus is put squarely on helping workers to succeed.

The post Singapore most prepared for workforce automation in APAC appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Biotechnology was once perceived to be the exclusive domain of nerdy scientists and academicians, seemingly shrouded in arcane scientific jargon and concepts beyond the grasp of the masses. Thankfully, with the proliferation of the internet, it has entered mainstream consciousness as the intersection between science and technology grew wider.

In 2020, partly fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, the global biotechnology market was valued at a massive US$752B. From manufacturing drugs and vaccines to developing cleaner energy and food production, biotechnology has fundamental applications across multiple sectors critical to the growth of myriad economies around Asia Pacific (APAC). 

According to Grand View, the key factors driving this growth include favorable government initiatives, plummeting sequencing prices, growing market demand for synthetic biology, and increasing R&D investments by the public and private sectors.

Biotechnology in APAC

Closer to home, Asia Pacific’s biotech market is expected to expand even faster, with a CAGR of 16.8% up to 2028. This speed can be attributed to improvements in healthcare infrastructure, supportive government policies, clinical trial services, and epidemiological factors.

We also previously wrote about the three big trends shaping the Asian biotechnology scene, and how tech can improve the biotech supply chain, especially in places facing extreme impediments to vaccine delivery.

There is growing interest by foreign companies to work or collaborate closely with local biotechnology players. 

Taiwan recently held BIO Digital 2021, the world’s largest biotech partnering and education event. Supported by Taiwanese authorities, it showcased innovative, locally-developed technologies in cancer drugs and cell therapies. This has attracted the attention of Big Pharma players such as Eli Lily, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, among others.

Advancement of biotechnology applications

Artificial intelligence (AI), data sciences, Internet of Things (IoT) and augmented reality (AR) are just some of the technologies utilized in biotech. They help scientists and practitioners to discover, investigate and develop solutions and products to solve challenges across other sectors.

At the BIO Digital 2021 forum, academician and former Taiwan VP Chien-Jen Chen stressed the importance of using technology, AI and data analytics, as well as smart hospital management to cope with the demands placed on healthcare systems. 

APAC biotech market

3 TRENDS SHAPING THE ASIAN BIOTECH SUPPLY CHAIN IN 2021

Joe Devanesan | 24 December, 2020

The APAC region has been seeing quite a number of interesting movements and investments in the biotechnology market for some time. At the Australia-Taiwan Clinical Trial and Biomedical Forum 2020, Australian and Taiwanese leaders highlighted how collaboration between the two countries has had positive and promising impacts commercially and output-wise. 

Inspired by Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine for Covid-19, Australia is also considering investing in mRNA-based vaccine manufacturing capabilities in order to be prepared for the next pandemic.

As emerging economies in Southeast Asia (SEA) rapidly grow, so too will the consumption needs of their population. This might push SEA to facilitate the development of biofuels, alternative energy sources that utilizes biotechnology for development and production.

Biofuels can heavily reduce the carbon footprint of nations, and lower their impact on the climate. In 2020, Vietnam, a primarily agrarian, but rapidly growing SEA economy, pledged to develop cleaner, greener, and sustainable smart energy resources under its smart city initiatives. 

Overall, the needs of the APAC region across multiple sectors present a prime opportunity for biotech startups and firms to push for growth, to support and develop robust biotech ecosystems across APAC.

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In times of need, if customers can’t open a chatbot or pick up a phone to quickly get resolution to their issues, they’ll start shopping around – customer experience is now part of the package.

Meeting these real-time demands, then, is a deal-breaker, but there are also rewards. According to McKinsey, 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated, and if you do it right, they will stick around. It also costs 6-7 times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, so investing here just makes good business sense. 

The customer service ‘war room’

All this makes the customer support function a vital chunk of the business, one that’s generally housed in a designated contact center – a central hub where often vast volumes of omnichannel customer communications are managed. 

It is a full-scale operation focused on collective efficiency – a ‘war room’ with banks of desks, phones and screens, where supervisors roam the aisles and “control the floor”. Large screens adorn the walls, showing real-time data such as customers’ average hold or handle time. These contact centers may still use old-premise systems and physical phones to take calls.

Contact centers are round-the-clock, performance-based operations; support staff may circulate on shift patterns, using the same desk and equipment as one another throughout the course of the day. Centers may also be based offshore, in different time zones, to accommodate 24-7 availability. 

When social distancing measures took hold across the world, then, the airtight, machine-like concept of the ‘traditional’ contact center was swiftly thrown to the wind. Physical call centers – where support staff’s work is essentially tethered to their desks – had to shutdown. To make matters yet more complex, businesses across industries received never-before-seen spikes in support requests, as panicked customers scrambled to cancel travel plans, file for unemployment or renegotiate payments – among a thousands of other complexities the current circumstances brought with them. 

In an update to customers, the CEO of UK telecom firm TalkTalk, Tristia Harrison, said the sudden and unexpected 30 percent surge in network usage caused by remote working and subsequent connectivity issues meant “240 head office colleagues” had to be retrained as customer service agents, with staff having to be reduced at designated contact centers because of social distancing requirements. 

And while some call centers were able to shift to work from home themselves, most could not due to technology limitations, regulations, or the fact that agents lack a private space to take phone calls from home. Those businesses with offshore call centers were also mired by the complexity of local lockdown laws and guidelines. 

Under more strain than ever

The upshot of all this is that many companies, in a time where their customers need support the most, are not able to meet demand, putting their business in further jeopardy at a time of significant market uncertainty. 

“I talked with travel related companies that will only deal with travel related calls within 72 hours from the trip, and food delivery companies that shut down part of their business since they could no longer serve it,” said Gadia Shamia, the co-founder and CEO of Replicant a conversational AI platform for customer service.

With the pandemic leading us to question the normal way of doing things across broad plains of business, the current situation is highlighting new approaches to customer service, and how technologies like AI can assist in ensuring that – for both today and future disruptions – the efficiency and effectiveness of customer service operations can continue unaffected. 

To underscore that statement, just weeks ago tech giant Google tweaked its own Contact Center AI – built for customers fielding thousands of customer enquiries each day – to specifically answer questions around the COVID-19 pandemic, and associated disruptions to users’ operations.

As government agencies, healthcare services and other sectors such as travel, financial services and retail, faced a deluge of requests for clarity over the impact of the outbreak, the AI-powered Rapid Response Virtual Agent allows organizations to deploy chatbots to answer questions across voice, social and chat around the clock.  

The release was aimed at those needing to adapt to the situation quickly; Google said the tool could be set up within a couple of weeks, or more quickly if using curated templates of FAQs and up-to-date guidance from health authorities. At a basic level, the Contact Center AI can provide answers to sector-specific questions like ‘should I wear a facemask’ for healthcare & life sciences groups, or ‘have your refund policies changed?’ in the travel industry. 

But more advanced integrations and conversational flows added over time, can allow ‘virtual agents’ to handle advanced interactions related to the business – customers can ask their bank about changing their individual credit limit, for example, or checking where their order is with a retailer. 

If users add complex conversational flows and backend integrations over time, the virtual agent can handle advanced interactions related to the specific company – those could be related to changing an individual’s credit limit with a bank, for example, or checking where an order is with a retailer.

On Friday (May 1), AI call center software firm ASAPP announced US$185 million amid a boom for such solutions owed to the combination of the pandemic pushing up call center volume at a time when companies must also streamline the function. 

The software doesn’t replace humans. It analyzes the most efficient member of the team, and provides other agents recommendations for responses in real-time based on those insights. Investors in the firm – which claims to employ 55 AI and machine learning engineers with PhDs – included the former CEO of CISCO, John Chambers, and the deal brought ASAPP’s value to $800 million, according to a Reuters’ source. 

Shamia told TechHQ that AI in the contact center is well-suited to handling many customer service requests due to their transactional nature. They can be automated without compromising on quality. “When a customer calls to cancel a flight, there is a very clear conversion funnel – the customer has a ticket and they want to come out of this call with a refund,” he explained. 

“The steps the agent takes are predefined and there is no room for judgment. This is a great call for conversational AI as it can answer the call with no wait time, run a shorter and more effective call than a human agent, and do it 10,000 times a day without getting fatigued.” 

But that’s not to say humans should be removed from contact centers. Support staff remain vital to handling certain requests which require more skillful navigation, but automation can alleviate them to provide a better-quality interaction. 

“By letting AI take on flight cancellations, agents can focus on more complex and emotional calls,” Shamia said. “The result of this partnership is lower wait time, less exhausted agents who can really focus on the caller, lower total cost and higher customer satisfaction. 

“It also allows companies to run 24/7, without forcing employees to work undesirable graveyard shifts.”

Contact center technology may gather pace during this period, as organizations realize how these platforms can transform preconceived ideas of the contact center, shifting from one where rows of headset-adorned support agents are benchmarked on call volumes and average call times, to a slightly ‘airier’ one where the focus is on the quality of customer interaction more than anything else. That said, the COVID-19 outbreak may only accelerate a trend that’s been in motion for years. 

IS THE FUTURE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE FULLY AUTOMATED?

Tech Wire Asia | 19 January, 2018

“Companies have been automating parts of customer service for years using applications and web pages,” said Shamia. “Now they have another channel they can use, without changing their customer’s habits […]”

“This will create long term elasticity both in spending and availability, as AI voice agents can answer one call or 10,000 without planning or complex staffing.”

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Add distributed workforce concerns to the expansive list of security risks and cybersecurity worries that many a business has to adapt to these days, and it becomes clear that merely setting up a firewall or purchasing more antivirus software is not going to comprehensively cover the entire organization, as one might wish.

Instead, the changing ways of doing business in light of recent world events highlights just how much the risk profile has grown for organizations in the region. Cybersecurity risks are actually business risks, and they are not just the concern of the IT or security manager any more. Indeed, the threat surface encompasses the whole company now, and that makes security and risk management the responsibility of the entire organization.

The “new normal” requires a longer-term strategy that balances company objectives with greater cybersecurity risks to survive and thrive in an uncertain climate. Integrating a data-driven information security program has countless benefits for any business.

To start with, organizations can employ data analytics and visualization to inform their decisions and mitigate risks. Furthermore, security leaders can leverage this approach to communicate with executives and other key stakeholders.

Big data can inform the company’s security stance, but also help the organization execute its business strategies, provide data-led confidence to manage uncertainty, and also help assess risks that spring from an ever-evolving cybersecurity threat landscape, along with keeping the firm up-to-date with the latest compliance requirements.

Hence the role data contributes to the organization is wide-ranging, not just for improving customer experience strategies. In much the same way, managing enterprise risk cannot be confined to a single department anymore or performed on an ad hoc basis, within operational silos.

The spread and storage of mission-critical data is widespread too, as with changing business continuity processes comes the added issue of the ballooning volume of data that is exposed online, or increasingly within a cloud storage environment.

Significant data breaches are also rising according to the 2020 Verizon Data Breach Report, and not always because of malicious malware attacks, but more and more due to errors as a result of poorly configured cloud migrations. Deploying to the cloud may improve efficiency in the short term, but the risks of misconfiguration can be substantial. Companies of all sizes need to establish the right controls to determine the risk of cloud servers being misconfigured and becoming vulnerabilities.

Distributed operational requirements or a distributed workforce comes with distributed risks. With employees connecting from unsecured networks, to security patches expiring or not found at all on personal employee devices, to newly-migrated critical systems which lack multifactor authentication, to more and more IoT devices and sensor data latching on to company systems, there is a plethora of security breach access points, data formats, and data input types that need to be secured.

Trying to make critical business decisions without the right data to support those outcomes can be a trial in itself, so organizations need to integrate the right enterprise-grade management solutions that can incorporate a comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessment process – and in the present shifting, uncertain business continuity environment, ideally a risk assessment process informed by actionable data.

Today Tech Wire Asia looks at three enterprise solutions that are geared towards enhancing company-wide risk management.

DATAMINR

As the most advanced platform for detecting real-time risk using artificial intelligence, Dataminr is often recognized as one of the world’s leading AI businesses. Dataminr Pulse, the latest addition to the company’s full suite of products, provides global enterprises with the earliest indicators of business-critical information about risks to their people, brands, and physical and virtual assets.

For corporate executives and risk teams, Dataminr Pulse offers advanced real-time alerting and scalable operational integration capabilities to maintain situational awareness on potential risks across the enterprise spanning operational issues to brand reputation concerns to physical and cyber security. In a business environment still recovering from the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dataminr Pulse’s AI algorithms run on over 100,000 public data sources — such as social media platforms, blogs, and public IoT sensor data — to give organisations a first glimpse of potential threats and opportunities. The product surfaces alerts 24/7, enabling enterprise leaders to close the gap between an event occurring and when it is discovered.

Dataminr’s efficacy can be clearly seen in its early detection of the COVID-19 outbreak, where by scouring public social posts, Dataminr was able to notify its customers of the coronavirus in late December 2019 – a full week before the first announcement from the US government.

The Governance Institute of Australia has partnered with Dataminr to produce a new report which can be downloaded here: The Future of the Risk Management Professional

DELL EMC

Dell EMC data solutions enable companies on their transformation journeys by incorporating smart infrastructure into their safety and security strategies. Its data storage and protection appliances include powerful yet cost-sensitive solutions to enhance data backup, but also data recovery, archiving and replication procedures, increasing uptimes and helping mitigate the risk of data loss.

Dell EMC offers enterprise-wide data management across a variety of industry, but targeted to find solutions for some specific challenges. For instance, the Dell Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) is a converged solution that combines capabilities for backup, recovery, deduplication, replication, instant access and restore in a single appliance with faster deployment and lower cost-to-protect.

Then there is PowerProtect DD, a scalable, reliable cloud backup solution with backup appliances for small and midsized environments along with those of the enterprise, plus it supplies a software-defined solution to shield virtual environments.

Not forgetting the cloud, PowerProtect DD also offers software for faster backup and replication, cloud disaster recovery services, as well as long-term data retention protection in the cloud. There is also a complete cloud protection portfolio that comprises data protection hardware, software, solutions and services that help transform data centers for greater operational efficiency, scalability, and resilience.

SECUREWORKS

Secureworks has been a managed security services provider for two decades now, bringing a wealth of security response experience to its services-oriented solutions. Lately Secureworks has focused its service offerings on extended detection and response, also known as XDR, becoming a leading platform provider in this branch of risk mitigation.

XDR is a newish approach to threat detection and response that Gartner termed a top security and risk management trend of 2020. XDR attempts to combine elements of security information and event management with security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), endpoint detection and response, and network traffic analysis in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to centralize security data and incident response. This improves and speeds up detection and response because it correlates threat intelligence across security products, as well as visibility across networks, clouds, and endpoints.

Secureworks entered the XDR market in 2018 with its Red Cloak Threat Detection and Response (TDR) SaaS product, which stitched together artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data analytics with threat intelligence software, before adding a 24-hours a day, 7-days a week managed detection and response service on top.

Secureworks complements its unique trajectory on XDR with its 20-plus years’ expertise as security practitioners, relying on their closed tech stack to develop the tools necessary to kit out the security team.

*Some of the companies featured on this article are commercial partners of Tech Wire Asia

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