“Clients think, ‘I have an MSP that manages my technology. And cybersecurity = technology. Therefore, my MSP is managing cybersecurity,'” ConnectWise noted in its Art of the Cybersecurity Assessment ebook.

“I thought you were already doing this for me!” is just one of the misconceptions clients have that needs to be addressed to ensure the establishment of the most suitable defence system for the organisation. Companies forget that the responsibility of protecting their data is on them. They own the data, they control the budget, and they are the final decision-makers. Because they outsource IT functions to a contractor doesn’t mean they can wash their hands of the risks and responsibilities of securing data.

Then, there’s the “My business is so small, no one would bother to attack me!” logic. How humble and naïve. Small fry is a favourite of opportunistic criminals. For them, it isn’t about the organisation size; it is always about the data. Those who are complacent with their security measures are making it easier for attackers. Some may not even know their data has been breached until months after an initial attack. According to the Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average time to identify and contain a data breach is 280 days (approximately nine months). The 2020 report gave an average 296 days for Australia. When (or even if) organisations finally realise they have been attacked, they would say it was a sophisticated and well-coordinated operation rather than admitting that the criminal probably just waltzed right in.

“My security has been fine for ages now. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” is another mistaken belief held by some. Just because a company hasn’t experienced a data breach, it’s thought that its legacy system is sufficient. However, threats and vulnerabilities are changing all the time. Unfortunately, legacy security tools and techniques are not keeping up with the threat landscape.

So, hate to burst the bubble, but the criminals are upping their game while you’re sitting on your laurels.  The hackers may not even undertake attacks themselves — they just develop the technology and sell it to others. Think of them as the IT service providers for bad actors. The perpetrators could be anyone who has enough motivation and money to cause harm. These bad actors could be business rivals, a jealous friend, a teenager experimenting with the tech, or some random person with time on their hands fooling around out of curiosity. More often than not, however, monetary gain is the primary motivation — and hacking indubitably pays and pays very well.

“TSPs and MSPs realise that the stakes have never been higher in cybersecurity as ransomware, cyberattacks, and other emerging threats are increasingly causing major business catastrophes,” said Jason Magee, CEO of ConnectWise. However, market research firm Vanson Bourne found that only 13% of MSPs talk to their clients about cybersecurity as a regular part of their business practice. ConnectWise also reported that 83% of MSPs believe their clients would take legal action following a cyberattack, and 80% have difficulty selling cybersecurity services. So, it’s not surprising that some of the clients’ misconceptions could have been dismantled by starting a conversation.

ConnectWise shares a three-step framework on initiating a cybersecurity talk with clients in a bid to educate them and build up long-term success together:

1. Overcome objections and misconceptions.
2. Understanding the client is on the same page regarding security’s scope, intention, and expectation.
3. Create an assessment of the situation with tools visualising the current system, and identifying its vulnerabilities.

ConnectWise knows — it’s the leading provider of intelligent software and expert services for TSPs.

“What’s unique about us is we’re focused specifically on the channel, including MSPs, ISPs, and TSPs,” Drew Sanford, senior director of ConnectWise’s global SOC operations, told CRN last June when its new Cyber Research Unit (CRU) was announced. “And we’re focused on the SMB (small-medium business) space. Others are focused on the enterprise. The problem is, SMBs have different requirements from enterprises. So, we provide information to help partners in SMB.”

In June, New Zealand government agency CERT NZ reported that the country saw a 25% increase in cyber security incidents over the same time compared to the previous year. It identified almost 500 vulnerable Microsoft Exchange servers and a further 100+ other compromised email servers between the start of January and the end of March this year alone. Small businesses owned the majority of the compromised email servers.

In April, the US Department of Justice took an unprecedented step to remove web shells from compromised on-premise Exchange servers using a court order. If the web shells were left alone, they could allow attackers to administer the hacked system remotely.

Meanwhile, the Australian government cybersecurity agency, ASCS, reported a 60% increase in ransomware attacks against Australian entities in the past year. The ASCS received approximately 144 reports of cybercrime relating to small businesses per day in 2019, costing small businesses an estimated $300 million per year.

ConnectWise’s independent research conducted with small businesses worldwide suggested that about 92% of SMBs change service providers to get the right cybersecurity protection. On average, they’d pay over 34% more to do so. If there is ever a time to begin a cybersec talk with clients, it is now. Unfortunately, the risk of losses is getting higher, not just for clients but also for service providers. Not just in stolen data but also missed opportunities. That is certainly not in anyone’s vision of success.

Choose ConnectWise for access to dedicated teams delivering best practices, fighting threats, securing your clients, and accelerating your business growth.

The post Cybersecurity talk is necessary to fortify businesses from attacks appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

A Microsoft global survey released in March found 41% of employees will consider leaving their current employer this year, and 46% are likely to move because they can now work remotely. It also found nearly one in five respondents say they believe their employer doesn’t care about their work-life balance. With job churn becoming a significant risk, HR must cultivate a business culture and community based on empathy and technology support.

HCM APAC President at Rizing Mike Ellis said there are two aspects that HR is considering as companies are starting to return to the office: how the people are coping and how HR can serve the best interest of both the business and the people.

“From the first aspect, HR puts a lot of emphasis on (employees’) wellbeing and mental health. I think there’s a lot of shock and apprehension. We’ve almost settled into two years of being remote, not being around people, and suddenly you are around people,” Ellis explained to Tech Wire Asia in an interview recently. “They’ve had to adjust to being remote and dealing with different things, so we can’t expect them just to drop everything and run back into the office.”

Click the image to download the ebook “Keeping employees engaged in a new world of work”. It gives more information on how to keep employees engaged and productive in the face of dramatic workplace disruption.

Ellis continued: “The other aspect of it is, do we want them to? Is it effective having people in the office? Or do we now look at interactions in the office as being more of a collaboration and team-building/sharing type of activity, rather than ‘I need you to be at your desk from nine to five, so I know that you’re working?’”

These concerns lead to HR taking on more responsibilities as they navigate the corporate, social, digital and even legal transformations. It is a whole new ball game for the human resources department, from retaining loyalty to attracting and hiring new talents.

“We definitely see not just increased workload for HR, but also the changing nature of what they’re being asked to do,” Claire Badger, talent practice director at Rizing, told Tech Wire Asia. “More than ever before, they’re being involved in things like organization design and looking at the best ways to structure the organization, particularly with remote working and how that would look.”

“There’s a lot of different information that HR is being asked to capture or maintain now. Being the gatekeeper, it has to ensure that the business has the information needed to make the right decisions.”

Feeling of isolation and losing the sense of belonging are major demotivating factors for remote workers. As much as technology can be alienating, it too can be used to create a caring and inclusive work atmosphere for the employees wherever they are.

“There’s a need more than ever to have key touchpoints with your employees. You’re not meeting face to face regularly, so there needs to be a way to build that human interaction into the processes you’re running. An (HR) system can help you do that,” Badger said.

Click the image to download the ebook “Keeping employees engaged in a new world of work”. It gives more information on how to keep employees engaged and productive in the face of dramatic workplace disruption.

Rather than handing out the occasional engagement surveys, companies can do more regular “pulse checks” to help address employee concerns, like managing stress and taking time off. “Being able to get those regular real-time sorts of feedback from employees helps managers to have the right conversations with the employees,” she said.

Aside from that, a modern HR system can house more functionality to enhance the employee experience, from rewards to upskilling. For example, more companies are expanding their learning catalogues. “Companies are offering all sorts of different learning channels that they may not have considered before by providers such as LinkedIn Learning. They’re offering employees development opportunities which might not even be related to the business that they work in,” she said. “It’s giving them some other things to think about when they’re stuck in their home, and they can’t get out. It builds on the value proposition that they have for their employees.”

The ebook “Keeping employees engaged in a new world of work” gives more information on how to keep employees engaged and productive in the face of dramatic workplace disruption. It looks at HR’s challenges and how modern HR software can be part of the solution.

Rizing provides consulting and technical services leveraging SAP platforms to enable businesses to achieve a truly intelligent enterprise. Its proprietary apps, such as Synchrony People and Lyra, extend SAP Successfactors’ functionality to optimize the new functions expected of HR.

It is said that every great relationship begins with a conversation. Kickstart it with a Rizing expert who truly understands the business issues for HR and how to solve them.

The post The conversation, work-life balance and more: post-pandemic HR in discussion appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Putting off building the technology right from the start means more than just having to pay for it later. “The highest cost of tech debt is not just legacy cost; it’s opportunity cost. It robs you of resources; it robs you of time, energy, and the ability to compete, innovate and build for the future,” said Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems, a global leader in modern application development named in Forbes 2021 Cloud 100.

Tech debt isn’t just referring to old systems near their end-of-life. It is a risk inherent in making any applications as businesses evolve, developers change, and new technologies replace old. “A new generation of technical debt is created by heavy customization of SaaS products like cloud service products,” Rosado explained, “So you have now these platforms where you’ve added so many rules that over a couple of years, the system has become so heavily customized that it’s extremely difficult for you to rationalize it, and make it without a huge technical debt removal project.”

“It is not only about heavily customized ERP systems like in the past, or a lot of COBOL or Java bodies of software. Now there’s this new SaaS pro, SaaS customization, and mobile apps. It’s probably where we see it, the latest technical debt.”

A survey conducted with companies across the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Europe, India, Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore found that 69% said tech debt limits their innovation capacity. In addition, over 60% said tech debt is a significant drag on their performance, and 64% said it would significantly impact their future business.

Conducted by OutSystems with research company Lucid, the survey also reported the two leading tech debt factors: high number of development languages which makes it complicated to maintain and upgrade systems; and turnover of development teams, which leaves new hires in charge of platforms they didn’t create, forced to decipher code that is poorly documented and that they may not fully embrace or understand.

Japanese carmaker Mazda Motor Corporation recognized this risk when it had to start migrating its 500 legacy Java systems. So it planned the move carefully rather than rushing it and spent most of 2018 building solid foundations for its software engineering.

“We aimed to use OutSystems for core systems across Mazda, so before starting a wide-scale roll-out, we needed to prepare an environment for repeatable success,” said Seiichi Shinagawa, Technical Leader IT Department at Mazda. “This included making interfaces with existing systems, a framework for authorization and security, and modular software architecture standards.”

Taking its time paid off handsomely for Mazda. It saw a fourfold increase in developer productivity with up to 75% savings on legacy migrations worth millions. Furthermore, in contrast to most large-scale modernization projects, this project is expected to be completed ahead of schedule.

But what if time and the market tide are not on your side? The best thing to do is to identify your largest sources of tech debt and apply the best practices to monitor, measure, and manage them. A recent OutSystems webinar features Professor Rick Kazman, author of the recently published MIT Press book “Technical Debt in Practice: How to Find It and Fix It.” He specializes in software architecture design and analysis, and his methods and tools have been adopted by Fortune 500 companies worldwide.

Prof. Kazman discusses the subject with renowned digital transformation expert Hans van Grieken, an independent international technology researcher at Techinspire, and OutSystems solution architect John Ferguson. They dive deep into three crucial chapters from the book: implementation debt, architecture debt, and deployment debt.

Technical debt isn’t something to sweep under the rug and forget because sooner or later, it will come out to bite you. Nipping the problem in the bud will save businesses more than just money; it may well be the root of their future survival and growth.

Click here to become one of the many customers triumphing over technical debt by learning how to prevent, reduce, and manage tech debt in your organization. Alternatively, you can join the discussion on business needs for growing digital demands and threat of technical debt as part of the APPventure Roadshow series on 7 October.

The post Tech debt drag: Seek, fix and nix it appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The irony for decision-makers is that employees are any company’s biggest investment and greatest asset, yet they remain one of its highest costs. A new piece of IT hardware procured at great expense wouldn’t be mistreated as a matter of course from the day it arrived. For some, doing the same with people appears to be OK.

Of course it’s all entirely avoidable, and study after study shows that positive, happy employees perform at their very best, day in, day out, for (literally) a lifetime, given half a chance. Conversely, getting it wrong can wreck the business’s chances at the success that most seek.

Starting Early

Like comparing options from multiple retailers before a big purchase, research and investment starts early with new employees. Vetting applicants and interviewing candidates takes time and money, plus there are plenty of other elements to get into place. Training and mentoring, for example, must be planned from a purely operational perspective, plus there are the pastoral elements too — introductions, tours of the premises, a managed settling in process for the new arrivals — in all, it’s a great deal to consider.

Certain parts of that process have evolved a great deal over the last few years. There are obvious changes in work patterns (remote vs on-premises), but even before the COVID pandemic, technology had begun to alter pre-onboarding, onboarding itself and ongoing development, too.

Some IT-related changes have come from the adoption by organisations of digital processes, like digital signing and witnessing of contracts, for example. But the overall experience of a new employee is much influenced by the ubiquity of technology in everyday life.

A prime example of this natural tendency towards the digital might be a young employee given an A4 arch folder comprising a “welcome pack.” To a digital native raised in the smartphone era, that’s not the best experience, nor is it a particularly promising start to a new career.

Hybrid onboarding

The cultural shift in society outside the workplace needs to be reflected in the workplace. Therefore, using technology platforms to onboard new staff seems appropriate, and it’s certainly highly relevant at a time in the evolution of work where the lines between home and office are blurring.

Technology delivering onboarding digitally serves the purpose of encompassing both traditional “welcome to the office” and the newer “wave hello at the camera to your new colleagues” onboarding scenarios.

There’s a great deal more on offer from onboarding technologies than substituting the traditional welcome handshake for a digital equivalent. The same platforms can be used to deliver engaging, exciting mentoring and help via rich, experiential media, for example. Plus, multiple collaboration tools at the fingertips of the new starter and their colleagues can start friendships, build bonds, and start the new hire on the right course faster and with less need for managerial oversight.

There’s little need to train new hires in the physical workings of digital platforms, if the creators of the onboarding suites stick to the norms of interface design that are an everyday part of life. That leaves the field clear to have a software platform that makes immediate and positive connections between the newbie, the organisation and the people in it.

Done well, those connections develop, building excitement for the new career — irrespective of whether the process is all online, all in-person, or some of each.

Not just the money

The big technology companies know well that the very best employees are looking for more than a high salary. That’s why companies like Apple and Google work so hard (and spend so big) on exciting campuses, employee environments and everyday perks of the job. Candidates of the Microsoft caliber pick and choose an employer based on the working experience.

The lessons other organisations and sectors can learn are apparent. Starting off and developing new hires needs to be positive, engaging, and exciting. Just a decade ago, achieving this via technology for remote or hybrid workforces was impractical. But in 2021, technology can not only deliver great onboarding experiences but add more to the processes than its traditional elements ever could.

Staff who are brought into the company smoothly and who are quickly up to speed and comfortable in their surroundings will outperform those left standing at the (real or virtual) threshold, wondering what to do next. Getting onboarding right isn’t especially difficult, considering suppliers of dedicated platforms offer experiential onboarding systems right now.

Engaging early in the new employee’s progress into the organisation and keeping up the positive, helpful, and broad-reaching support will create a body of workers who will do well by their employer. Every employee deserves more than a workplace that is just good enough not to complain about. With systems like that from Enboarder, organisations can make a difference in their people’s lives and an extraordinary difference to the bottom line too.

The post Getting the Basics Right: Onboarding Done Right in the Hybrid Workplace appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Today, most workers have begun to comfortably adapt to remote working. A poll by McKinsey showed that 63% of workers in major countries across the world prefer some degree of flexibility between working remotely and working in an office — even post-pandemic. Clearly, the need for remote work has accelerated the move to the cloud as it optimizes and enables remote collaboration, communication, and work delivery.

Whilst remote working comes with its benefits, many businesses still underestimate the importance of cybersecurity for their remote working staff. It is thus important for businesses to re-evaluate their security and networking strategies to cater to the “new work normal.”

Why traditional security and networking approaches still aren’t enough

The security of workplaces of yore was not designed with the cloud in mind. Whilst they were effective on-premise, their security and networking approaches were disjointed, in silos, and limited by hardware and location (they are usually on-site).

Traditional security and networking methods tend to be complex to manage, they’re less flexible and inefficient. They also hamper disaster recovery and resilience capabilities. As such, enterprises frequently miss out on opportunities available from cloud-based solutions, losing to more tech-savvy competitors. Most importantly, their difficulty in securely integrating with the cloud meant that it would be a challenge to support remote working.

To address this, businesses can consider changing core architectures to integrate security and networking in a more unified manner. With remote work increasing, companies need to improve their security posturing to integrate with the cloud so both the company’s network and workers’ devices are protected. This will improve network performance and close security gaps for a more secured remote workforce.

Zero-trust: A superior cybersecurity approach

The internet was not designed to prioritize security, especially for businesses. As workers increasingly move online, cybercriminals have taken advantage of this mass influx of workers in unsecured networks to prey on unsuspecting victims. According to the Asia-Pacific Risk Centre, APAC is 80% more vulnerable to cyberattacks. Almost 90% of APAC companies came under some form of cyberattack in 2016. Business revenues lost to cyberattacks in APAC amounted to $81.3 billion in 2017. As such, companies should approach their security strategies with a zero-trust approach instead.

Cloud-based IT architectures with Edge capabilities may be more vulnerable to attacks from hackers, especially since IoT devices, often with low security, are increasingly used.

A zero-trust security architecture assumes that authenticated identities or the network itself may already be compromised — even if they aren’t. This approach treats every user, device, and interaction as a potential threat. As such, every single connection or condition will be continuously validated to ensure that it is legitimate.

The adoption of zero-trust architectures is expected to grow. According to research by the Ponemon Institute, the majority of organizations (62%) are familiar or very familiar with zero-trust. It also found that nearly half of high-performing organizations (48%) have deployed or will deploy zero-trust security.

Enter Zero Trust Edge (ZTE)

ZTE is a virtual networking model developed by Forrester that provides secure access to corporate services and applications to remote workers whilst prioritizing business application traffic that dominates the branch-wide area network (WAN).

ZTE securely connects and transports traffic through the Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), using zero-trust access principles, in and out of remote sites leveraging mostly on cloud-based security and networking services. ZTE also allows for central management, monitoring, and analysis of security and networking services.

Zero Trust Edge benefits both physical and remote working and is directly accessible from almost every major city in the world. Additionally, it secures IoT (internet of things) and edge devices, as well as business partners. Businesses can be protected from customers, employees, contractors, and devices connecting through WAN fabrics or a higher-risk environment.

A Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) is part of the ZTE model. A SASE network architecture integrates VPN and SD-WAN capabilities with zero-trust principles at the “services edge”, where devices and networks are connected, using a cloud software model.

What’s great with ZTE? Wi-Fi 6E.

Increased cloud usage and demand for internet connectivity leads to heavier loads on wireless networks, throttling application performance. This negatively impacts user experience, reduces productivity, puts digital initiatives at risk, and stifles innovation.

These concerns are addressed by a newer Wi-Fi standard called Wi–Fi 6E. Currently, most commercial Wi-Fi-enabled devices operate using two bands — 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, on the Wi-Fi 6 standard.

The radio frequency (RF) spectrum is doubled with the 6 GHz band, resulting in lesser congestion on airwaves, broader channels, and higher-speed connections. Consequently, Wi-Fi 6E can support multigigabit traffic, as well as high-definition video and AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality).

According to IDC Research Director Phil Solis, Wi-Fi 6E will be rapidly adopted this year, with over 338 million devices entering the market. By 2022, he expects that nearly 20% of all Wi-Fi 6 devices will be able to support the 6 GHz bandwidth.

Currently, the US and 39 other countries comprising over 1.3 billion people have opened up the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi 6E.

Aruba brings businesses closer to the Edge

Devices and infrastructures with edge as well as Wi-Fi 6E devices and infrastructures are optimized through platforms such as the Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform).

Built on AIOps, zero-trust network security, and a unified campus to branch infrastructures, the Aruba ESP can predict and resolve problems at the network edge before they happen. This capability also encompasses the SASE infrastructure that integrates VPN and SD-WAN, with zero-trust principles at its core.

The Aruba ESP is an AI-powered, cloud-native, enterprise-grade platform designed to unify, automate, and secure the edge. It is also backward-compatible with existing Wi-Fi spectrums and networking infrastructures such as WLAN, LAN, and SD-WAN.

Aruba ESP delivers an automated, all-in-one platform that continuously analyzes data across domains, tracks SLAs, identifies anomalies, and self-optimizes while seeing and securing unknown devices on the network.

With Aruba ESP, organizations will find it easier to support critical remote-working activities such as video conferencing, unified communications, augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), IoT, and cloud, amongst others.

Aruba has decades of experience as a leader in Wi-Fi innovations and solutions. Aruba retains the top spot in the Wi-Fi 6 solutions market for the fourth time in a row among the South East Asia, Taiwan and Hong Kong regions, according to the IDC Quarterly Wireless Lan Tracker for Q1 2021.

For businesses looking towards a Wi-Fi 6E-ready future, Aruba also provides a range of modular and flexible Wi-Fi 6E access switches.

Learn more about Aruba’s Edge Services Platform here.

For Wi-Fi 6E enterprises, check out the Aruba 630 Series Access Point here.

The post Here’s why businesses on the cloud need edge services with zero-trust security appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

If there is one thing virtually certain since the occurrence of the pandemic is that it has speeded up the adoption of digital technologies by several years – and that most of the changes could be here for the long haul. In just a matter of months, the Covid-19 crisis has brought about accelerated change to the digital economy, the way companies in a great many sectors do business around Southeast Asia (SEA).

The e-Conomy SEA 2020 report jointly compiled by Google, Singapore’s Temasek, and the venture capital firm Bain & Company, reveals that 40 million people in six SEA nations came online for the first time in 2020, bringing the total number of Internet users in the region to 400 million, up from 250 million in 2015.  They represent around 70% of the 580 million people living in these countries. At the same time, the size of the region’s digital economy exceeded US$100 billion this year for the first time – and if current trends hold, is set to triple to more than US$300 billion by 2025.

The report focused on Southeast Asia’s six largest economies: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Tech Wire Asia was given the opportunity to discuss with Google Cloud SEA MD Ruma Balasubramanian regarding the wave of change for Southeast Asia’s internet economy in the last one and a half years.

“The market is just amazing. There’s so much demand across every single country in Southeast Asia contributing to the growth in the digital economy sector. Companies of all sizes wanting to solve their most complex business problems in the middle of a pandemic. What is happening in the last 18 months is just an incredible testament to the level of digitization across the region,” Ruma said. 

True enough, the report indicated that e-commerce, online media, and food delivery adoption and usage have surged last year, while transport and online travel have suffered significant challenges. Ultimately, the net effect is that the internet sector will remain resilient and is poised to grow to over US$300 billion GMV by 2025, a clear indication that momentum has not been derailed by the year’s challenging environment. 

There is a cloud hovering over SEA

Cloud has emerged as a core foundation of this renewed tech focus, leading to Asia Pacific public cloud services spending growth of over 38% to US$36.4 billion in 2020, according to the latest update of the IDC Worldwide Public Cloud Services Spending Guide. Cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is the top contributor to the overall public cloud spend in 2020, making around 48% of the overall spending – it is expected to remain the highest throughout the forecast.

“The growth in demand of cloud services and digital across Southeast Asia has been very well. Companies are really interested in getting close to their consumers. For example KPG Healthcare Malaysia, they’re actually leveraging Google meet for their telemedicine consultation for non-urgent health care issues. 

BIG TECH SEIZES GROWING HYBRID CLOUD OPPORTUNITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

Joe Devanesan | 3 May, 2021

“That’s just one slice of how we see the industry sort of evolving overall, from a cloud perspective. What gets my attention even in the short time that I’ve been involved with cloud, is that how enterprises, regardless of their sizes, are increasing exponentially in digitization throughout the course of the pandemic,” Ruma told TWA.

Health technology (HealthTech) and education technology (EdTech) have played a critical role during the pandemic, with impressive adoption rates to match. Even so, these sectors remain nascent and challenges need to be addressed before they can be commercialized at a larger scale. Nonetheless, the boost in adoption, compounded with fast-growing funding, is likely to propel innovation in this space over the coming years.

Google Workspace’s uptake

Ruma also shared that the Google Workspace’s platform that has 2.9 billion users worldwide, is coming from across every single segment of the market. “For an example, in the consumer space, we’re seeing tremendous adoption of workspace, for example, within education since we have been really supporting governments for the adoption of workspace by students as well as teachers.”

She added that there has been huge adoption among large enterprises as well. “If you’re the CEO or the CXO of a large enterprise, you don’t want to be caught flat-footed. You need to ensure business resiliency, continued innovation because truth is told, this isn’t gonna be the last pandemic. You have to have a proper remote working strategy.”

Who experienced the largest cloud expansion?

Ruma highlighted that Google Cloud is witnessing massive uptake of digital natives as a lot of investment is going into the space in SEA. “In  Vietnam in particular, we’re also seeing an incredible development of digital talent because a lot of the programs and from Google Cloud Platform’s perspective, a lot of the certifications are actually coming in from Vietnam. Plus, we are hiring incredibly qualified engineers who are already certified so it’s a great growth market for us.”

The post Did Covid-19 trigger the digital economy turning point in Southeast Asia? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

In most businesses, the in-house experts are rarely the ones deciding the technology tools that are approved to use. But employees are often very happy to share their opinions with their supervisor or line manager (or indeed, anyone who will listen) on improvements that can be made to processes, how the company solves problems, how to work more productively or efficiently, and to the software tools they use daily.

The ability to see an improvement comes from the knowledge of daily practices and is one of the primary opportunities organizations should consider but often don’t. In fact, organizations can waste precious resources, such as with expensive consultants who often tell decision-makers what their employees already know. It’s important for organizations to listen to and use the expert resources they already have in their own knowledge workers.

Looking to the market leaders

Today’s big companies try to establish into their team culture an ethos of freedom and creativity. For example, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) allows for 20 percent of everyone’s time to dedicate to “moonshot thinking”: the pursuit of creative, sometimes out-there projects that could change the course of the company.

Companies that follow similar approaches and encourage big ideas from their own experts can apply systems of fast iteration on those ideas, test, refine, and improve in ways that, over time, greatly benefit the company.

People silos

Software is the most common technology tool used in business today, and organizations employ and/or outsource software architects and developers skilled in its creation. The software developer’s craft comes from years of learning, training, and experience, and is often regarded by non-developers as strange, hieroglyphic, arcane lore. But there’s incredible value in those mysterious skills.

Development departments are often separate entities in many organizations, sitting and working away from the operational staff and strategic planners, and separated from business strategy. That could be a costly structural oversight.

If we agree that employee ideas and creativity offer great value to the business, then organizational leaders will want to create opportunities for those ideas to weave into new technologies and tools that best serve strategic priorities. Additionally, breaking down team silos and integrating developer ideas across the business can support the process of strategic change and best align creative ideas with the strategic vision — at ground level.

Paulo Rosado – CEO of OutSystems. Source: OutSystems

OutSystems’ Vision

This alignment is one of the key points raised in this blog post by Paulo Rosado, the CEO of modern application development platform, OutSystems. In the post, Rosado calls for the intermingling of the people silos that tend to exist in most organizations today.

For more than 20 years, OutSystems has helped companies empower their teams to build the types of applications in software that make a difference, both through company strategy and individual creativity and productivity.

By having traditional developers, strategists, decision-makers, and others across departments collaborate around the process, the tools get built properly and with the business in mind. Hands-on developers, with a connection to strategic business goals, can add value to the business in ways not possible from those in silo-ed work structures or from outsourced support.

Clearly, the situation is more complex than this simple assessment, but the ideology has led to the success of Rosado’s company, OutSystems, over the last 20 years.

In a time when most organizations use more-or-less the same tools — SaaS services, common communications platforms, file sharing capabilities, financial reckoning software, and so forth — the interconnections between the tools and their bespoke applications are what differentiates a successful company.

Rosado’s vision is one where organizations can, as a collective endeavor, build applications that will change the way business works. From the basis of multiple common software tools deployed from public clouds or on-premise, companies build and iterate on the business applications that are crafted to the company’s strategies and objectives. The development speed, quality, and scalability of applications can change the business dramatically, as companies more efficiently hit their objectives using the expert tutelage of their valuable teams.

The creativity and power of many company resources simply lie dormant. Rosado and team have proven that that needn’t be the case, and gives their clients the means to create game-changing apps quickly, iterate and improve on them constantly, and better help businesses achieve their goals.

You can read more about Rosado’s ideas and vision in this blog post. And if you want to learn more about how businesses are changing with OutSystems, visit their blog and get in touch with the team to experience remarkable change in your own journey.

The post A Company’s Most Valuable Untapped Resource: Employee Developers and their Ideas for Change appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Like all good safety systems, most people remain unaware of the existence of such systems of protection until presented with an error message or alert, a web page’s provenance questioned, or a transaction refused. Otherwise, a small padlock icon near a browser’s URL bar is probably the only notable feature visible to most, one that assures the user that they can transact and interact on the internet safely.

As the use of and the shape of the internet changes, so too must the underpinning security models and features that ensure users’ and systems’ safe interactions. For example, in the last ten years, it’s become very much more important that machine entities can be identified and have their integrity checked. At the consumer level, these are most obvious in IoT devices; however, essentially anything connected to the internet that is in some way privy to sensitive information (even a routing device) needs to be verified.

When this facility goes wrong or is circumvented, it can affect any business or individual. One of the indicators of this type of activity is the rise in phishing attacks. Increasingly, machine identity verification is gaining importance — email traffic’s controlling technologies now need to prove their identity too. It might seem odd to a “civilian” that an SMTP relay server should be issued with a renewing, trusted certificate of authenticity. But, without such a facility, the internet would be a lawless place, and email itself would be unusable in any practical sense.

The vital role select organizations play in keeping the online world safe is not often spoken about in mainstream media, possibly because it is little understood. But there are trends in technology that most people can recognize, and it’s the role of organizations like GlobalSign that ensure that new facilities and technological capabilities can adhere to their makers’ visions. In brief, technology can advance without being compromised by hackers or others keen to exploit for profit, political gain, or just to spread anarchic mischief.

We’ve mentioned IoT once already, but apart from the connected doorbell or aircon controller, there is a much bigger picture. In 2021 fleets of IoT devices are online that monitor, attenuate, and control critical systems in manufacturing, engineering, utilities, mining and many other hundreds of industries and settings. Where these devices perform critical roles, either in groups or alone, they need to be able to operate in a system of trust — trust at machine-to-machine level, and trust between systems and human operators, users, and eventually, beneficiaries.

This vital work continues to this day, done by organizations whose technology and expertise provide secure environments. Doing so at the deepest possible levels of the internet’s workings for a generation is GlobalSign. It’s one of those names whose work has touched just about everyone on the planet – or at least anyone who has connected to the internet since the mid-1990s.

Most tech companies have had to adapt themselves to change, but GlobalSign is one of the few that has instead empowered and facilitated other companies’ ability to change. Its range of encryption and security oversight functions complements its role as one of the world’s largest and longest-standing Certificate Authorities (CAs).

GlobalSign provides public key infrastructure and delegates to Registration Authorities that ensure the encryption of billions of transactions daily. Every time a computer boots, or a phone turns on and checks its firmware’s veracity, it could well be GlobalSign’s work that is helping keep users safe. Every day, e-commerce traffic, encrypted video or chat messages, and data movements of many types take place safely.

Most IT professionals in many capacities will have come across GlobalSign throughout the course of their careers, from web designers purchasing SSL Certificates to software developers signing codes and applications before publishing or distribution. As a provider of safe digital environments, GlobalSign’s work touches the technology creators’ work, as well as everyday internet users.

In a further article on Tech Wire Asia, we’ll be looking in more detail at GlobalSign’s portfolio, focusing on its API-connected Digital Signing Service. That helps organizations prove ownership and provenance over their data and media, at scales and with the type of accessibility and scales that come from its cloud-based implementation.

Check back to read more about that product specifically, but in the meantime, if you want to learn more about an organization that literally helps promote trust on the internet at just about every level, head on over to the GlobalSign website.

The post The Vital Role of GlobalSign in Providing a Secure Internet appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Every professional human resource manager knows that these areas of people management software are just the start of modern workforce management platforms. Sure, those elements of payroll & legal do exist in most businesses some form or another, but often the driving force in formulating contracts and setting pay rate changes fall back on HR professionals. Today’s HR platforms integrate with many other business functions and provide a lot more functions and features beyond what is traditionally imagined.

This article considers some of those features found in modern HCM technologies, which today range from candidate search facilities, to pre-onboarding new employees at one end of the “human capital” chain, right through to safely facilitating the exiting of staff leaving the organization.

Between these two outliers is where the platforms we feature below differ. There are solutions out there that concentrate specifically on employees’ well-being, both mental and physical). These platforms can even provide training that’s not necessarily job-related — like information on how to practice mindfulness or meditation exercises.

Others focus on protecting the organization from a cybersecurity point-of-view, where they provide learning platforms designed to educate users of technology systems about good online practice. This functionality also sometimes extends to tracking and monitoring data movements into and out of the company when instigated by employees at any level. This function stops an organization’s intellectual property from going on a walkabout with employees as they move from their current role to a role outside the company (taking valuable sales leads with them, as a prime example).

Specialist applications of all types exist in this market space and there are as many as there are types of people in any workplace, each with its own foibles and strengths. Here at Tech Wire Asia, we are concentrating on four suppliers of HR technology that we feel offer stability, reliability, function and business value for any organization, of any size.

Some platforms we feature were designed specifically to be modular, so companies can pick and choose their requirements, almost in a menu-like listing from those available, and pay accordingly. Most featured here are cloud-based, although in-house hosting is often an option if an organization possesses the infrastructure necessary — in some cases, such as industries or verticals that handle sensitive data, in-house hosting is a prerequisite.

The challenges being faced every day by HR professionals — especially given the varying office and home office setups most businesses are experiencing — mean that turning to technology for a helping hand in managing the workforce is a solution for HR professionals seeking streamlined safety. The vendors featured here can help.

EMPLOYMENT HERO

Employment Hero is a cloud-based human resources platform with a broad offering across different HR areas, from paperless onboarding and integration with jobs boards, right through to performance reviews and goal management.

With Employment Hero, you can access learning and development opportunities for your team, as well as reward and recognition features. You can also easily manage employees, freelancers and contractors on the platform via the time management system, as well as provide your team with exclusive benefits.

As a standalone solution, HR professionals will find that Employment Hero can streamline just about every aspect of their roles. Employment Hero also has integrations with a number of common systems you might already have invested in across payroll, accounting, and recruitment.

It’s simple to use, and the powerful automation capabilities of the platform free up staff from manual activities that often see human error. Say goodbye to copying, pasting and transferring information between systems; or worse – from paper.

You’ll find the templates that are built into Employment Hero useful too. There are common contract types, induction content that can be easily modified to fit any business, and HR guides. There is even an optional add-on that connects you with HR and payroll specialists for tailored advice.

Clearly, Employment Hero was built by legal and HR experts for fellow professionals, and you can sign up for a free demo on the company’s site right now.

XREF

Getting references from prospective employees is a practice as old as any job itself, but Xref’s spin on this is that it is still massively time-consuming and problematic for employers.

Via the Xref platform, referees can quickly and easily upload their impressions of their past employees or ex-colleagues, taking the sting out of the tail of the overhead when being asked to provide precis of pat employees. In fact, the whole process can be automated and made much easier by the platform’s content as presented, with simpler questionnaires and checkboxes that make providing references much simpler.

The Xref solution also offers background checks, such as security-based assessments, criminal records, nationality and right of residence; a capability that is available cross-continent.

The reference service is available on a pay-as-you-go basis, or for employers that hire regularly, there are enterprise-level pricing plans. For those larger-scale clients, Xref also lets companies dive into the entire process’s metrics, pulling out critical data to unearth trends and insights so HR professionals can improve continually.

There is also API integration with existing HR platforms baked-in, so we envisage Xref being deployed with one or more of the other solutions showcased here at Tech Wire Asia. To read more about the company’s focused offering, click here.

REWARD GATEWAY

This multinational company’s platform concentrates firmly on employee well-being and reward, with capabilities that let companies carefully tailor offerings to incentivize and help their staff.

There is a great deal of emphasis put on communication from “the higher-ups” to frontline staff, with recognition systems and gaming of learning outcomes very well executed.

The financial aspect of employee rewards is also well-catered for too, with different healthcare bonuses or remuneration package components covered too, which is perfect for organizations operating internationally.

Country-specific offerings are also included, such as the cycle-to-work scheme in the UK and discounts in stores local to whichever continent your offices happen to be on. This latter facility is well integrated, so businesses can even offer discounts or tax breaks on goods & services from companies with which they work — like local electrical retail outlets, for example.

The company also makes a feature of API access to its platform, allowing external company benefit & remuneration systems to integrate with the platform, and cybersecurity is writ large throughout the platform’s underlying structures.

To learn more about Reward Gateway in your country, click here to be redirected to the appropriate site.

SAP HCM

SAP’s suite of applications helps companies and organizations of any size connect the different strands of their business, aspects like expenses and spend & travel management to produce data that feeds into the SAP platform saving time for administrators, payroll, and HR alike.

Expenses, for example, are presented and can be approved on-the-go via the SAP Concur mobile app, allowing access to this powerful, cloud-based platform from the office or out on the road — when that becomes a reality again, at least!

The same platform can be used by HR Managers, ensuring seamless and timely onboarding and continuous development mechanisms according to predefined policies – and all in a compliance-safe, secure environment.

Electronically captured and processed paper so common, still, in even heavy HCM-reliant enterprises, can be normalized into digital records via the OCR capability built into SAP.

With automatic verification of information, items like orphaned expenses, mismatched learning records, and erroneous contract paragraphs become rare. Exceptions are flagged for specific attention only when the powerful, automated SAP platform processes require human intervention, so every ‘i’ is dotted, tracked, and managed.

The SAP suite of offerings is as broad as your needs, and specifically, you can read more about the Concur suite on Tech Wire Asia here.

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

The post The latest in HR technology integrates people and systems appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Today’s security picture is much more complicated — plus, it’s one that’s prone to near-daily change. Organizations use technology for just about every function across the business, and topologies shift between different cloud providers and services, both on-premises and remote. Edge computing allows for resources to be placed closer to users for better responsiveness.

Cybersecurity practices from yesteryear don’t cope with the ever-changing situation well, and many organizations struggle to create protection from several point-products or platforms — some new, some legacy.

We looked briefly at Netskope’s real-time data-focused and cloud-aware offerings in a previous article. But here, we thought we would go straight to the source and talk to David Fairman, Netskope’s Chief Security Officer for the APAC, to see how the company’s ethos and methodology work in practice.

We began by talking about the complexity of today’s IT infrastructure and the massive variety of ways technology is used in the enterprise — especially how multiple SaaS instances have changed the threat landscape. How is Netskope addressing this software usage model? David told us:

“How Netskope helps organizations is that foremost, we’re a data protection-focused company. So, we care about understanding the data, the criticality, and the sensitivity of that data. We want to understand a number of attributes that are relevant to how that data is being used, manipulated, and shared. The relevant attributes are things like the identity, the user behavior, the device type, the network, and the data that are now being used within SaaS applications or cloud services.”

He noted that there are complications when personal and business SaaS uses coincide — for example, both the private and corporate uses of file-sharing service Dropbox.

“Within that SaaS application, there are multiple instances; it could be a corporate instance, it could be a personal instance, it could be a third-party instance […] We’re trying to understand all those different data points, coupled with understanding the data itself. [That’s] the criticality, the sensitivity of that data. We want to bring that together so we can establish the true context of the business use of that data.”

We suggested that the oversight of all data points has to come from an assessment of how the company works. David told us:

“We can help organizations assess the risk of SaaS-based applications and cloud services, we can help them assess the risk of, and the exposure of present and past services that they have deployed, and we recommend and help them with the tools to identify the secure configuration of IaaS or PaaS, the risk posture of SaaS apps and other services. [We] give them methods to help them rectify problems — within their risk appetite and their risk methodology.”

Risk analysis, therefore, becomes a critical component of any protective system. We mentioned Microsoft’s advice regarding Office 365 to turn off any CASB at the client end of the connection to ‘improve user experience.’ David said that like all best practice guidance, this would be factored into a broader risk assessment process:

“An organization will perform a risk assessment on any platform or application that it will use. And it will identify what its risks look like for the implementation of that technology or its capability. Off the back of that, I think they’ll make decisions as to whether or not they want to meet necessary, specified best practices, because, what is necessarily specified by an organization or by a vendor around best practices might not necessarily meet the risk appetite of the organization, or may not even be relevant depending on how this has been implemented or architected […]

“[…] Once we understand the true context of the data, we can then help organizations define the right policies that they want to put in place to control how end-users access and manipulate that data. So that’s where we play a role.”

Netskope helps organizations define risk in terms of the data’s value and can implement controls and protections based on real-time information about risk posture. That’s very different from historic cybersecurity approaches, which are technology-focused (the perimeter, the endpoint, the public-facing router, and so on).

We suggested that in many ways, Netskope’s approach seemed to be one of discovering, first and foremost, how an organization operates and what its strategic goals are: the business motives of the organization. Only then can cybersecurity — to protect those goals — be designed, implemented, and continously maintained.

“I think that’s a good way of looking at it, right. So yes, we are a security company, and we do provide organizations a consistent set of controls around how data is used. But ultimately, those sets of controls need to be applied in a way that understands the needs of the business — that understands the operations and processes of the organization. […] If you don’t understand how you operate, how your organization operates, and you don’t understand all those various different data points, it’s really hard for you to make the right risk-based, data-driven decisions around how you want to apply your security program or more specifically, your risk management program.”

The changing nature of how technology gets used every day makes prioritizing security based on risk more straightforward and effective in the long term. The insight here is that security policies should apply to a type of information, not just where that information happens to be stored (today) or by what means it is accessed.

Netskope is uniquely positioned to provide assessment, and ongoing protection as the enterprise’s topology and practices change over time. To learn more about the Netskope approach and how it can help your organization protect itself, read more here or request a demo today.

The post Approach Cybersecurity as Continuous Risk Management, with David Fairman of Netskope appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.