The past few years have seen several sea changes in the higher education sector, not least financial belt-tightening by state and national legislatures, the increasing need for innovative tertiary revenue streams and, of course, the coronavirus’s continuing effects, especially on international student numbers.

The resultant fallout has a significant impact on finance functions. While institutions’ central finance functions have traditionally been the hub of their relatively discrete business units, models are shifting. Today it is possible to centralise data-focused operations across campuses and even beyond, as universities consider partnering and merging to survive and thrive in a post-pandemic world.

Key to this evolution is the need to aggregate available financial information and streamline processes: not only in higher education institutions’ finance departments, but in every cost centre, organisation-wide, and to turn this into meaningful data that cements their authority as a driver of meaningful organisational change and adaptation.

But the crux of the matter is time. There’s never enough of it. Many finance professionals still find themselves engaged in manual and administrative duties that often have little to do with core financial tasks. Depending on automation levels and the maturity of the technologies deployed, these activities are squeezing out more important tasks. As a result, less time-sensitive but more meaningful activities such as strategic planning, policy oversight, impactful reporting and providing guidance and leadership often fall on to the ‘to-do’ pile, but seldom make their way to the ‘have done’ checklist.

By leading the use of advanced financial technology, central finance functions can reduce costs and improve efficiencies internally. And, by amalgamating data sources, meaningful information will flow – putting finance leaders in a position to positively shape other departments’ approaches to financial matters, as well as their conceptions of the central finance department.

Is central control essential?

Almost all enterprise-scale organisations use centralised functions for key operations to reduce duplication of tasks and, therefore, wasted resources. In a shared service model efficiencies abound, but the risk increases as departments are less able to find the information that is meaningful to them. Embracing difference and, therefore, complexity is essential.

Managing financial data begins with technological challenges, but it is not a pure IT exercise. Until the last five years, complex operational procedures have been an anathema to business software. In brief, complex procedures at a significant scale were difficult to mirror in software. This is no longer the case: finance solutions have matured, as have the typical approaches of IT systems in general. With today’s software, multiple so-called point products (specialist solutions capable of doing one thing only, yet doing it well) work in tandem with others, instead of one solution being imposed centrally.

We wondered: how are academic institutions managing this complexity and improving efficiency? And what are the implications on HE staff (academic, administrative, auxiliary) and third parties? When complexity is not fully realised and captured, are clear insights possible?

Centralised processes enable technology like machine learning to interpret POs, invoices, remittances, etc., at scale, without individual departments having to fund this capability. But without appropriate support, institutions who deploy software can still flounder. Using specialist providers who can operate independently whilst still being able to connect data in meaningful ways is essential.

For example, one of Basware’s customers, a Tertiary Education Institution in Australia, says that using a specialist provider for their e-invoicing has allowed them to synchronise activities, while feeling like they are supported every step of the way.

The Basware implementation team has been the most engaged, knowledgeable, and reliable project team of any technology vendor we’ve dealt with. While we’re using a large education-specific ERP vendor, we’re just another number to them. Basware has been with us every step of the way – and continues to add value to us. They’re more than just a software solution.

Customers using software technology to automate previously disparate and disconnected processes are also realising the comfort of improved governance and compliance, especially when the auditors investigate accounts. For example, recent research revealed that only 6% strongly agree that they have deployed automation to monitor and check compliance data across all critical areas of the business. We think this is significantly risky. But what do you think?

Actionable insights begin with accessible data

Businesses making decisions based on outdated information are taking significant risks. Real-time data [1] is a prerequisite for accuracy. In many higher education institutions, like any large business, data flows at necessary speeds. Unfortunately, interpretations of ‘necessary’ vary significantly between departments and functions.

While data collation comprises 12.5 per cent of a person’s average working week or 11 days over the period of one year, [2] information can often reach central finance in a manner timely enough to comply with policies or governance (with a significant amount of manual re-work involved), but no quicker. Operating in discrete business units, academic and administrative departments work to different cadences, determined according to business unit type and internal processes.

We wondered: are universities helping their employees do bigger, higher things than simply moving numbers around? Data siloes may be preventing finance departments from seeing the bigger picture – not to mention delaying decision-making and increasing admin busy-work. The fact is good data provides a foundation for informed decision-making. But it can’t be used if it can’t be obtained. Disconnected systems and processes are a roadmap to stagnation.

Finance is the central hub of a university. In technology terms, data silos are not necessarily problematic, but those silos do need to be filled. Relying on manual processes to achieve this is not ideal.

It’s clear that automation helps central finance get access to (near) real-time data proactively, rather than waiting for the manual receipt of needed information. However, methods of data collation may vary hugely across campus/es. This may include everything from Excel to Google Sheets, .csv, open-source and proprietary software, to isolated and networked applications in local data centres or in cloud repositories.

Leading institutions deploy technology platforms that allow different business units to gain access to financial software that is easy to use. But does it all need to be in one platform? Not necessarily.

It’s worth noting that centralised financial technologies no longer need to rely on a single entity from a single supplier: for instance, spend and cash flow capabilities might be handled by dedicated software but be fully integrated with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Similarly, central finance might operate using an e-invoicing platform, a procurement management solution, and a governance and data security management element. These can form part of the institution’s ERP or integrate with them using APIs. But to end-users the interface with which they interact need not be apparent, with seamless data flows from platform to platform the only visual clue.

Does this make finance and procurement teams’ lives easier? Yes. In an ideal world, finance teams should deploy a solution once and let it do its thing, so they can focus on adding more value back to their institutions. For example, another APAC-based Tertiary Education Provider says, of using Basware:

We’re very happy with our e-invoicing software choice. It’s good. It does its thing. It ticks over. We don’t have to look at it. We’re happy.

Those using automated tools to manage financial processes such as e-invoicing – and even procurement – are reaping the rewards: including improved visibility, time-savings, and cost-reductions. This adds up to improving the lives and reducing workloads on finance teams. It seems like a logical choice to many. But what do you think?

Making the case for financial leadership

It’s well-established that non-financial professionals will interpret and engage with financial information quite differently from their finance-trained colleagues. The de facto tools deployed by many finance departments are not optimised for general use, and therefore any content will have less impact than desired. For example, common tools like PowerPoint and Excel are used in most finance presentations, despite these often not presenting information in ways assimilable by non-finance personnel. These tools are also non-interactive and not collaborative.

As a result, a significant percentage of non-financial personnel feel that the ways they are shown relevant information is not appropriate, with academic studies suggesting that best engagement methods may be found outside the institution altogether, such as freely available “Web 2.0” channels. [3]

As in the case with cross-departmental finances being managed by a central location, the same logic applies to being able to present key findings from connected information in a way that genuinely adds value to institutions and academics. This requires standardisation and clear outputs, based on best-practice processes, so that finance teams and leaders can win hearts and minds.

We wondered: is it clear to those financial professionals who are keen to put forward agendas for the greater good, that activities like ring-fencing and defensive attitudes are natural reactions to difficult circumstances? With this realisation comes the knowledge that, in order to change attitudes to financial matters in areas where such concerns are not of primary concern (in academic or research-led areas of the organisation, for example), care needs to be given to how messages are shared, how the mandate for digitisation can be ‘sold in’ and how an attitudinal shift to the necessity of automation is put across.

The answer may lie in a combination of factors such as improved efficiency, visibility, faster payment times and improved supplier relationships. With the right systems in place, it’s possible to get 100% of visibility of supplier data, a deeper sense of cashflow, and knowledge of committed spend 3-6 months further than is currently possible. The right systems also enable institutions to tick the compliance box, reduce auditing pain, and eliminate fraud. Risk reduction is also possible through multi-level approval layers that are quick and easy to approve and audit trails come as standard.

For example, recent research revealed that one of the top three compliance and supplier risk drivers for better data visibility is increased reporting requirements to governments / regulators. In Australia, universities are increasingly concerned about reporting requirements to address regulations such as the Modern Slavery Act and the ABS Survey on Foreign Entities.

One way in which finance can ensure these benefits – including compliance – are realized is by making it easy to implement a solution, as this quote from another Australian-based Basware customer in this sector illustrates:

We love your standardised project delivery and approach. All your systems and processes are standardised, clear, and well documented. It has made it easy to implement your solution and makes us confident that our users will engage with it more easily, so we can get better, more consistent results.

In short, by better synchronising the financial functions in the different parts of the institution – an activity that should be led by central finance – the finance department can show other business units where “quick-win” savings can be made, financial problems alleviated, and difficult decisions made. The decentralised approach to higher education funding is now largely accepted as a cornerstone of financial strategy in the sector. [4] But what do you think?

Polling the professionals

While the questions raised in this article and the solutions suggested (and often observed) to resolve these issues go some way towards addressing the pressures faced by CFOs and senior finance leaders of higher education institutions, we know that because of the rapid changes in financial environments in the last two years, a great deal of information about these issues is now outdated.

That’s why Basware is commissioning independent research in partnership with Tech Wire Asia to ask finance leaders at higher education institutions how they are choosing, using and re-imagining technology tools to achieve their goals: to improve services, streamline processes at data and operational levels, re-position central finance, and change approaches and attitudes to financial matters across the campus.

Participants in the survey from Tech Wire Asia will receive an advanced and exclusive copy of the ensuing research in a condensed report that will enable them to benchmark their own department’s performance against those of their peers.

Register to participate in this research by voicing your opinions and telling us about your experiences.

[1] While “real-time” as an adjective might imply nanosecond precision, in finance, it is interpreted more generally. Information that is weeks out of date might be pertinent; data from months or years ago may not be so. For finance professionals, real-time should be interpreted as less than 24 hours old, in ideal circumstances.

[2] https://blog.statwolf.com/9-key-facts-about-machine-learning-in-2017

[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/1/331 pp.5

[4] https://www.hanoverresearch.com/media/Financial-Reporting-in-Higher-Education.pdf pp.13

The post Lessons in Higher Education Finance: Lead from the Centre appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The significant causes of dissatisfaction raised by unhappy consumers in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore were failure to address enquiries from the first interaction (62%), long wait/response times (54%), and not achieving the expected outcome from the interaction (52%). The more developed markets tended to be disappointed by their experience due to higher expectations.

It’s a whole new ball game now that online-only and bricks-and-clicks are becoming the standard for shopping. In a previous article, we touched on how retailers can up their game to serve changing realities and customer expectations. Tech Wire Asia recently talked to Patsy Wong, chief strategy officer at CINNOX – a 100% Asia-born innovative customer engagement and analytics platform.

Wong said that while more businesses are aware of shifting consumer sentiments, they don’t necessarily know how to address it. There also tends to be a narrow view of what goes into crafting an exceptional customer experience.

“Most people come to us with a particular pain point, not a comprehensive view [of CX]. Many of them will come in and say, ‘I want to talk to my customer on the robot app [via chatbots]; I want to talk to a customer on WeChat’,” Wong said. “The customer experience conversation is relatively new in the Asia Pacific market. Some businesses are more mature, but some are still pretty early.”

Many companies were not prepared for the pandemic’s impact on everyday life and customer behavior, and simply reacted; but will now have to map out their way forward.

“They’re not thinking long-term yet, but once they get past the initial stage of addressing some key pain points, our approach is to show them the workflow so they can see the entire customer journey end-to-end,” she said. Many companies are not aware, she added, of what tools are already available that can be easily implemented.

“Once they see the whole picture, they can appreciate the platform more. It’s not just a live chat, you can have multiple channels and integrate with other systems. You can also do analytics.”

The CINNOX platform allows all communications and CRM data to be seamlessly sync-ed and automatically updated, without affecting existing workflows. It can also integrate with customer relationship management platform Salesforce, as multinational healthcare company Roche has done.

There are three essential things to consider to boost the quality of CX, according to Wong. “First off, what are the expectations? A lot of times, if the company is either not aware of or not establishing the right customer expectations, then a positive resolution is going to be tough to achieve. The second is the intent. Why are people coming to you in the first place?” she said. “The third layer is preferences. People will have different preferences, depending on the type of communication they want, and what they are familiar or comfortable with.”

According to the Forrester report, five key consumer personas have emerged post-pandemic. The largest segment at 44% is the omnishoppers – working adults aged between 20 and 49 who feel safe with digital interactions, consider both human and digital touchpoints important, and want an omnichannel experience. Then come the multichannel enthusiasts (15%) who differ from the omnishoppers in that they prefer not to switch communication channels during interactions.

Those aged 50 and older made up the other two personas. The reserved digital immigrants (15%) feel less safe with digital interactions and prefer human touchpoints. Meanwhile, the affluent high-touch seekers (14%) also prefer human touchpoints, even though they are comfortable going digital. They want a personal touch from in-person interactions.

Adults below 30 years old are the last group, referred to as the low-touch digital natives (12%). They consider digital touchpoints more important than humans, and prefer to keep communications digital without switching channels.

With offices in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, the team at CINNOX sees their distinct advantage in serving APAC businesses directly, with a keen regional understanding. “For us, we are 100% Asia-focused, whereas global platforms may dedicate 20% of their attention to the region. Unlike the larger players, we can partner closely with our customers to get a lot of the features that we have, like the one we especially created for financial services clients,” Wong explained.

CINNOX is cloud-based, but with a module to enable banks, insurance companies and others in highly-regulated industries to securely store data on-premises, as required for data compliance. The platform is also multilingual, with more local languages added regularly to better serve the diverse communities in the region.

Another standout feature of the platform is its unique and seamless integration of telephony and digital channels. As noted in the Forrester report, around 50% of APAC consumers still want to call companies directly – which means that phone lines are still a critical customer service tool.

While CINNOX started as a telecoms company, its integration of traditional telephony with digital channels offers both the old and new communication channels in a single convenient interface, and at a competitive cost. “Technically speaking, this is not an easy thing to accomplish,” Wong said. “Many people in the industry were pretty amazed that we could pull it off.”

The data analytics available from the platform also provides insights into customers and their personas. Interaction data from all channels can be aggregated to develop a 360-degree view of each customer, enabling the business to build a more contextual and flexible CX strategy – which is imperative in an age of hyper-personalization.

To find out how CINNOX works and what it can do for your business, request a demo via the CINNOX website.

The post Nurture sustainable competitive advantage through CX appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Companies like IBM that aren’t afraid to shift and pivot that respond to changing conditions in their market and in the world at large are the successful ones. A similar more local case is Interactive, the Australian company we featured on the Tech Means Business podcast.

Interactive has always been the go-to player for technology solutions, including business continuity, APRA-compliant services, and disaster recovery for many thousands of companies in the APAC. But it was the COVID pandemic that led to the company’s recent move into secure, serviced office provision. It’s not a common-or-garden variety commercial landlord, renting meeting rooms and draughty communal spaces to roving freelancers. Instead, it’s offering facilities directly related to its APRA compliant data centre capabilities, giving financial services companies (or any security-conscious organisation) the capability to split their staff into more localised locations while retaining the cast-iron security and best standards necessary in this highly regulated vertical.

We spoke to Brett Wilson, Chief Operating Officer Infrastructure & Risk at Interactive, about the company’s new take on providing for its customers. He told us: “Being a business continuity solutions provider means that we’ve got a unique lens on the delivery of [IT] services. We reduce risk effectively which is very much complemented by the data centre service we offer.”

Ask most serviced office providers if they can host fault-resilient, highly encrypted servers on-site, and blank looks is likely all you’ll get. But Interactive’s customers have always used the company for its expertise in technology, and the provision of physical space equipped to specialist standards is the next logical step. That includes dedicated data feeds, encryption capabilities, physical security, and data centre quality provisioning. The quality extends to the basics, too: “Every single desktop in our facility sits behind a UPS [uninterruptible power supply] and diesel generator, so that power resiliency of the site comes in addition to the security,” Brett said.

Most companies now go out of their way to ensure data security, continuity, and resilience, but the government mandates these in the financial sector. Companies in the vertical operate under APRA strictures, which, for non-Aussie readers, refers to the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority. The quango regulates financial, deposit-taking institutions – that is, any company that’s a custodian of the public’s money.

In practical terms, APRA compliance translates to a whole list of obligations regarding information and physical security, system redundancy, and resilience in the IT systems used to do business. Non-compliance ends up with financial institutions losing their license to trade.

While Interactive can’t coach companies through their individual compliance application procedures, they can lend considerable experience to key personnel to ensure internal procedures and operations are on course. “Moreover, we end up helping our customers. [The] less experienced risk managers really do lean on Interactive’s expertise from having done this thousands of times with many, many customers,” Brett said.

Without getting into the weeds of acronyms, companies must aim for APRA’s accepted level of ‘sound practice’. With regards to digital information, CPS 232 and CPS 234 [PDFs] (Business Continuity Management and Information Security, respectively).

Brett told us that Interactive’s aim is “to be a part of our customers’ accreditation process. So, it’s about our facilities being a compliant part of their complete solution.”

For general ease of use of its data centre facilities, remote office provisioning, secure IT, and governance adherence, and what are actually very specialist requirements and services, Interactive offers simplicity. Brett told us, “It’s about aggregating all the aspects required to stand up a second office for staff. That relates to leases, to our furniture, […] to the technology, to power cabling and all the niceties of video conferencing and meeting rooms and breakout areas and facilities and amenities. We turn all that complexity into a single monthly service fee that has flexibility.”

In highly regulated industries, every aspect of digital interaction is considered a potential place to compromise security and resilience. That situation isn’t particularly compatible with home working, where professionals have to share networks with – for instance – teenagers’ BitTorrent-ing, kids downloading pirated games and bandwidth needed by VPNs eaten up by streaming media.

“You have staff performing regulated functions and these aren’t jobs that can be done around the kitchen table with children running around,” Brett told us. “We’re talking about institutions transferring billion dollars of superannuation fees in a single transaction and that type of requirement necessitates a regulated and controlled environment, [one] with secure access and identity management so that we know we can report on and track who was literally in the room at the time of the transaction.”

Helping companies transition from home or remote working back to offices that may be closer, smaller, cheaper, yet still compliant is all in a day’s work.

“Over the years of providing business continuity services to this customer base [the financial services industry], you go through thousands and thousands of audits and each time there’s a new audit and a new auditor, they identify opportunities for improvement. Our service just hones and improves over time.”

The list of adjectives describing Interactive’s office spaces also includes luxurious. One client allegedly told Brett that his new office space is “like being at a resort, except I have to work.”

For some commercial landlords, luxury is the sole USP. In Interactive’s spaces, it’s an add-on. The real core of the offering is APRA-compliant levels of security, connectivity, and resilience. Although those features are in the background, they need to be at the forefront of decision-makers’ minds as the company begins to get back into the workplace.

To learn more about Interactive’s unique offerings, get in touch with a representative from the company to talk through your options.

The post APRA Compliance Just Step One for Returning Workforces, with Interactive appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

A chargeback is a consumer protection tool that can come at a high cost to businesses — Mastercard estimates every dispute to cost between $15 and $70. Whether the chargebacks are fraudulent or being used as a last resort by disgruntled customers, merchants need to remain vigilant.

When there are too many chargebacks, the business could lose card acceptance, further complicate customer payments, and reduce sales. For example, a 10% chargeback reversal rate in the travel industry could be a fatal blow to a travel merchant’s chances of survival in the post-covid era.

Chargebacks and disputed transactions are always a business risk, so merchants must have a strategy to mitigate as much as possible. Ninety-seven percent of e-commerce CEOs believe the industry needs to innovate its business models to stay relevant, profitable, and resilient in the next 18 months, owing to shifts in online retail. Being proactive and installing prevention measures are some of the best ways to do it.

PRISM+ recognised that it needed more transparency of its data and optimised its transactional process for better customer experience and fraud prevention. It switched to Checkout.com as its payment service provider (PSP) to provide end-to-end data giving complete visibility on its money flow and instant insights on what was going on throughout the customer journey so any issues could be detected and resolved as appropriate.

“Checkout.com provided the expertise for us to improve acceptance rates, cater to chargebacks, optimise our risk settings, improve fraud detection, and understand the different challenges and opportunities for each geography,” said Jonathan Tan, co-founder of PRISM+, which sells high-value and high-performance gaming monitors and smart TVs online in Singapore, Malaysia and, more recently, Australia. The onboarding process was so easy; it went live in just two days.

“Besides seamless, improved payment services, we were also assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) for round-the-clock support,” Tan said. “And when we were hit with fraudulent transactions, the Checkout.com team ran us through the best course of action. They tweaked our risk settings to better adapt to purchase patterns and advised how we can optimise our operations. This guidance was invaluable to us.”

The result? PRISM+ boosted its acceptance rate to over 90% and saw zero chargeback incidents for three months consecutively at the beginning of this year alone.

“Checkout.com gained our confidence as a reliable partner with great expertise, making them the obvious choice when we decided to launch our Australian entity.” It proved to be the right call. There were several fraudulent chargebacks at the start of its expansion which the Checkout.com team proactively identified, and provided advice and solutions to resolve the concerns.

The correct data and insight are crucial to pinpointing the root causes of chargebacks – which are often symptoms of something wrong somewhere in the process. There may be patterns in the transaction stages that might have gone previously unnoticed. For example, suppose an item keeps initiating chargebacks from customers. In that case, the data could flag that the item description lacks specifics and clarity, or a simple return option is overlooked.

Checkout.com is one of the most valuable privately-held fintech decacorns in the world with a market valuation of $15 billion. It has over 19 international offices and processes payments in more than 150 currencies across five continents. Its clients include Grab, Wise (formally TransferWise), SHEIN, Binance, and Jeans West.

Checkout.com provides its customers with the tools for electronic payments, analytics and fraud monitoring together in one platform. Users create custom risk strategies and scale according to need using the range of technology—from simple rules to machine learning models—available on the platform. This also means they can adapt as fraud continues mutating and future-proof their risk-management strategy for defence.

“With our technology, deep payments expertise, and specialist teams with local knowledge in your markets, we help you capitalise on your data. This allows for smarter decision making to meet customer expectations, cut fraud and capture revenue.”

Click here to download the Forrester fraud report and learn how to balance risk in an ever-changing retail landscape.

The post Mitigate chargeback and fraud risk with the correct data and insights appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

According to a statistic cited by the World Economic Forum, the “Great Resignation” is a global phenomenon, with 41% of employees worldwide planning to leave their jobs this year. Recent surveys by Employment Hero conducted in Australia and New Zealand found that 40% and 39% of employees, respectively, are planning to look for new jobs in the next six months.

That’s much potential reshuffling that could happen as we enter 2022. For businesses, the time to act is now to prevent people from leaving or to begin to attract new talent. Either fall behind with the Great Resignation or benefit from the Great Recruitment Rush, AKA the Great Reshuffling.

“Right now, all companies, all CEOs, are rethinking the way their company works. They’re rethinking their culture. They’re rethinking their values and about what it means to work at their company. And on the other hand, you have employees globally who are rethinking not just how they work, but why they work and what they most want to do with their careers and lives,” said Ryan Roslansky, chief executive at LinkedIn, in a TIME interview last month. “And while this reshuffle of talent will most likely play out for another year or two, I believe it will ultimately settle back down in a place that’s going to lead to greater effectiveness for businesses, greater fulfilment for employees.”

In the Australian survey, the top three reasons people leave companies are: lack of career opportunities (31%), no pay rise (30%) and lack of appreciation or recognition (26%). Poor company culture is also a reason cited by the respondents, especially among government employees and large businesses. Of concern is that 55% of managers and senior executives intend to move in the next 12 months. Replacing them with someone as capable or with similar standing may be difficult.

Forty-one per cent of Australian job seekers and job switchers prioritise doing something they enjoy over a salary increase when looking for subsequent employment. The survey also found that younger people, defined as under 45, were more active in planning their next move. As for what would make them stay, nearly half (47%) would be appeased by a salary increase, being promoted, and receiving more rewards, recognition, training, and development.

Employment Hero, named second in the 2021 LinkedIn Top Startups in Australia recently, shared several budget-friendly versions of its top retention initiatives in the report. These include:

• Giving small salary boosts now instead of holding out for a big pay hike next year or redistributing the cost of a proposed fancy company party. That’s especially pertinent for the 30% of workers whose pay has not been reinstated since receiving a pay-cut during the pandemic.
• Starting conversations and charting clear career development pathways for employees so they can better visualise a future for themselves with the business.
• Showing appreciation and recognition more frequently. Even small gestures can positively impact staff morale.

Step Fwd IT, a family business providing IT support, keeps its staff engaged and happy using Employment Hero’s all-in-one people, payroll, and productivity management platform. For example, staff use the Employee Happiness Score to communicate their feelings honestly and anonymously and they benefit from other features of the app that convey appreciation for their contributions. Using technology to do this is highly effective when people are not necessarily working together under the same roof.

“We’re doing Shout Outs, Recognitions and now pushing Hero Dollars (which can be spent on a range of items). With everyone working remotely, it’s so easy to put the blinkers on and get lost in your own world and the monotony of never leaving your house. Now we’re able to be more aware of what the team is doing,” said Olivia and Chris Mannering, directors of Step Fwd IT.

The factors which encourage employees to stay are also the ones that can boost the Employer Value Proposition metric (EVP). Apart from salary increase, flexible working figured highly in the survey respondents’ job considerations. Staff having to go remote also showed that current connectivity and technology support working anywhere, even across state and international borders. It comes down, therefore, to choosing the tools which best serve the business.

Employment Hero, for example, has a Global Teams service, which allows small and medium businesses to employ full-time hires legally and ethically from anywhere in the world. This includes an applicant tracking system (ATS), which automates and streamlines hiring, and offers features like integration with the world’s most popular job boards, candidate shortlist management, digital contracts for remote hires, quick transitions into onboarding, and more.

An Australian streaming media company, Fetch, used Global Teams to retain an employee who returned to Canada to care for his family. “He didn’t want to leave Fetch and we didn’t want to lose him, but not being a legal entity in Canada meant we would have been unable to continue the arrangement. Global Teams enabled us to keep a skilled and valued employee,” said Louise Reed, HR manager at Fetch. “Replacing highly skilled employees can take some time and losing the intellectual capital and recruitment fees costs a lot of money, so it’s a cost saving as well. This was such an easy and simple solution.” (Our italics.)

Making work easy is at the core of Employment Hero, founded by Ben Thompson and Dave Tong in 2014. Its complete HR solution saves an average of 80% of time spent on HR admin and it now supports over 5,300 SMEs globally with more than 270,000 active users on the platform. It has localised versions for workers in New Zealand, United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore, with further expansion planned for Southeast Asia and Western Europe.

“Employers know that their people are everything to their business. Without a great, stable team, it’s impossible to achieve success. That’s why it’s Employment Hero’s mission to make employment easier and more rewarding for everyone,” said Ben Thompson, CEO and founder of Employment Hero.

As the report’s introduction states, “If employment is fulfilling and inspiring, you attract and retain the best the world has to offer.”

Do it all with Employment Hero for a more innovative way to manage HR, people, payroll and productivity.

The post Turn the Great Resignation into the Great Recruitment Rush appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

“Ransomware thrives because of its ability to adapt and innovate. For instance, while RaaS offerings are not new, in previous years their main contribution was to bring ransomware within the reach of lower-skilled or less well-funded attackers. This has changed and, in 2021, RaaS developers are investing their time and energy in creating sophisticated code and determining how best to extract the largest payments from victims, insurance companies, and negotiators,” said Chester Wisniewski, a principal research scientist at Sophos.

“They’re now offloading to others the tasks of finding victims, installing, and executing the malware, and laundering the pilfered cryptocurrencies. This is distorting the cyberthreat landscape, and common threats, such as loaders, droppers, and Initial Access Brokers that were around and causing disruption well before the ascendancy of ransomware, are being sucked into the seemingly all-consuming ‘black hole’ that is ransomware.”

That is one of the key trends highlighted in the recently released Sophos 2022 Threat Report. It contains a multidimensional outlook on the security threats and trends facing organisations next year by the security threat researchers, data science experts, threat hunters and rapid responders at Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity with more than 30 years of experience. Ransomware, malware, mobile security, artificial intelligence, and the overall threat landscape are the five main topics covered in the report, with a special focus on the importance of balance between prevention and detection in cyber-defence strategy.

“The technology industry uses the term shift left to indicate that, when a business can tackle a problem early on, rather than letting it fester, that business can save itself a lot of time, money, and debt,” Sophos CTO Joe Levy wrote in the report. “You can’t effectively secure an application if you introduce security at the end of the development process, and you can’t effectively secure systems or networks if you surrender the idea that better prevention is achievable, or if you believe that either prevention or detection, alone, can solve modern problems in information security.”

Cyber adversaries have shown that they are upskilling their tech know-how and adapting their operations to be more effective and stealthier. Therefore, we cannot be complacent and must always be vigilant and continuously evolve our cybersecurity approaches and arsenal to be ahead of the game.

Wisniewski adds, “It is no longer enough for organisations to assume they’re safe by simply monitoring security tools and ensuring they are detecting malicious code. Certain combinations of detections or even warnings are the modern equivalent of a burglar breaking a flower vase while climbing in through the back window.

“Defenders must investigate alerts, even ones which in the past may have been insignificant, as these common intrusions have blossomed into the foothold necessary to take control of entire networks.”

The cybercriminals keep seeking out and abusing vulnerabilities in defence tools and mechanisms to their advantage. The threat report noted the presence of criminal distribution networks being used, among other things, to target and spread malware infections to infiltrate Android and iOS mobile devices and Linux systems. This includes a move from deploying either shotgun attacks or highly specific targeting of potential victims, to a hybrid of the two methods. In 2021, Sophos researchers reported on such attacks by Gootloader and BazarLoader, for example.

Next year, Sophos researchers expect cryptocurrencies to remain a mainstay, fuelling cybercrimes until digital currencies are better regulated worldwide. In addition, AI applications and powerful machine learning models will see accelerated use in threat detection and alert prioritisation. Cyberattackers will also start to use these technologies to craft more cunning techniques, from disinformation campaigns to spoof social media profiles and more.

A recent Europol-INTERPOL joint cybercrime conference stressed the importance of innovation and collaboration to counter emerging online criminal activities.  “Cybercrime is an urgent global security risk, costing trillions of dollars each year. To address what is a parallel crime pandemic, law enforcement and the private sector need to take strong, collective action,” said INTERPOL Secretary General Jürgen Stock.

Keeping up to date with the latest in the IT security industry and the online criminal community is an imperative component of prevention and detection measures against cyber intrusions. An in-depth view of the trends in ransomware services, commodity malware, attack tools, crypto miners and more is helpful when planning your organisation’s future cybersecurity strategy. Knowledge is power, and when the stakes are higher as more data is sent, received and stored online and in the cloud, one should never underestimate its impact. What you know and are prepared for could be your saving grace.

Read more on the trends in cybersecurity risks analysed and written by SophosLabs, Sophos Managed Threat Response, Sophos Rapid Response and Sophos AI teams in the Sophos 2022 Threat Report: Interrelated threats target an interdependent world.

Sophos products help secure networks used by millions of users in 150 countries and over 500,000 businesses. Sophos has support offices in the UK, US, Australia, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, and the Philippines, so you can access a support technician who speaks your language.

The post Shift left: Tackle cyberthreats at the start of the attack chain with prevention and detection appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Scams and phishing are inescapable risks as more people do business online, with the losses caused rising significantly. For example, from January 1 to September 19 this year, Australia’s Scamwatch reported a 261% increase in losses to phishing scams, while identity theft and remote access scams created 234% and 144% increases in losses, respectively.

Businesses are increasingly aware of cyber threats and are becoming more vigilant, with many re-evaluating their defence mechanisms. James Morrow, The Missing Link’s Senior Project Consultant, recently spoke with Tech Wire Asia about the issue. He said there were two main motivating factors for people to start cybersecurity conversations. First, experiencing a minor breach and being concerned, therefore, that something worse might be next. Second is being aware that “their time” could be soon, even if no notable attack has occurred.

“People feel like they are overdue. They have not had a cyber breach, they have not had an attack, they have not had anyone mistakenly hand over their passwords, and that almost makes them more concerned,” Morrow said.

Scams damaging Australian businesses

Last year, payment redirection scams, part of a larger attack type termed business email compromise (BEC), were incredibly damaging for Australian businesses, costing a total of $128 million in losses, according to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report. Scammers typically duped people into making payments to fraudulent accounts by impersonating a business or its employees via email – so-called phishing.

“The most common way for threat [actors] to reach end-users is through email. There are a few different ways of mitigating the risk so you can protect both your end-users and your brand to make sure you are not the victim. That you are [either] the one getting hijacked [or] sending out the phishing emails,” Morrow said. One way to help prevent either is by verifying the email sender and checking the recipient via the DMARC protocol (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).

DMARC for all businesses

It sounds complex and the underlying concepts may well be, but Morrow said DMARC is not just for big enterprises. Small and medium-sized businesses can use it to confirm senders and recipients of emails. That means all parties can be sure that emails are from who they purport to be, and will be sent to the correct and intended recipient.

“Almost all major ISPs support DMARC records. So, you will get sent reports of who is using your domain and where they are using it,” Morrow said, explaining that DMARC validates the authenticity and legitimacy of emails, even those used in the context of mass-marketing, surveys, and the like. In addition, DMARC verification helps prevent third parties pretending to represent the business. Setting up DMARC is relatively trivial, but alone it is not enough.

“DMARC on its own is only half the battle. The more complicated part is what to do with that information once you have it,” Morrow told us, adding that raw DMARC reports are presented in XML format which can be difficult to read without some form of presentation layer. “You can do it if you sit there and you are persistent enough, but it is essentially just reading machine code. It’s not meant to be read by a person; it’s meant to be read by an automated process.”

DMARC analysis tools

“I would strongly recommend anyone who is looking to go down the road of DMARC to have something to translate [the output],” he said. That is where the Mimecast DMARC Analyzer comes in – The Missing Link’s go-to solution for DMARC management and oversight. It takes the hard-to-read information and turns it into human-readable formats. “Then it categorizes the information and puts much intelligence behind it – faster than if you are filtering through a wall of text for two hours looking for something that might be out of place.”

Implementing DMARC may sound daunting to achieve without expert guidance, which is why investing in specialist email security and configuration professionals is an intelligent decision. It’s essential that DMARC protocols are set up properly; to that end, it is worth working with a reliable team like The Missing Link.

With a 97.7% customer satisfaction score, The Missing Link can help at any stage of DMARC deployment – whether setting up, applying security updates, or monitoring and acting on reports.

The Missing Link – a specialist in email security

“We can get involved in all stages. If someone is taking those first steps or has started their DMARC journey and got their record set up, but is not sure what to do with it, then we can come on and help set up the Analyzer, some dashboards, and intelligence around it,” Morrow elaborated. “If you just want to make sure you are aligning with the best practice and making the most out of it, we can do [that] too.”

The team at The Missing Link can keep checking the security reports generated by DMARC so that the businesses can focus on their actual work. “We can do the monitoring and take that load off and free up resources [from the business]. As far as I am aware, I have never met someone who has DMARC Analyzer in their job title,” he said, smiling.

While it is challenging to prove any solution’s effectiveness when something doesn’t happen (“there have been no cyber attacks on my business…yet”), having DMARC protocol protection live can give you greater confidence in your email security (and know your brand’s reputation is safer). Prevention is better than cure, and being lax in protecting the most compromised business system, email, can be costly.

Why not reach out to The Missing Link to discuss whether DMARC is right for your needs? If you use email in the course of business, then the answer’s probably “yes”!

For those businesses looking to protect their organisation, users and brand but unsure where to start, The Missing Link’s Security Controls Review can help. The company provides a personalised series of recommendations to resolve your security issues and keep your IT environment free from potential breaches.

Get in touch to find out how you can keep emails flowing, business operations running, employees productive, and data accessible and recoverable.

The post Defend your email perimeter with DMARC protocol appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Now, for the first time, you can join the APAC-specific NGINX virtual conference, SPRINT 2.1, an extension of the NGINX Global SPRINT 2.0 (also available on-demand here). Selected content for SPRINT 2.1 is in English, Japanese, and Chinese, and so will give the broadest range of engineers, SR specialists, DevOps, and infrastructure specialists opportunities to deepen their knowledge about the full capabilities of NGINX in its OSS (open source) and PLUS guises. Join your fellow IT professional attendees to hear keynotes, take part (or just listen) in to technical breakouts, and get hands-on training — with plenty of content available in local languages.

From the outset, you’ll hear first-hand case studies about using NGINX to replace legacy hardware, how NGINX Plus aids massive and elastic scalability, the key differences between the OSS and NGINX Plus  offerings, and — of critical importance to many enterprise users — why NGINX is continuing and increasing its ongoing support to the open-source community with a re-emphasised commitment to upstreaming innovation and several other community-focused practices.

NGINX has always been about speed, openness, configurability, and security, and the ethos of the platform continues across its expanded (and expanding) range of capabilities. Whether you use a single NGINX instance as a reverse proxy in your home lab, or have deployed it at a huge scale in enterprise settings, the APAC-centric SPRINT 2.1 is your opportunity to expand your knowledge, increase your skills, and learn about the value-adds of NGINX Plus.

You can learn about best practice, NGINX Service Mesh, the best ways to deploy container fleets with NGINX, and plenty more besides. Join your fellow professionals online for this all-virtual half-day conference-come-training opportunity, December 7 and 8, 2021: register here.

The speaker and session-leader roll call read like a who’s who in IT today: systems designers, CTOs, product leads from NGINX, security experts, and, of course, Tech Wire Asia‘s very own Joe Green (in a fireside-style chat with Rob Whitely [NGINX], Sumit Malhorta [Times Internet] and Burzin Engineer [PhonePe]).

Sign up to reserve your place, and block out your calendar for the duration, December 7 and 8, 2021.

REGISTER HERE

The post The APAC’s NGINX SPRINT 2.1 (virtual): Reserve Your Place Now appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Failing to take into account customers’ payment preferences leads to friction in the buying journey. Knowing how your customers prefer to pay can lead to increased conversion, improved customer loyalty, and reduced churn — ultimately bolstering the bottom line, and making it easier to scale locally and internationally.  

The go-to payment method is assumed to be credit card, but research suggests that this assumption is increasingly unfounded. Some businesses are using this shift in attitudes as an opportunity to reassess payment options right across the board; and the emergence of open banking will accelerate the uptake of faster, smarter, more secure card alternatives. 

Preference is for a more secure and low-cost way to take payments

A recent YouGov and GoCardless survey of over 15,000 consumers across Australia, Canada, Germany, France, the UK, and the US found that bank debit — bank-to-bank direct debit — is the first choice for recurring payments (2nd only in the US). 

Consumer preference for bank-debit stems from better security as bank accounts do not get lost or stolen, no or low cost with often no surcharges, as well as the convenience of being able to set and forget.

For merchants, bank debit is automated, cheaper and low touch for paying customers. It is a pull-based payment method so payments, once authorised, are pulled from the customer’s bank account at the time they are due. 

Bank debit is particularly effective for recurring payments but is also flexible enough for variable and one-off payments and has higher payment success rates and lower fees than cards.

Credit Cards are still widely used, despite the drawbacks

Credit cards have been the default payment method for most businesses because of high acceptance rates and the issuers’ global networks. However, they have some real deficiencies, and are among the least preferred payment methods of consumers, even in North America. 

For merchants, the stand-out issue is cost. Card networks can charge up to 2% per domestic transaction uncapped. For comparison, an account-to-account platform like GoCardless charges 1% + $0.40, capped at $4 per bank debit transaction (with scale pricing available for larger organisations). 

Roughly 10-15% of card payments fail because cards are lost, expire, or are rejected by issuing banks. And every failed payment needs to be retried and rectified, adding to the admin burden of trying to recover these failed payments. Small businesses stand to lose $10,500 every year in uncollected payments, while mid-sized businesses stand to lose $38,000 and that’s without considering admin and recovery costs. Failed payments can lead to huge cash flow bottlenecks that stunt growth. Bank debit uses a customer’s bank details which rarely change. GoCardless customers can expect failure rates as low as 3% and even lower when using smart retries. 

The stats beg the question: why are businesses slow to adopt bank debit?

Perhaps fears of installation costs are behind a general reticence? But Luke Fossett, Director ANZ Sales at GoCardless says transforming your businesses payment strategy to leverage the demand for bank debit doesn’t mean completely scrapping the existing tech stack. Technology now exists to integrate a bank account solution into a business’s ecosystem. 

“We’ve been able to insert our solution on top of a legacy architecture in 30 countries worldwide. As a result, we helped merchants access payment methods their customers have and want to use” he added.

The London-based Fintech works with over 70,000 businesses, processing US$30 billion payments worldwide annually. The company’s technology integrates easily into the systems that businesses rely on to operate. It provides excellent support for merchants looking to do so and offers a choice of approaches.

Source: GoCardless

“We have two ways of being able to work with merchants. One is through direct API integration. The other is via over 350 partner integrations,” said Tanya Martin, Head of Partnerships at GoCardless. “In the instance of these partner integrations, the beauty is, if you as a merchant are already using one of these platforms to manage your billing, you can then access GoCardless through that platform with no further development work required at all. […] “We also have an onboarding team of customer success and solutions engineering to help you through that process, as you do that build or start using GoCardless, to make sure it’s a smooth process.”

GoCardless partners include Xero and Zoho for accounting and invoicing; Salesforce and Asperato for CRM; Martialytics and TeamUp for health and fitness; Chargebee, Recurly, and Zuora for subscription billing; and many more. In addition, it offers any level of DIY for vendors, making adoption as pain-free as possible for the merchants.  

Is there value in automating payments?

Automating recurring payments is convenient and saves time for both the customer and the business. Simpler workflows translate to less time spent on trying to resolve payments hiccups and more time on doing what you do best.

“Before GoCardless, our payment process was slow and expensive,” said Sam Caulton, chief finance officer of Re-Leased, a cloud-based management platform for commercial real estate. “But now it’s streamlined and cost-effective – we’ve saved $10,000 a month on bank transfer fees. And rather than having to collect recurring payments by manual methods like bank transfer or cheque, GoCardless enables Re-Leased to collect automated international payments through direct debit.”

The Kiwi company now has more than 1,200 customers across Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US has reduced its average day’s sales outstanding from 50 days to payment terms of just 30 days. 

Bank debit is also emerging as the key to international growth

Today’s vendors trade internationally, but the payment landscape has become so complex to navigate that more often than not, businesses end up falling back on the two most expensive forms of payment collection; credit card and bank transfer. That’s according to a YouGov survey commissioned by Wise of 4,835 micro and small businesses across 11 countries. It revealed 54% of Australian businesses said that the cost and complexity of managing international payments scuttled their international expansion plans, preventing businesses from entering a new market (25%), growing their customer base (26%) and buying new inventory (23%).

To remedy this, GoCardless partnered with Wise to make payments effectively as borderless as possible. “We see a huge appetite for small to medium businesses to grow and expand internationally but accepting payments for most customers has been one of the barriers for them to dip their toes into international markets or to maximize the potential of those global markets,” Luke Fosset said.

Source: GoCardless

Wise and GoCardless have created the first multi-currency bank debit network. Previously, businesses could only collect bank debit payments from overseas if they had a local currency bank account or took hefty credit card fees on the chin.

“What we’ve been able to do with Wise is allow, for example, an Australian business to collect a payment from a customer based in the UK in pounds sterling. Then, pull the payment from their UK bank account, convert those funds using Wise back to Australian dollars and settle the funds back to the merchant,” he explained. 

“With International Payments, we’re solving two problems: first, enabling businesses to offer the payment methods that their customers prefer, regardless of their geography. And second, offer the payment methods of setting up overseas entities or bank accounts to accept international currencies, and then having to settle it back into their local currency.” 

By leveraging the Wise multi-currency infrastructure, businesses of any size can collect one-off or recurring bank debit payments from over 30 countries in eight currencies (GBP, USD, EUR, SEK, DKK, CAD, AUD, and NZD). 

But what about tax, and red tape as monies move across borders? “The beauty of using a service like GoCardless is that we take care of all of that kind of regulatory side for you,” Martin said. “You can rest easy knowing that if you use GoCardless to collect the payment, for example, from the US and satellite it into Australia, that compliance and regulatory work has been done for you. And all you have to worry about is your business and collecting your payments.”

Future of payments

Soon Australia and New Zealand will see even more GoCardless offerings as it ventures into open banking and instant direct debit via PayTo, PayID and the New Payments Platform.

GoCardless continues on its mission of making payments painless for businesses by facilitating account-to-account payments — and making the ability as simple as possible. Whether it’s for recurring subscription payments, borderless transactions, one-off payments, or open banking, the pain-free way to do it is GoCardless. 

The post Payments – the secret solution to improving your bottom line without gutting your tech stack appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

“The fundamental underlying assumption is the internet would be the next corporate network. This is important to us as we are convinced that there will be more applications on the internet than retained applications that are still living in our private networks,” said Frederik Janssen, VP of global IT infrastructure portfolio at Siemens, which began its transformation journey in 2018. “If more and more applications are moved to the cloud [and] residing on the internet, this is not a network we own. So how do we secure a network we don’t own?”

Cloud security leader Zscaler was brought in as a strategic partner to enable the Siemens Digitalisation Network initiative. Zscaler was founded in 2007 to make the cloud a safer place to do business. From 2011 onwards, it has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with the highest completeness of vision and best ability to execute. That’s a jaw-dropping achievement to have won ten years in a row.

In 2020, Gartner recognized Zscaler as the only leader in the SWG category, a testament to the company’s continued vision and innovation.

Siemens has secured all the traffic of its 350,000 users across more than 180 countries through the Zscaler gateways, driving its security costs down by around 70 percent. Last month, the two companies announced that they are working together to deliver an integrated zero trust security solution for Siemens’ operational technology (OT) system, enabling users to access and manage the entire, unified OT/IT network from anywhere, securely.

Zscaler is 100 percent cloud-delivered. Its SASE-based Zero Trust Exchange security platform puts a company’s defences and controls where the connections occur—the internet—and at the edge, hence services are close to users for a fast experience. Zero trust means it doesn’t allow anyone or anything to communicate on the internet without first being identified and permitted to do so. The Zero Trust Exchange is like a centralised intelligent switchboard in the cloud, where the inspection is done based on three tenets:

1-    Zero network access: connect users to apps, not corporate networks, to prevent over-privileged access and the risk of lateral movement

2-    Zero attack surface: make apps invisible so they can’t be attacked

3-    Zero passthrough connections: use a proxy architecture for complete inspection that quarantines files to prevent threats and data loss

[ From the report “Securing your digital transformation. Corporate IR presentation, September 2021. https://ir.zscaler.com/  ]

Zscaler is the world’s largest inline cloud security platform, with more than 150 data centers across the globe. It secures users in 185 countries, processing more than 160 billion transactions per day, while blocking seven billion threats and policy violations. According to Zacks Equity Research, Zscaler exited fiscal 2021 with over 5,600 customers, noting its Zero Trust Exchange as the key catalyst. It also fulfills another necessity pushed into the limelight by the pandemic: speed.

Because of Zscaler, the Los Angeles Information Technology Agency (ITA) had mere days to execute its business continuity plan to observe the city’s shelter-in-place mandate. That means it had to safely enable 50,000 municipal employees across 44 departments to keep mission-critical services running in the second-largest city in the United States. As a result, Its strategic plan to build a next-generation IT infrastructure was accelerated, including implementing Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) and Zscaler Private Access (ZPA), to allow its staff to work remotely, securely, and efficiently.

“In less than two weeks, we were able to deploy a work-from-anywhere platform that enabled our employees to access all their applications and data from the safety of their homes. Moreover, we did this while keeping critical city services running, such as emergency and health services, trash collection, infrastructure repairs, payment processing, and contact tracing,” said Ted Ross, general manager and CIO at the City of Los Angeles.

The City is just one of over 100 U.S. government agencies and federal integrators that Zscaler counts as clients. The California-based company was also selected by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to participate in a pilot program driving the adoption of zero-trust architectures, following the Biden administration’s executive order on cybersecurity.

The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange is elegant, effective, quick to implement, and scalable—but it doesn’t stop there. The platform is integrating active defense capabilities to proactively hunt for emerging attack tactics with its acquisition of Smokescreen Technologies, announced in May.

“Today’s most sophisticated cyber threats, like the recent Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, require immediate, high-confidence detections to drive effective response,” said Jay Chaudhry, CEO, chairman, and founder of Zscaler.

“Zscaler is proud to be the industry’s first security vendor to extend a zero-trust architecture with integrated active defense and deception capabilities. With the addition of Smokescreen to our Zero Trust Exchange, our customers will be able to change the economics of cyberattacks by making them far more costly, complex, and difficult for the adversary, both before and during their attempted intrusions.”

The Zero Trust Exchange platform offers a range of unified services, including Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA); Zscaler Private Access (ZPA); Zscaler Business to Business; Zscaler Cloud Protection; and Zscaler Digital Experience. Customers can pick all or choose the services that best suit their requirements and priorities.

There is no company better positioned to help you through your secure digital transformation than the pioneer in cloud security and the leader in zero trust, Zscaler. Click through to learn more.

The post Building on Zero Trust: Every Connection Secured appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.