PARTNER
The key tech platforms for driving ASEAN’s growth
By Cherian Varghese
Cherian Varghese, Regional Managing Director of ASEAN and SAGE at Oracle, explores the challenges and opportunities in a guest post.
Today, we are already seeing ASEAN organisations embracing areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), recognising their power to help them innovate faster, drive change, and operate more efficiently. However, the incredible pace of technological change can make it feel impossible to keep up, and with so many companies looking to harness the benefits, the relevant skills are in short supply.
To help with this, forward-looking leaders in ASEAN should look to capitalise on the advantages of the next generation of computing: ‘autonomous cloud’.
Do more with less
Autonomous cloud represents a new category of cloud services. This new style of cloud platform, powered by AI and ML, has the potential to help organisations across the globe reduce risk, lower costs, do more with less and get more value from their most important business asset: data.
An autonomous cloud is underpinned by three basic concepts—self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing. Through self-driving, the service automatically backs itself up, fixes issues on its own, recovers quickly, and automatically tunes itself, all while the service is up and running. This improves efficiency, reduces cost, and eliminates human labour and human error.
Being self-securing, the system automatically applies patches with no downtime, helping protect itself from malicious external attacks. According to Forbes, 85% of breaches exploited system vulnerabilities where a patch had been available for 12 months.
Finally, imagine your agency’s main server fails. Most often, under these circumstances the chances of recovering your data are minimal. The third aspect, self-repairing, provides automated protection from all planned and unplanned downtime. Even if a server goes down because of some disaster, the service will back up and recover without any disruption to the end user.
Freeing up resources
In the longer run, the resulting ‘autonomous organisation’ will reach an ideal state where it does not require manual processes to run its day-to-day operations and maintain its core IT systems. Instead, AI and automation, working together in harmony, will manage everything from database to application development, to providing predictive insight around business processes—all without human input.
This will free up resources from the burden of managing complex IT systems. They can then be focused on tasks that provide higher value to the business: innovation, through the creation of new applications and better ways to serve citizens, employees and partners.
"This is a completely new category of IT, and we are just at the start of the journey."This is a completely new category of IT, and we are just at the start of the journey. But it won’t be long before autonomous cloud services bring simplicity and self-service with integrated security into all areas of the organisation, providing new fuel for innovation.