Thailand travelling full-speed ahead on its digital journey, says Veritas

Thailand’s government, financial services and telecom sectors are continuing to lead the country’s digital transformation journey and this will further accelerate when the kingdom adopts 5G (fifth-generation) cellular and artificial intelligence technologies,  according to top executives of Veritas, a world leader in data protection and other services.

Speaking at the recent Veritas Vision event in Indonesia, Chris Lin, senior vice president for Asia Pacific, said healthcare and manufacturing industries are also key sectors for digital transformation in the Thai market.

For US-based Veritas, the vision is to simplify the increasingly-complex IT landscape by making sure that digital services are available at all times with increased cost efficiency and compliance, along with superb data protection anywhere as well as “always-on” data  insights, added Ravi Rajendran, vice president and managing director for Asia South.

Ravi said the IT complexity has resulted from the ongoing digital transformation process, which has seen massive data growth and brought with it a significant rise in ransomware and other cyber threats.

From the traditional workload of data, enterprises have witnessed the virtualization of new workloads from open sources resulting in the so-called big data and use of multiple cloud services.

The global trend of personal data protection as required by law has also driven the demand for superb data protection and related services as exemplified by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). Thailand is to follow suit, enforcing a similar Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in May next year and prompting enterprises to prepare for compliance.

Under Thai law, enterprises need to cope with new compliance and other requirements resulting from the massive data growth as well as data back-up and recovery challenges, especially with regard to storage and protection of such personal data as national ID,  credit card, driver license and passport numbers. Keeping these records secure is vital as data leaks would carry legal and other liabilities under the new law.

As the leader in data backup and recovery software, Veritas has also been providing services for airline ticketing systems and mobile telecom billing systems, among others, around the world, with virtually no down time as these critical systems require non-stop data for analytics.

The advent of 5G cellular service for which Thailand is scheduled to hold the spectrum auction early in 2020, will further increase the data volume massively, making it necessary to simplify the IT infrastructure along with superb data protection anywhere and “always on” data insights.

With much less latency than the current 4G network, the new 5G service will make Internet-of-Things (IoT) in the consumer and industrial sectors practical resulting in a massive number of connected machines, connected vehicles and other new service and product features in retail, entertainment and other sectors.

John Abel, CIO of Veritas, said digital transformation also needs new revenue models as enterprises turn to make customer and other enterprise data their core and most important assets which have to be protected accordingly.

In the digital transformation journey, enterprises may start with the employment of data scientists to find new values and experiences from the existing datasets which have the potential to become the new revenue models.

Since 2007 when the first iPhone was launched, the world’s most successful enterprises have been those with a focus on creating new customer experiences, he said, citing the 2011 launch of Uber, the ride-hailing platform, an example in the wake of unsafe subway commutes in New York City.

The rise of economies of speed is also obvious in the case of Facebook which got its first 50 million users in just two years, so successful enterprises in digital transformation need new data insights, revenue models and improved customer experiences as exemplified by Netflix and Amazon in addition to Apple and Uber.

According to Abel, the digital economy is supposed to focus on creating new experiences by using connected data and intelligences in a new way via customer-centric platforms in which analytics and business alignment are key components.  In addition, enterprises need to have an innovation culture and the capacity to educate other businesses and stakeholders.

In the digital economy, enterprises have to fail fast and fail cheap and start new efforts again with a team-sport spirit for digital dexterity, while data are the most important assets and have to be protected from ransomware and other threats as only about 50 per cent of data can be recovered on average once stolen.