Three Key Takeaways From Asia To Succeed in the Future

2023 has been a truly eventful year for Splunk in Asia. We brought the Splunk experience to customers across Asia, hosting a series of Splunk Experience Day in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Customers and partners had the opportunity to hear from local industry leaders and regional experts who shared their insights around enterprise resilience and best practices on security and observability.

We also took our flagship user conference, .conf23 on the road with .conf Go held in various cities across Asia Pacific. Having our events close to our local partners and customers not only solidified our commitment to the region but also significantly contributed to our understanding of the diverse and unique challenges faced by our APAC customers.

Meeting with fellow business leaders, CTOs and CISOs in these digitally savvy cities was a golden opportunity for me to better learn how they cope with the dual challenge of staying ahead of adversaries and to innovate at the same time. From these conversations, three things were clear to me.

1. AI/ML Takes Centre Stage in Asia

The surge in data volume, ongoing tech talent shortage and increasing reliance on digital systems have propelled AI/ML-powered response automation to the top of the priority list.

Distributed environments often involve large volumes of data from various sources, making it complex for organisations to manage. Technologies like AI/ ML help handle these complexities and provide real-time insights, threat detection, and task automation, reducing the manual effort required to manage distributed data.

AI and ML have been a part of the cybersecurity professional's toolset long before the recent Gen AI hype, helping organisations with threat detection, analysis, and response. Now, it is also an increasingly essential part of the observability toolset, addressing modern IT environments' growing complexity and scale by providing real-time insights, automating routine tasks, and enabling organisations to manage and optimise their systems and applications proactively.

At .conf23 earlier this year, we announced an enhanced unified security and observability platform, where our enhanced Splunk AI and ML capabilities with 'human-in-the-loop' support can accelerate human decision-making and threat response by connecting domain expertise with relevant information.

A prime example would be our customer, Unitel – one of Mongolia's leading information communications technology groups which needed a solution that can better protect sensitive data and resolve incidents more quickly. By leveraging Splunk’s AI capabilities, they could automate complicated manual processes and give them comprehensive visibility into systems, allowing the company to respond significantly more rapidly to incidents and lower the overall risk of security breaches.

2. Increasing Importance of Total Visibility

An increasing number of organisations are realising the importance of total visibility as part of their digital resilience strategy. Moreover, the demand for digitalisation in today’s always-on, ever-connected world increases the risk of data deluge, which can overwhelm organisations from efficiently accessing complete visibility across their technology stack.

This has become increasingly prevalent as more organisations adopt edge computing due to its significant benefits which brings data transfer and storage closer to the data sources themselves to improve response times and save bandwidth. Yet, the process of organising data in large quantities across multiple physical and virtual sources can be incredibly complex, tedious, and costly.

As such, we introduced Splunk Edge Hub to help businesses streamline data by breaking down silos of data access across physical and virtual environments, acting as a data aggregator and providing comprehensive visibility across IT and OT environments. This is particularly relevant to the manufacturing sector where there has been a disconnect in data collections between factory floors and other parts of the business.

For Asia's robust manufacturing sector, this could be a game changer. At .conf Go Seoul, LG Electronics shared how they were able to leverage Splunk Edge Hub to drive innovation with edge computing and AI - disrupting traditional industry models by going beyond data and into automating their physical operations. 

Separately, at .conf Go Singapore, we were joined by Singapore Airlines, who deployed Splunk as their Operational Data Analytics (ODA) platform. The platform provided their IT support teams with insights and tools to identify, resolve, and even predict issues, giving them a full array of running services. They were also able to enhance the visibility of their IT system through Splunk Dashboards, ensuring the close monitoring of their most critical applications. With full visibility across their systems, the airline carrier was able to swiftly resolve issues, maximise service uptime, and enhance their customer experience.

It is clear that organisations that invest in total visibility empowers them to go beyond their existing operational capabilities and instead are able to reach a new height of efficiency, customer experience and security for their business. 

3. Silos as a Thing of The Past

It is evident that siloed teams, complex environments and evolving regulations are a common set of challenges faced by organisations across Asia. As such, organisations need to look towards unified and integrated solutions. 

Collaboration opens doors, and breaks down walls. In fact, based on our latest CISO report, we found that resilience depends largely on collaboration. CISOs now recognise cross-team collaboration among IT, security, and software as a significant strategy for building, expanding and sustaining resilience within their organisations, and see it as an extension of their security practices.

Although it takes some time and effort, there is no downside to collaboration. On average, respondents in our CISO report saw more than 35% improvement in aspects such as integration between security and IT, visibility across attack surface, time taken to evaluate risk of new business initiatives, and more. 

The above encapsulates the three key takeaways from my engagement across Asia — they may seem obvious, but they are undoubtedly crucial for a successful future. As businesses in Asia continue to expand and contribute to global growth, our purpose remains clear — we will continue to support global enterprises and government agencies in their journey to resilience, as complexities will only persist with rapid innovation fueled by the age of emerging technologies such as AI.