Organisations in Malaysia Expect Budgets to Support Accelerated DX

Despite the severe economic downturn, organisations in Malaysia expect increased technology budgets to support escalated digital transformation in today’s new business normal. Amongst business leaders in Malaysia who believe that there should be more investment in remote working, 86 percent list the enhancement of cybersecurity measures as a top priority. Further, despite a grim economic outlook, 65 percent of local business leaders expect technology budgets to increase.

Many organisations have experienced digital transformation at an unprecedented pace and scale across business segments and operations, as they have quickly moved to mass remote working arrangements during COVID-19 to survive. Forty-eight percent of local business leaders surveyed said the pandemic accelerated their move to cloud solutions, while 9 in 10 say COVID-19 has changed the way they interact or deliver products and services to customers. These results indicate a strong shift and rapid investment into transformation projects that move from traditional on-premises security solutions to next generation cloud-native solutions as organisations look to protect today’s distributed workforce and digitally driven business models.

Seventy-one percent of local business leaders believe that their organisations should increase investment in cybersecurity software over the next six months. As cybersecurity is front of mind for budget allocation, many respondents have recognised that COVID-19 has resulted in a massive increase in cyber-threat behaviour. CrowdStrike observed an increase in electronic crime (eCrime) activity – up by more than 330 percent since the start of 2020, as compared to the same period in 2019. As local business leaders look forward and put the initial shock of the pandemic behind them, the issues of solidifying secure digital transformation, prioritising and assigning budgets to the most critical areas – including cybersecurity training and protecting new supply chains, will need to be addressed.

“The COVID-19 pandemic may have had the biggest impact on the way organisations operate since the introduction of office PCs. The reaction of business leaders has been impressive, but the speed and size of change to a remote workforce has led to some inevitable gaps, particularly in the cybersecurity of organisations,” said Sherif El Nabawi, Vice President, Engineering, APJ, CrowdStrike. “Our research findings show that respondents understand these gaps and expect to address them during business recovery, going beyond ‘good enough’ security measures to ensure their employees remain secure against sophisticated threat activity – regardless of where they are located. In the new business normal, it is then vital to implement solutions that can be quickly deployed at scale to detect new threats, adhere to new regulations, and leverage the cloud so they can be easily and remotely managed.”

“Remote work is expected to continue for some time, and we might not even return to the past of having employees in the office for the entire workweek. Organisations must therefore update their cybersecurity policies to factor in remote or hybrid working. This includes planning for the use of personal devices, secure access for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) on corporate networks and leveraging VPNs to protect sensitive data accessed through insecure Wi-Fi. Keeping employees educated on cyber-threats brought about by remote or hybrid working situations and educating them on cyber hygiene are important for minimising exposure,” said El Nabawi.

(This content is surmised from a press release)