Building a future-ready and smarter Asean

DURING the 32nd Asean Summit held in Singapore last year, the region agreed to establish the Asean Smart Cities Network. The project has seen 26 cities from the 10 countries work towards a common goal of smart and sustainable urban development, bringing the geography closer than ever before. Integral to this is the aim to harness opportunities from disruptive digital technologies in order to equip people with the right skillsets to build a future-ready and smarter Asean.

Many elements - socio, political and technological - will need to come together to help make this happen. On the technology front, a number of changes are afoot that will go some way towards helping businesses both better manage this transition and be a critical element in support of it.

WELCOMING THE SECOND GENERATION OF CLOUD

Smart cities' development requires close cooperation, so that organisations of all types and sizes can easily pull their information and operations together. This requires a fully unified and connected IT infrastructure to support such an ecosystem - and the best way of providing that is in the cloud.

As we look towards 2025 and the roadmap to building Asean 4.0, the continued adoption of enterprise cloud infrastructure by companies both big and small will help enable this collaboration. When cloud initially emerged on the scene, it offered many attractive benefits to enterprises. However, first-generation cloud infrastructure was not designed for traditional application architectures - as a result, it did not have the performance, predictability and availability required, and companies hesitated to migrate to the cloud.

Today, the cloud has evolved, and while the cloud migration path is not always simple, requiring planning, organisational buy-in and a comprehensive technology framework, the second generation of cloud infrastructure makes it easier to get it right. Second-generation cloud infrastructure also provides hybrid cloud environment options ranging from integrated public cloud services to deployed cloud solutions behind firewalls, something that is critical to business, seeing as cloud and on-premises are expected to co-exist for quite some time. Modern cloud capabilities also allow companies to run any enterprise application - cloud native or traditional - and workload securely in the cloud while protecting the underlining data underpinning them.

"ADAPTIVE PROCESSES" TO TAKE CENTRE STAGE

Increased productivity and efficiency are arguably two of the biggest benefits of a connected city. When achieved, it means time and effort can be spent somewhere else, particularly on tasks that require more care, attention and specialist skills.

In support of this is the introduction of new "adaptive processes". For instance:

In transportation, we have Singapore's Intelligent Transport Systems - where traffic lights can monitor, adjust and optimise in an adaptive manner to provide green lights along main roads in response to changing traffic demand.

In healthcare, adaptive processes can not only detect when a patient has fallen down, but can also predict the likelihood of when it might happen next - allowing clinicians to better diagnose and even personalised treatment plans for patients.

In the workplace, high-performing robots are working alongside the human staff to free up resources so they can focus on higher value activities.

These actions are achieved, in part, by integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning into the software so that it can take some actions automatically, helping free humans up to focus on more complex issues and tasks.

This trend is the start of a move towards a fully self-learning model, and by 2025, we expect adaptive processes to play a vital role in the operations of businesses across every industry.

The other area that smart processes will impact is the user experience, something that is critical to the success of Smart Cities, making it easy and more pleasurable for citizens, governments and businesses to interact with each other and to tap the services available.

AI-driven systems will not just execute relatively straightforward actions, such as booking a rental car for that sales trip. They can also tackle harder tasks that normally require not only time, but also some level of expertise, such as optimising business workflows, reviewing financials for anomalies, or finding expense report violations. Often, there's still a human review, but that review can often be done faster, and more accurately, with the assistance of AI in laying all the groundwork, presenting recommendations, and providing the background, documentation, and reasoning behind those recommendations.

While some might fear this means the rise of robots, most "AI in action" will, in fact, remain hidden. For customers and employees alike, it will merely usher in a new era of experiences - one characterised by invisible technology, simple interactions, easy engagements, predictive recommendations and friction-free journeys.

PREPARING FOR FUTURE THREATS WITH AUTONOMOUS SECURITY

With new threats emerging every day, it is hardly a surprise that cybersecurity takes a leading part of any Smart Cities discussion, especially in terms of policy development and capacity building initiatives, and the Asean Smart Cities Network meeting was no different.

To help with this ongoing battle, AI will emerge as both the shield and the sword, and it will need to be a part of every organisation's security strategy on some level. According to Oracle and KPMG's Cloud Threat Report 2018, the number one challenge to respondents was analysing security event telemetry at scale. And the most effective way to defeat a highly automated network of attackers is for enterprises to turn over the mass analysis of events to intelligent AI and machine learning-driven analysis platforms that span the entire enterprise IT estate.

With broader and more complex IT environments to protect, an ever-expanding network of user-controlled endpoints to keep an eye on, and with the region standing on the verge of Industry 4.0, it is crucial for businesses to be well-equipped with the right tools to fight the cyber war. This is particularly important given that the Asean region has seen an increase in cybercrimes in recent years.

Businesses that act now in these three key areas will gain many advantages - a cloud platform for digital business for now and beyond; AI to drive efficiency and productivity and free up workers to focus on higher value work, improved and simplified user experiences for customers and employees alike; and a new set of tools to help win the cyber battle.

To some, these technologies might be new, but it is a future Oracle has been preparing for for years now, and we can assure you of the value and return. It is a vision that will continue to guide our strategy - deepening AI capabilities and offering new solutions to better connect enterprise cloud solutions.