TechTouch Asia

With the recent shift in consumer needs sparked by the pandemic and global events, more businesses in Asia Pacific are accelerating their digital transformation efforts. A November 2019 study sponsored by Red Hat* found that 95% of APAC executives surveyed said digital transformation has gained importance and perceived it as a strategy for both survival and growth. COVID-19 has merely accelerated this trend. The APAC finance industry, for instance, was moderately impacted by COVID-19, with customers switching to digital transactions, said Arvind Swami, Director, financial services at Red Hat APAC. He said the digital element is here to stay, and named innovation, efficiency, automation, regulatory complpiance, security and resiliency as the main considerations for the industry. Organisations focused immediately on helping customers feel secure, reducing the risk in their investment portfolios, and also implemented remote working measures, and have now changed their priorities, he s...

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, has announced the winners of the Red Hat APAC Innovation Awards 2020 for their exceptional and innovative use of Red Hat solutions. This year’s awards honoured 27 Asia Pacific (APAC) organisations for digital transformation, hybrid cloud infrastructure, cloud-native development, automation and resilience. Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, Senior VP and GM, APAC, Red Hat said: “2020 has been a year of uncertainties – but also possibilities. It’s inspiring to see how organisations in Asia Pacific are using open source to quickly and effectively meet changing market landscapes and consumer demands. Congratulations to this year’s winners, who we believe will become role models to other organisations looking for ideas to transform their business. We look forward to working with our customers to help them address the many real challenges our customers face today, and unlock the unlimited possibilities of taking the business forward...

By Jeffrey Kok, VP of Solution Engineers, Asia Pacific and Japan, CyberArk With the COVID crisis far from being over, the Singapore government has been encouraging businesses to continue with work-from-home arrangements as the default mode of working to safeguard the health of employees. This means that many employees will continue to use personal devices on unsecured networks - often without understanding the potential risks to company security. The Singapore Ministry of Manpower's (MOM) workplace requirements for businesses, after the Circuit Breaker (lockdown) period ends, notes that employers should provide the necessary IT equipment to facilitate remote working and ensure COVID-safe workplaces for employees. As remote working arrangements are extended, a security infrastructure that will allow employees to safely access sensitive company data from home is imperative. In leveraging technology to manage access to a company's IT network, privileged access management (P...

by Rosalind Quek, GM, Modern Work, Microsoft Asia When countries across Asia Pacific went into lockdown over the pandemic back in early 2020 it was clear that the future of work had arrived much sooner than any of us expected. Overnight, we swapped conference rooms for living rooms, cubicles for coffee tables, and watercooler chats for messaging apps. Once we settled into our new normal, however, deeper questions arose. Do I need to change how I showcase my value? How is my performance being measured? What does my path for growth now look like? These questions underscore how, just as we swiftly transformed to ensure business continuity, we must also transform our approach to career development so that our people can also continue to grow and thrive. It is tempting to put aside thoughts of career progression as a luxury to revisit when we go back to normal. But increasingly, it looks like many of these workplace changes are here to stay. So rethinking career development and team per...

Citrix Systems, the global digital workspace provider, and Upwork, which offers an online talent solution, are expanding their collaboration to empower flexible work models and provide fast, easy, and secure access to untapped pools of specialised talent. “The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the way we work and is forcing companies to reimagine the way things get done,” said David Henshall, President and CEO, Citrix. “Forward-thinking organisations are embracing flexible work to enhance and expand their talent pools in ways they couldn’t previously and to build and acquire the modern skills they need to not just return to where they were, but power their business forward.” With Citrix Workspace , companies can give workers the resources and space they need to perform at their best and deliver a consistent, secure and reliable experience no matter where work needs to get done. Through Upwork, companies can access a global pool of proven talent, enabling them to scale their ...

by Geoff Soon, MD, South Asia, Snowflake Source: Snowflake. Soon. Data is growing at an exponential rate. Many types of Internet of Things (IoT) devices are generating data, including images and video created or consumed for entertainment, images and video from functional applications like advertising and security, productivity-driven data such as files on PCs and servers, and log files. While data is the largest business asset and nearly every company collects data, few organisations realise the value of their data assets to its full extent. Except for technology firms that built their businesses on the back of big data, the majority of companies across sectors today sit on mountains of underutilised information. To maximise the value of data, it should be shared and monetised, and achieved in a secured and governed way. In a recent survey, 61% of consumers indicated that sharing consumer data is unethical, but when asked a followup question if they would look more favourably on...

Source: NVIDIA blog post. The new AI-powered Smart Portrait Filter on Adobe Photoshop can make the person look older or younger, change gaze direction, and offer different lighting angles. Adobe Photoshop users are getting GPU-accelerated neural filters, new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools that enable users to make complex adjustments to images in just seconds. Done manually, such adjustments traditionally take hours of work. Adobe and NVIDIA are collaborating on AI technology to improve creative tools in Adobe Creative Cloud and Photoshop . This collaboration includes the new Smart Portrait Filter , which runs best on NVIDIA RTX GPUs. With Smart Portrait in Photoshop , users can experiment, making edits to facial characteristics such as gaze direction and lighting angles, by dragging a slider. Smart Portrait uses NVIDIA StyleGAN2 technology and a deep neural network developed by NVIDIA Research and trained on numerous portrait images to achieve results in seco...