Thuy Thi Le Luong - Managing director, Cisco Vietnam

Cybersecurity and IT evolution

Connections between people, devices, and data are ever-expanding, with billions of open, shared, and accessible touchpoints multiplying in a hybrid work, cloud-first world. The network is the nervous system that allows everything to work together.

And while this has created limitless possibilities, it’s also introduced incredible complexity. As organisations and users become more distributed, the demand for anywhere, anytime access to applications requires the transformation of networks to deliver uninterrupted connectivity while maintaining security.

This is especially as just over 80 per cent of respondents in Vietnam to a Cisco survey believe that having connectivity issues regularly is career-limiting for remote workers, yet around 20 per cent say their company still needs the right networking infrastructure.

Predictive networks

Competing in today’s digital landscape means one thing – what can be delivered digitally must be delivered, and it must be always on. Applications are just the front door to an expansive digital landscape that is evolving and growing in scale and complexity, given Vietnam’s continued growth in mobile app transactions, which is expected to surge 300 per cent between 2021 and 2025.

The key to delivering a great digital experience comes with having full-stack visibility into different data, system interactions, interdependencies, and business metrics that are happening in real time across the digital interface. Predictive network engines that can gather data from a multitude of telemetry sources, and integrate them into different models to predict user experience issues will be powerful tools.

They will help bridge the current gap between IT and business teams, allowing IT leaders to resolve issues before they happen and business teams to focus on agility and innovations that will win customers’ hearts.

Reimagined workspaces

Our latest hybrid work study found that 60 per cent of respondents in Vietnam say that fully remote workers will have challenges engaging with their colleagues and company, compared to those in the office. This underscores the need for businesses across different industries to rethink their workspaces and drive an inclusive environment for all as hybrid work becomes a mainstay.

This will unfold through closer collaboration between IT, human resources, and facilities to drive change, from integrating inclusive features such as AI-powered audio intelligence/background noise cancellation, to equipping physical spaces with the right video conference devices.

5G to revolutionise innovation

As more businesses in Vietnam begin to realise the benefits of digitising and using future technologies, we foresee a greater adoption of 5G, especially with Vietnam leading as one of the first Southeast Asian countries to deploy 5G trials and having declared its intent to achieve national 5G coverage by 2030.

The combination of Wi-Fi 6 and 5G is set to pave a new future of connectivity for almost every industry, by providing 3x more bandwidth and 5x more speed than Wi-Fi 5.

This is especially key for firms in sectors like manufacturing, which require high-precision engineering capabilities to implement transformative applications that drive digital transformation, smart factories, and automation within processes for greater efficiency.

The power of the technologies comes from their ability to monitor and manage thousands of assets. Its scalability brings the promise of wide-scale deployment of mobile robots, and self-driving vehicles closer to reality. We can hence expect more companies to be on the lookout for such technologies once the relevant spectrums and infrastructure are provided.

This will help Vietnam move from an export-oriented, labour-intensive economy to a more diversified and innovation-driven economy and present opportunities for it to attract both domestic and international investors.

ESG making headway

Purpose will only become more relevant and central to companies in the year ahead. We are proud that Vietnam is making headway on sustainability through environmental, social, and governance criteria.

The government is strongly promoting environmental protection this decade and with a vision to 2050, which is a turning point for the country’s national strategy to achieve its dual goal of environmental sustainability and economic profitability.

As we come together to galvanise collective impact and progress in Vietnam’s sustainability roadmap, it will become increasingly critical for companies to measure their company’s purpose journey, especially their social and environmental impact, and place this centre stage in their corporate decision-making instead of approaching this as a tick-the-box exercise.