German commercial bank Commerzbank is moving into a five-year deal with Google Cloud to migrate a ‘significant number’ of its banking applications into the cloud.

The expanded agreement will mean Google offers the bank ‘a deeper set of platform services to enable its digital transformation’, the companies noted. Commerzbank developers will be able to follow a continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) approach, enabling faster and easier building and maintaining of applications.

An early application developed on Google Cloud Platform, and available to Commerzbank customers, is the ‘Digitale Kontoanalyse’, a digital account analysis tool. The tool helps track historical financial data and create accurate balance sheets for customer accounts, among other uses.

“We will benefit from Google Cloud’s extensive capabilities in infrastructure modernisation, as well as from its know-how in data analytics and machine learning, as one of the pioneers of this technology,” said Jorg Hessenmuller, chief operating officer of Commerzbank. “As we move to the cloud, Google Cloud is an important strategic partner.”

While five years is the quoted figure for the two companies, who have been partners since 2017, Commerzbank has a ‘Strategy 2024’ approach, launched last month. The strategy ‘represents customer-centricity, digitalisation, sustainability and profitability’, the bank trumpeted at the time. The goal is to run 85% of its decentralised applications in the cloud by that date.

Multi-cloud ‘continues to play a major role’ in the strategy, as Hessenmuller put it. The bank also has a partnership in place with Microsoft, announcing in January it was to move a ‘significant part’ of its applications to Azure.

ARB Bhd is eyeing a merger and acquisition (M&A) deal this year, leveraging its current strong net cash position, to expand the group’s cloud computing business.

The group plans to extend ARB’s footprint in the IT segment by targeting an M&A deal with a higher return on investment, which is expected to increase its shareholders’ value.

“I think we are in a good position to expand our business beyond the boundary. Over the last three years, we have solidified our position in the IT business in Malaysia.

“We have been focusing on the field of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions as Covid-19 accelerated user demand for cloud-based computing needs,” ARB ED Datuk Seri Larry Liew Kok Leong said in a statement yesterday.

Liew said the company aims to ride on the surge in demand for cloud-based computing as a result of the pandemic, coupled with rising interest from international clients for digitalisation and cost-optimisation efforts.

“IT solutions have been proven to help companies achieve their digitalisation efforts and improve cost optimisation in the long-term.

“We foresee a strong demand for solutions in new categories such as big data analytics, e-commerce solutions, IoT platform for 5G and data cybersecurity.

“The group needs to expand into horizontal markets to provide innovative solutions in this area, but the demand far exceeds our capacity and existing infrastructure.

“This is why the next phase for ARB is to look at M&A potentials and collaboration with our local partners,” he said.

Liew said the potential M&A and collaborations are expected to expand ARB’s geographical presence and access in new sectors while taking advantage of the cross-border business opportunities in 2021.

“Overseas expansion will help build a regional reputation for the group. On the domestic front, ARB will continue to work closely with government-linked companies, multinational corporations and public-listed companies to grow its ERP and IoT business segments,” he said.

The government recently introduced the MyDigital initiative which is intended to spur the country’s digital transformation direction plan and drive the business sector to compete globally. The blueprint targets the local digital economy to contribute 22.6% to the country’s GDP by 2026.

ARB saw its net profit for the financial year 2020 (FY20) rise to RM43.46 million compared to RM34.77 million in FY19, as its revenue more than doubled to RM219.45 million from RM102.64 million.

LETTERS: The pandemic had accelerated digitalisation in 2020. The transformation predicted to take its course in the coming years was forced upon businesses within a couple of months. The concern for corporate Malaysia now is whether businesses can ride this wave through while maintaining competency, accountability, compliance and transparency?

Being a double-edged sword, digitalisation has been proven to bring about changes in the way we think, communicate, collaborate and conduct daily affairs. It enables innovation, making processes more efficient and creating new business models. It also poses significant implications for the area of compliance and business integrity.

Moreover, the need to fight corruption is also reflected with the enforcement of Section 17A, MACC (Amendment) Act 2018 on Corporate Liability which now criminalises those running corporations for acts of bribery committed by persons associated to it. The only defence in court for those in charge, would be to ensure preventive measures (adequate procedures) had been undertaken to mitigate the risks of bribery/corruption in the first place.

Such digitalisation, technological advancement with abundance of acquired data enables the use of new risk management tools to monitor and detect fraud/bribery/corruption automatically and provide digital solutions in improving third party due diligence. Notwithstanding that, e-procurement/e-tender solutions could offer a win-win situation for both the public and private sector in leveling the playing field between businesses and enhancing transparency.

The use of data analytics for risk assessments and continuous monitoring can complement qualitative methodologies, thereby reducing false positives and false negatives. However, data analytics is not a replacement for human judgment and professional scepticism. It compliments judgment/scepticism with identifiable and verifiable results through due statistical processes.

As we fraud examiners see things, the single most effective means to mitigate the risk of fraud within organisations is to increase the “perception of detection”. It is when individuals feel that they are being watched will they act in a manner acceptable to the organisation.

Take for instance, if payments are being made with illegal intent (eg. bribery), real-time monitoring of transactions via data analytics software will be able to pick up anomalies in these payments compared to those made in usual business practice.

The anomalies detected are based on algorithms developed through machine learning which in turn picks up those transactions that seem to be out of the norm as compared to historical activity of the organisation. It would be rather impossible for individuals in the organisation to predict which transactions are going to be picked up/highlighted by the software.

Knowing who you do business with is often another concern for both the public and private sector. Here, we see the adoption of tools being able to conduct background checks (including beneficial ownership of corporations, to an extent), with a global informational reach and review of relationships between parties concerned in an arrangement, with visualisation capabilities.

Gone are the days we rely on self-disclosure from individuals or corporations in attaining the right balance of due diligence information. Applicable software / tools are available to scavenge through public and private (with consent) domains / registers to acquire required information.

Organisations should also consider moving towards e-procurement/e-tender, vendor and document management solutions as well, which would enhance accountability and transparency while capturing the trail information and documentation concerning activities and transactions with external parties. This mitigates the risk of abuse in the procurement process, while highlighting non-compliances and misguided operational deficiencies.

Furthermore, digitalisation is enabling Board of Directors,

Senior Management and Compliance Officers get more timely information on compliance risks and enhances communication of rules and regulatory requirements.

Embracing technology for business integrity would be the way forward as we continue to pivot towards digitalisation. Future thought, however, will be on data protection and cyber security which needs to be accounted when adopting new tools for business improvement and integrity.

Every successful company needs a scalable infrastructure that can support complex functions, faster delivery of time-sensitive information, data transformation, and visibility on all data that flows in and out of their ecosystems. Hence major businesses across verticals are now adopting the cloud.

In the past decade, digitalisation has moved and skyrocketed in new and unexpected directions. As digital technologies are shaping industries, enterprises are pursuing these measures to drive business goals and gain a competitive edge. The cloud has been the most significant disruption in the technology space with adoptions accelerating at breakneck speeds. The adoption of cloud services is influenced mainly by essential components like internet connectivity coverage, latency & cost, and policies pertaining to data storage on the cloud. It also offers unmatched flexibility in resource utilisation and scalability. Interconnections offering low latency and downtimes have now become the keys to success.

Maintaining data within the confines of the office space and behind a firewall was the traditional and only offering available to organisations until a few years ago. However, critical industries like banking, healthcare, government, manufacturing, retail, tech, customer servicing, etc. are now moving to the cloud due to avoid the high costs involved in building, maintaining, and raising those facilities to current standards. Data centers instead offer these industries excellent access, state-of-the-art infrastructures, and cloud services at less than half that price.

Edge computing as a solution to latency, involving processing capabilities delivered closer to the applications they serve, is further opening new markets and developing unique software ecosystems that are now attracting significant investments. Servicing heavy-content demands has made edge data centers a go-to for many large and mid-size firms due to its ability to deliver time-sensitive data at high speeds and minimal latency. The 5G rollout will also bring in revolutionary changes in cloud adoptions.

Through its ability to provide latencies in less than ten milliseconds, it will soon allow organisations to deploy low latency 5G applications like IoT, AI, etc. This, in turn, will also open newer avenues like cloud gaming, industrial loT, and on-site augmented reality guidance. These new avenues and solutions will bring in a lot of information at a faster pace, thus increasing overall storage consumption on the cloud and in data center setups. This data needs to be collected faster and processed further to make it meaningful, requiring organisations to develop a holistic approach while moving towards the cloud computing platform. They will need to classify data, its objective, comply with policies, and design an IT architecture that could utilise cloud storage and on-premise data center.

The rapid spread of Covid-19 significantly increased data traffic from March 2020. Businesses and trade were massively impacted, and firms began to realise that conventional methods wouldn’t be enough to ensure normalcy and continuity of business. Circumventing these negative effects of the Covid-19 pandemic required companies to build technological infrastructures, secure business continuity, and manage data. Maintaining on-premise data in a lockdown was a major challenge and also involved high costs of power, poor access to critical systems, shutting down of telecoms, and most importantly no labour for on-site operational support. In addition to that, loss of data and downtime could seriously impact business and incur irrecoverable losses which brought into light business continuity and disaster recovery options that mitigate risks, maintain and recover data immediately and keep the business running normally even in the face of disasters. This drove many organisations to partially use cloud computing services for addressing their business continuity needs while some moved from conventional methods to the cloud permanently.

In recent years the concept of hybrid cloud is slowly coming up as an answer to increasing workloads. The hybrid cloud is a combination of cloud services and an on-premises data center. While India has already adopted cloud services for its mainstream data processing, this has also resulted in enterprise customers exploring cloud computing platforms beyond a typical on-premise setup. In a couple of years, the hybrid cloud market is expected to grow exponentially as more enterprises start exploring the cloud computing world without disturbing their on-premise setup. In fact, a hybrid cloud setup provides the best of both the worlds -enterprises can store/ process their critical data on their on-premise setup also while they burst on the cloud platform for their unexpected workloads.
Organisations also prefer to move towards a cloud platform to keep unknown users or roaming users away from their core on-premise setups. In addition to that, scenarios including multi-city solution deployments like loT require enterprises to rely on Edge Clouds to relay data to their core setups, and requirements such as these drive organisations to adopt more and more hybrid setups. Additionally, with the government developing data protection laws, many enterprises are adopting or are on the verge of developing hybrid cloud strategies to keep certain customer information on-premise in order to ensure regulatory compliance.

With data centers now becoming the nucleus of digital transformations the regional demand for data centers is growing rapidly, with investment in data storage in India is estimated to be at $4.5 billion and grow at a CAGR of 20 per cent by 2022. Data protection and data localisation initiatives by the government add incentive to the physical presence of cloud service providers, thereby increasing data center service revenue in the country. This spells huge scope for the region in terms of the growth of data centers and is allowing both new as well as existing data center providers to scan for opportunities to invest here. Together with the rise of multiple hyper-scale cloud data centers, cloud services have also been seen ramping up. While local vendors dominate the colocation market in India, state governments particularly Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana have announced incentives attracting FDI’s for data center development in the country.

Every successful company needs a scalable infrastructure that can support complex functions, faster delivery of time-sensitive information, data transformation, and visibility on all data that flows in and out of their ecosystems. Hence major businesses across verticals are now adopting the cloud to gain their competitive edge through new-age application services and advanced analytics. Cloud computing is the refreshed approach and the much-required response that businesses should opt for to thrive in opportunities presented by globalisation along with challenges characterised by political, economic, financial, and social instabilities and accommodate growth and support business.