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How to resolve AdBlock issue? Lumen throws light on ‘vital’ business approaches to digital technology
By Leon Gettler, Talking Business >>
BUSINESSES all over the world need to transform their operations with digital technologies.
Francis Prince Thangasamy, the Singapore-based managing director for Asia-Pac of Lumen Technologies said there were many challenges, not least of which is cyber security.
But business leaders need to ‘go digital’ for all sorts of operations. Even during tough economic times.
“Regardless of market conditions, organisations will transform,” Mr Thangasamy told Talking Business.
“Regardless of market conditions, organisations need to enable business and drive efficiency.” 
This could be across many areas, he said.
“Transformation has many purposes. Some of it is to drive efficiency. It could be cost savings or it could enable new features focusing on the business,” Mr Thangasamy said.
“It really depends on how much dependency a business has on digital infrastructure.”
Digital impact is global
Being responsible for Asia-Pacific, Mr Thangasamy’s business works with mainly global businesses specialising in all sorts of areas. We’re talking here about verticals like finance, agriculture, retail, e-commerce, logistics and supply chain management.
He said the biggest challenge for companies transforming through digital technology was prioritisation. What comes first?
“You see companies that depend on IT for different aspects,” he said.
“There are companies depending on IT to enable the business to drive efficiency but also you have organisations which are heavily e-commerce driven and IT is driving the business.
“Those are the challenges of prioritisation of budget, of resources,” Mr Thangasamy said.
“How do you serve your business and at the same time modernise your infrastructure and how you get the skill sets?
“Skill sets [can be] quite a common problem globally.”
He said what a lot of companies do to deal with this is they complement what they have internally while training staff. And they leverage expertise from partners and providers.
At the same time, he said, there needs to be strong internal expertise to work with those third parties. So staff have to be trained.
“You need to have strong management program capabilities, people who can reach external partners and internal business units to solve common business problems,” he said.
Cyber security issues loom
One of the big challenges now, for businesses everywhere, including their boards, he said, is cyber security.
Mr Thangasamy said cyber security will be the major issue and focus for Lumen over the next five years.
“We focus quite a bit on cyber security because of the insights that we have on our networks,” he said.
“With that and our managed security services capabilities, we do help organisation modernise.”
But here’s the problem: so many companies now, he said, have invested in different security tools. It creates ‘blind spots’.
“This becomes an issue for companies where they have invested so much money but they still have blind spots, so how do you bring all of that together,” Mr Thangasamy said.
The other issue, he said, was finding security talent. And that is a global problem. How do businesses deal with that?
“What some companies do is get involved in campus recruiting and training people from internal training programs and competing in the market to identify top talents,” he said.
“But definitely that’s a big priority for companies – finding talent.” 
Hear the complete interview and catch up with other topical business news on Leon Gettler’s Talking Business podcast, released every Friday at www.acast.com/talkingbusiness
https://shows.acast.com/talkingbusiness/episodes/talking-business-31-interview-with-francis-prince-thangasamy
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