The appetite for 5G in Asia Pacific will continue to increase, with research firm Frost & Sullivan predicting the region’s 5G revenue to grow at a CAGR of 62.2% to reach US$23.89 billion in 2025.

At a Verizon Business event on May 5, Sampath Sowmyanaran, the company's chief revenue officer, highlights the trends that drive the demand for enterprise 5G globally. They include the increasing shift towards digital operations/ businesses, the convergence of IT and OT (operational technology that interacts with the physical environment), and the growing cyber risks.

These trends bring about changes to the role of the chief information officer (CIO). “In the past, CIOs focused on keeping the train running on time, [meaning that IT systems such as enterprise resource planning and emails need to work well].

“However, as businesses shift towards digital, CIOs are now part of operations team [and are responsible for] ensuring a good experience for employees, customers and partners. [They are no longer] a cost centre but revenue centre,” he adds.

During a panel discussion at the same event, the panellists agree that adopting 5G is only part of the equation for success. For 5G to be truly transformational, enterprises need to find use cases for the technology and work with the ecosystem players – including network, edge computing, and AI providers – to bring those ideas to life and scale them.

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Dr Andreas Muelle, chief expert communications technologies for IoT at Bosch, says: “5G is not about replacing a cable. Organisations need to think bigger – [they’ll need to change their] system architecture and add building blocks like edge computing to support their 5G adoption.

“[This is also because 5G won’t enable just a single killer use case but a combination of different things.” He gives the example of how 5G can enable manufacturers to use not only use robotics but also computer vision as they embrace Industry 4.0, wherein factories are heavily dependent on interconnectivity, automation, machine learning, and real-time data.

He continues: “Joint efforts among the enterprise 5G ecosystem players are also necessary. Working together to establish standards, a common language, and steps taken for validation [will help accelerate the adoption of enterprise 5G].”

Phil Siveter, CEO of Nokia UK and I, agrees. “5G is likely to transform industries like manufacturing and logistics. But unlocking that value needs use cases, trust, and partnerships. [This is why] we’re helping customers find out how 5G can fix their issues and what 5G really means to their business.”

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Cybersecurity must be a top priority

As organisations adopt cloud, 5G and other technologies to digitally transform, they must also look at ways to increase their cyber resilience. This is because of the increasing volume of cyber threats and the fact that organisations are taking a long time to discover a breach.

“The last Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that the average time taken for organisations to discover a breach is about eight months. This might be a longer today, with the rise of the remote workforce,” says Chris Novak, global director at Verizon Threat Research Advisory Center.

He adds: “Interestingly, we’re seeing more cybersecurity incidents happening in the cloud than on on-premises lately. One reason for this is that organisations don’t have the necessary resources (e.g., talents with the right knowledge) to solve that problem.”

Verizon Business is therefore helping its customers to assess their security gaps to prioritise and/or build a formal cloud security programme as they shift to the cloud and embrace hybrid work.

Moreover, the annual DBIR aims to help customers and other organisations be aware of the current and upcoming cyber threats. “Cybersecurity requires a global perspective as hackers can launch an attack from anywhere and move data to and from anywhere in the world. [Given our global footprint,] we have visibility into internet traffic worldwide so we can see how many organisations are hit by a specific attack [in a particular region. This can help warn others that they might face the same threat soon],” says Novak.

He concluded by sharing that despite the availability of security tools, they mostly help automate threat/attack detection. “Ultimately, it’s the people who drive the security programmes.”

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