Aruba commissioned study shows two in three Malaysia manufacturers prioritise optimising operational efficiency

Aruba, one of the world’s foremost companies in edge-to cloud networking solutions recently announced the findings of a recently commissioned study dubbed High-Tech Manufacturing Begins with High-Performance Networking and Security Solutions that was conducted in the APAC region.

The study was conducted in Q1 of 2022 among 270 business and IT decision-makers in high-tech manufacturers in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and India. 

“The turbulence in manufacturing and the supply chain seen in the last two years have underscored the need for manufacturers to accelerate their transition from mass production and economies of scale to prioritising market and customer responsiveness,” said Mark Verbloot, Senior Director, Product, Solutions and Systems Engineering, Asia Pacific Region at Aruba. “We embarked on this study to shed light on the challenges that high-tech manufacturers are facing to better understand their priorities amidst constant unpredictability of market forces.“

“In response to the issues they face, high-tech manufacturers are increasingly aligning their technology investments to secure and optimise operations while addressing data privacy and security concerns even as they build greater resilience in the long-term.” added Mark.

Aruba – High-Tech Manufacturing Begins with High-Performance Networking and Security Solutions Key Findings for Malaysia

Among the results of the study, especially in regards to Malaysia was the consensus that edge solutions, IoT applications and networks were absolutely critical to driving innovation for seven in 10 Malaysia respondents. Half of them indicated that they had optimised their manufacturing processes with robots and other automated processes. Another seven in 10 respondents also shared that they were already using or cloud-managed networking and security solutions to offer better scalability and flexibility for their operations.

Even with the looming challenges of a turbulent economy, high-tech manufacturers are increasingly realising the long-term benefits of aligning their technology investments to optimise operations and offer greater cost efficiencies while also ensuring security and data privacy. 

Further findings from the High-Tech Manufacturing Begins with High-Performance Networking and Security Solutions study indicated that seven in 10 respondents place equal importance in enabling consistent remote monitoring and network operation along with modern, resilient operations.

The study also indicated that more than 50% of Malaysian decision makers placed data privacy and security challenges in their top 5 challenges in implementing networking solutions. Among the top five challenges faced by Malaysian outfits wass the lack of cybersecurity features in legacy IoT devices. 

To say that data is the lifeblood of businesses today is an understatement and the collection, transmission and utilisation of data is becoming crucial to scale operations. The increasing connectivity and digitalisation of processes and operations in the modern digital age also raises new challenges in regards to privacy and security concerns and more than half of Malaysian decision makers are realising this, ranking data privacy and security concerns in their top five challenges when implementing networking solutions.

To tackle these concerns, more than half of the respondents in the study are planning to explore cloud-managed networking while one-third are looking at SD-WAN while one in three are looking at Zero Trust Edge solutions. Two in three manufacturers said that identity-based traffic segmentation helps them achieve their business objectives.

“As we emerge from the pandemic, there is a need for the manufacturing industry to develop greater agility and flexibility in their operations. Innovation is at the heart of decision-makers’ priorities but manufacturing leaders need to act now by leveraging high-performance network and security solutions to help the smart manufacturing industry scale effectively,” said Mark. To read the study in detail, you can check it out here at https://connect.arubanetworks.com/manufacturing