Name: The AIOps Advantage: Smarter and Resilient IT Operations in ASEAN
Uploaded: 2026-03-12T03:58:04.705Z
Duration: 42 min 12 s
Description: The AIOps Advantage: Smarter and Resilient IT Operations in ASEAN

Transcript for "The AIOps Advantage: Smarter and Resilient IT Operations in ASEAN": Hi everyone, welcome to today's webinar, the AIOps Advantage, Smarter and Resilient IT Operations in ASEAN. Across ASEAN, organizations are navigating increasingly complex IT environments, including hybrid infrastructures, multi cloud deployments, distributed teams, and rising performance expectations. At the same time, IT leaders are under pressure to improve resilience, reduce downtime, and achieve more with limited resources. That is where AIOps comes in. Today's session will explore how AIOps is helping organizations in ASEAN move from reactive IT management to smarter, predictive, and more resilient operations. Before we begin, just a quick note. If you have questions during this session, please drop them into the Q and A panel. If you need a direct follow-up from our representative, feel free to click on a Book a Demo button on the top right corner of the menu bar. Now, it is my pleasure to introduce Doctor. Chris Marshall, VP, IDC Asia Pacific, to share key insights on how AIOps is transforming IT operations across ASEAN. Chris, over to you. Welcome to the SolarWinds session on building operational resilience in the AI era. My name is Chris Marshall and I've had a long career in operations and risk management as a practitioner at companies like UBS, but also as a consultant in companies like KPMG and IBM. For the last eight years or so, I've been leading IDC's research in this area in Asia Pacific. Now at IDC, we survey companies across the world about their strategic and technical priorities. And what they're telling us here in ASEAN is that their strategic priorities in 2026 are, I quote, innovation, efficiency and intelligence. And this is felt perhaps most keenly in the IT department itself, which is increasingly charged with managing not just traditional IT operations, but broader operations within the business and at the same time forced to really spearhead many AI initiatives across the enterprise. CIOs, accordingly, are faced with specific priorities such as improved operational efficiency, sustainability, customer experience, and even things like risk management. Now all these priorities are very much fueled by the current paranoia almost about geopolitics and artificial intelligence. In response, forward looking CIOs and COOs are looking to use AI to power IT and operations and use AI to automate IT processes and balance their growth, business growth, with resiliency. While Agenic AI is being used, or hopefully used, to autonomously detect, predict, and remedy any problems in near real time. While three quarters of IT spending is still very much associated with keeping the lights on here in ASEAN, There is a shift, I think, towards proactive IT ops with predictive incident prevention and real time observability. And AI is already seen as delivering value in a number of important operational domains. We predict that this is set to continue apace and in just two years we expect that nearly half of Asian enterprises will have automated many of their manual workflows with AI agents. And as agents become ubiquitous, as they probably will, hybrid cloud will become a complex. And by 2030, just a few years away, a third of all day two IT ops tasks in Asia Pacific are likely to be handled by agents with humans in the loop, but not necessarily driving the process. But unlike generative AI, which has been all the rage over the last couple of years, GenDec AI will take more time to deploy. There are several reasons for this. Existing operational data silos really make it difficult to integrate across the enterprise. It's difficult to understand what the data you're using, network data, the observability of that data. The skill shortages are especially important in certain areas like security. A complexity that we're only now coming to deal with of hybrid ops compounded with, in many cases, fragmented governance and legacy infrastructure. That makes the whole thing much more difficult. At the same time, there's also increasing regulatory pressures forcing companies across every industry to improve the resilience of their operations and IT. This is very much developing across multiple sectors and anchored in, often, national data protection laws, particularly here in ASEAN. It's also driven by cybersecurity regimes and emerging AI guidelines across the world and across the region. Cross industry rules tend to focus on personal data protection, breach notification and cross border data transfers, while sectorial regimes particularly for government, health care, energy transport, telco and the like, are really adding requirements around incident reporting, reporting on cyber controls, service continuity, and supply chain risk management. Many core data protection and cyber laws have been enforced since the 2010s, but many are starting to be refreshed and perhaps more importantly expanded with stricter enforcement and broader operator coverage and new expectations for what AI governance and third party supply chain resilience actually means in practice. In financial services in particular, different countries within the ASEAN market have their own approach, but all emphasize operational resilience, cyber risk, third party vendor risk and business continuity. Although many countries try very hard to align with international standards, notably the Basel standards on operational resilience or the European Union's DORA, the Digital Operational Resilience Act, the fact remains that the landscape here in Asia is very much fragmented and this means even more work particularly for financial service institutions that are operating across the region and need to comply with each of these different areas. And this no doubt will necessitate a sort of a hub and spoke model in many cases to actually adapting to these various and disparate regulations they have to deal with. Now traditionally, the top areas of concern in this space have been things like data privacy. But this has all changed since last year when we face something very new with unilateral actions coming out of The US. The most obvious of which has got to be the US Cloud Act, which has opened the door for US authorities to access, potentially at least, data held overseas. Now, this has obviously driven a lot of companies to worry about what this means from a sovereign data, sovereign cloud and sovereign AI perspective. They realize that data, cloud and AI are really quite fundamental to success of their businesses and even the success of the entire economy. So obviously there's a real push back here. I think you've got to be wary of simplistic ideas that it only matters where the data is stored for example. I mean in practice it's a bit more complicated than that. For example, when we do analyses of what people are telling us, we know for example that people are concerned about where the controls for the data reside, what the potential use of the data is going to be in particular jurisdictions and the ability to essentially safeguard the flow of data from one jurisdiction to another. There's also government involvement in this discussion as well, which I think is only going to get more important as people realize that AI is going be a fundamental driver economic and national success. So it's no surprise that nearly 68% of Southeast Asian organizations tell us that digital sovereignty is really important due to these economic and geopolitical events. Now, it was only a couple of years ago that in response to this, ASEAN launched the DIFA framework back in 2023. And the idea was to really facilitate, regional integration and coordination, particularly in digital data and the digital economy more broadly. The idea was that by integrating and harmonizing digital regulations, governments and companies within the ASEAN region would be able to enhance interoperability and support data movement across the region. Now this is certainly a good thing to aim for, but I think the reality is still somewhat limited. And most firms I think have accepted that complete sovereignty, whether it's data or processes or controls, is probably unrealistic. Instead, companies, no matter where they are, are going to have to make tradeoffs. But at the same time, they need to stay committed to interoperability standards, because these are what allow you to flexibly respond to any operational issues as they emerge. This inevitably will be done at three distinct levels. At the level of data, first of all, protection, data at rest, in motion and use, data security for example and perhaps applying perhaps the most stringent requirements in terms of sovereign controls and compliance for data that's going across the region. So there's sort of a race to the top if you like in terms of digital data sovereignty. There's also technical sovereignty level which I think is underestimated in many organizations. Is really understanding the complete supply chain of the data and where it comes from and making sure that the processes that support that data movement are actually documented and managed explicitly. Of course this is where a lot of the automation and resilience capabilities really come to the fore. It's also where network security becomes an important theme. There's also the decisioning part, the operational sovereignty if you will. Who has control? Who is authorized to manage the data and the operations across different parts of the region? It's not simply a data issue. This is very much about transparency, accountability and auditability across the operational stack and the ability to actually formally understand where that operational process is going and how it's being used in practice. A good example of sovereignty concerns really is reflected in the move to hybrid and multi cloud platforms, with 58% of Asia Pacific organizations running what I would consider to be true hybrid environments. Now this shift from cloud first to what we call sort of a cloud smart approach that tries to balance innovation, compliance and sovereignty. And it does so, as we've mentioned, by standardizing across environments all the way from edge to cloud and using AI to remediate issues as efficiently as possible. The great thing of course about having hybrid cloud or even multi cloud to some extent is that you're able under one roof to unify your management across a host of different national platforms. You're able to support data and digital sovereignty across different parts of the stack. At the same time, you can support resilience and continuity with business assurance and fall over capabilities. Cost is inevitably easier to optimize if you can adapt to the changing workloads, basically taking advantage of your corridors of data movement within the larger, cloud platform. You can actually support economies of scale for AI and this is really a big driver for AI success and Agenetic AI success in particular because that's where your ability to deploy self healing systems and autonomous kind of operations really comes from. And you know, you can do this potentially at the cloud, but you can also do it at the edge and we argue that that's going be a big theme in many manufacturing organizations for example, as more and more inference goes to the edge to actually be done locally. So we see that cloud repatriation to a hybrid environment is only going to increase, at least in the near term, as geopolitics with sovereign AI, but also equally important I think, autonomous AI and cost optimization issues become important. So what does the future of operations look like? A few pointers here. Humans inevitably, I think, will be on the loop for the most part rather than in the loop. Humans will no longer be the guardians of knowledge and data and knowledge about operations and instead that knowledge will be institutionalized in the organization and used dynamically as needed. We almost certainly in many of our companies will not have one or two agents, but rather tens or even hundreds or more, all orchestrated and working together in often quite ad hoc ways to adapt to new problems and new functions. This future, of course, depends on data. Operational and IT data are very much the backbone of digital transformation. And getting access to this data is the role of the observability platform, which has got to be integrated across traditional operational data silos, which have historically really been major bugbears to actually success in deploying enterprise analytics on operational data. By doing this, we can support standardized and increasingly automated responses and faster remediation through intelligent correlation and response. So where are we in with agentic AI deployment in Asia Pacific? Perhaps more than any other function, ITOps has been the aggressive adopter of AgenTik AI, with over 40% already claiming to deploy AI agents in the region. The top use case seems to be IT recovery and compliance, but IT ops and SecOps are close behind. The top individual application really involves things like intelligent monitoring agents that predict resource bottlenecks and automatically scale infrastructures and optimize workload across multi cloud environments in near real time. So for companies thinking still about making a commitment to operational resilience and automated ops, a few things to consider. Now more than ever, strategic business leaders need to build resilient operations. They must adopt AI driven AI Ops platforms with built in governance and region specific compliance. They must prioritize explainable automation to maintain trust with operators and management. At the same time, they need to invest in the people that remain, who become more essential, not less so. Also, the move to autonomous intelligence requires enterprise observability of data to ensure that enterprises learn particularly in the most critical areas like root cause analysis. So, what's IDC's advice for moving forward with operational resilience in a world of AI? I think it sort of boils down to four things: Prioritize, first of all, deep integration of Agentic AI into your business workflows, whether it's ITSM, security, whether it's observability. Make sure that you are on the train to implement AgenTik AI. The second thing I'd emphasize is is think about the guardrails. Policy as code, audit trails, human in the loop control, sandbox testing, drift management, model management. All of these are capabilities that really ensure that the trust of the end users, operators, IT executives, IT managers, to trust the tools that are being deployed and actually effectively doing the job as advertised. The third thing I would emphasize is the need to invest in platform engineering, agent design and validation, and of course observability analytics. We've got to be able to manage and measure exactly what these agents are doing in order to justify their value and to eventually trust them. The fourth point I'd like to add is, it really is important that given the complexity of AI platforms and particularly agentic platforms, it's necessary to select vendors with transparent and interoperable agentic models. They also should have compliance certifications and a robust set of bill of materials capabilities to manage and monitor the success of your agentic deployments. Thank you so much for your attention today. Thank you, Chris, for those valuable insights. AIOps is no longer just a future concept. It is becoming a critical capability for organizations looking to modernize operations, reduce complexity, and strengthen resilience. To further expand on these ideas, we will now move into our next segment titled In Conversation, the AIOps Advantage. We will dive deeper into practical Welcome to SolarWinds AIOps webinar. We have the great pleasure of inviting Chris from IDC and our Philippine customers Sesenti from Converge ICT joining us for today's session. Thank you guys for joining us so the very first question is to Chris so operational resilience has been a hot buzzword over the past few years come to 2026 in fact it has evolved from best practice to a legal mandate in some countries across APAC yet we are still seeing a lot of resiliency gap but it still persists as nearly half of the IT leaders that we spoke to still reports unexpected outages despite their ratings on resilience are very high. So Chris, where does IDC see the disconnect from a perceived resilience versus the actual ability to recover? Do you think the shift from passive monitoring versus to ottoman's possibility close the gap. I think you're quite right. I mean, one of the struggles that we have is that we obviously as a survey organization, we ask a lot of companies about how resilient they are. And while a lot of companies may appear very compliant when it comes to their reports, they often, at the same time, are structurally very fragile in practice. And that's why you see such a lot of major failures in practice. So the major fault lines that consistently come up are usually not point solutions or individual applications of particular, but specific domains, but rather across hybrid complexity, for example, or human error or third party chains that support errors or end up leading to errors. So for that reason, the perception does really vary a little bit from the reality. And we see that in the sort of huge stacks of control libraries that people talk about when they report how resilient they are. And yet these don't seem to align very well with the real outage performance in those particular organizations. I mean, one in five executives really feel, I think, truly prepared for the big incidents that actually get the attention of obviously the board, their customers and the regulators. And the regulators know this and they're really starting to mandate firms to really maintain critical operations within specific tolerances. And they still kind of get away from this idea of resilience as documents or reports or scorecards and instead think about go beyond component success or health and towards end to end service resilience, if you want to call it that. And I think that's one of the areas that SolarWinds is really excelling in. I think actually a great story to the market right now is that it's going beyond this individual system health and performance, but rather going to sort of end to end services that span multiple systems, often across hybrid cloud. And this is really the focus of new resilience regimes, particularly international services or other regulated industries. So human error, mishandled changes, misunderstood dependencies, if you like, rather than a lack of point metrics is really what's driving the need for autonomous resilience moving forward. Thanks, Chris. So over to you Sesanti, you know our audience here may not be very familiar with your organisations perhaps you want to share what does your company do and what's on the top of your mind in terms of IT priority? Converge ICT Solutions is the leading fibre broadband technology solutions provider in The Philippines. While we are the second in terms of the biggest fibre broadband, we are the first in terms of fastest connectivity, experience, connectivity, consistency. Converge ICT is not just a telecom or a connectivity provider. We also offer data center services and managed service ICT solutions across the enterprises in The Philippines. We are also investing in multi edge data centers trying to localize ICT capabilities in the enterprise market government in The Philippines. So, this in mind, we have also invested in our own converged cloud services so that the enterprise market in the country can easily spin off their own instances of their infrastructure as a service, maybe firewall as a service or even SaaS platforms that they need to automate immediately for their own business operations. Thanks, Sir Santi. So, now in the area of resilience which we kind of spoke earlier, what will be your immediate challenge and focal area? I guess the answer to that would be zero touch operations. It's very important for our customers that we get to be proactive about their concerns, if not very quick to resolve the incident. And to be able to do that, we should be able to have a lot of automation in our systems and human intervention might prolong the process. That's why we've put agentic AIs to be able to do this. Normally, there's a network issue, what the engineer would do is to check the interfaces, try to reboot the connectivity, and then if it's not, they create a ticket and then they dispatch the engineer and resolve the problem. That's fully automated now. Of course, with the alarm compression, understanding what the root cause is, it will automatically try to self configure itself to be able to resolve the issue. If not, it will already create its own ticket by itself. So, something that we have put in our operations. And, one of the partners that enables us to do this SolarWinds. They have a unified observability platform that handles unknown unknowns by automatically monitoring all software, infrastructure and database metrics in real time. Thanks, Sesanti, thanks for that. Now that's exactly why we move beyond simple monitoring like what Chris has mentioned. In SolarWinds, we provide a unified possibility platform that handles the unknown be it your software, your applications, your infrastructure, database. We are capturing all these matrices in real time. It's all about creating a single source of truth for both your engineers, your regulator, whoever that you are presenting it to. Now let's do a bit of deep dive into ASEAN. Now within ASEAN, presents a very unique challenge. Now if you guys can recall we have this ASEAN digital master plan 2030 while it pushes for regional integrations but individual countries are still very much into their own digital sovereignty you know data residency requirement now how can regional leads then manage infrastructure across the different border without violating these strict local mandates so over to you Chris do you have any thought about this? Yeah, I think one of the things that's happened with Sovereign AI is that people have started to focus on understanding pathways, if you like, for compliance. And I think especially, say between Singapore and JB, there's this sense that different regions or sub regions are actually working more closely together. And I think some of the ASEAN frameworks that are now in place are starting to help make that happen. And I think it's that that is really the opportunity for being able to understand sovereign data, especially in this region, because it's exactly that is going to be the focus of sovereign AI requirements and data privacy requirements moving forward. Great, thanks for that. So, Sesanti, in your industry, do you see a data sovereignty as a major concern or will it be part of a consideration in your technology landscape? Absolutely, yes. The considerations for that for localization and data sovereignty one, it improves the latency with AI and more high workload applications are coming in, we need high performance in the network. And localization is a clear answer to that. Second, it involves national security, the services especially related to healthcare information, financial service information. The third one would be cost efficiency. It's very expensive to keep on investing in international submarine cables wherein you always move the traffic from one country to another and especially when you're running AI, want to keep everything high performing and also cost efficient and I think localization is the clear answer to that the greatest opportunity. Thanks Scenti, so we solved this by offering our SolarWinds possibility in both SaaS and self hosted versions. Now this allow our ASEAN customers to keep sensitive data within their local border, so meeting the local sovereignty laws while still leveraging the same advanced AI powered insights across their entire regional landscape. Now let's move on you know to go into a more industry deep dive topic. Now we've been seeing a lot of agenic AI you know talks recently and this is this is really much on the critical infrastructure so Chris maybe to you how does IDC see their role in automating complex tasks for example like risk quantification predictive maintenance how do you see they play in such an environment well it's already the case in many areas particularly heavily regulated industries like financial services, Agenic ANI is operating as a sort of a continuously running digital operator sort of thing in the background that can take, that can reason, that can plan and actually take actions based on whatever the requirements of those particular industries, those particular domains. I mean, risk, example, is classic case in point. Specialized agents are already in financial services that are ingesting market and credit and liquidity data to actually come up with new estimates of the exposure and then perhaps suggesting limit changes or changing hedges or whatever it happens to be. It's all this is done in near real time. But in financial crime and conduct, another huge area in financial services, agents already doing the heavy lifting in terms of looking at network analyses or gathering KYC data and stuff like that, helping basically understand suspicious patterns and the massive data that they're receiving all the time. And this is done not to replace people, but rather to allow human investigators to focus on the most important aspects of escalations, rather than doing the basic triage, which tends to be where frankly most of the operational work is. In other industries like mining or airports, Agenic AI is continuously monitoring the mass of sensor data and telemetry data and looking for early stage anomalies and trying to figure out things like how much remaining useful life is than a particular system or tool or application. And perhaps automatically raising work exceptions or work orders to reschedule maintenance or windows or to prevent potential unplanned outages. We're just at the early stages of this. And I think multiple agent systems are often linked to simulation or digital twins, are actually starting to coordinate across, for example, logistics firms, where they look at fleets of trucks or facilities and then they reroute trucks or change parameters or change the different dates or different assets or whatever. All the idea here is to balance sort of often safety or efficiency or throughput. All of these are kind of requirements that the AI agents are trying to optimize. But I think it's worth pointing out that these high stakes areas, there's always a strong human in the loop story here. And that means often strong policy guardrails. So inevitably, I don't think AI agents are going to be allowed to do all the work simply because the consequences of getting it wrong and not being trusted are just too big. Humans will remain and retain authority over safety critical and regulatory decisions. And again, I think hopefully that should reinforce digital resilience in precisely those areas that are most difficult for humans to manage when you're bombarded by a sea of alerts and you've got to respond in near real time. Yeah, I concur with you. That's a great insight, Priest. Now over to Sir Santi, so what's your point of view regarding the genetic AI played in such mission critical infrastructure environment? Well, as what I've mentioned earlier, that's part of our mantra in the operational team in Converge. Formerly, when we started our journey and our transformation, it's really the we have a big block team, right? We think at different monitors or different kinds of platforms to understand the network monitoring systems and the network health and condition. Run millions of equipment, it will involve hundreds of millions of alarms. From the CPU utilization, the power, optical power, the temperature, and a lot more. And, it's definitely one of the key tier steps to do is to automate and employ AI agents on your operations and your processes. And this is something that we have today and SolarWinds enables us to do it as well. And it's also one of the ICT services that we want to share to the enterprise market in The Philippines. So in these sectors, downtimes just isn't lost revenue you know it's a safety risk. Our AI powered anomaly detections and dynamic pressures help to fill out 90% of the noise so that your team can just focus on the 10% of alerts that really matters for this reason SolarWinds announced our own AI agent and expanded AI capability in order to advance autonomous operation resiliency what that means to you is that it enables you to resolve incidents faster use natural language avoiding all the jargons and last but not least is simplify possibility management so the Solawi AI agent is not is more than just a feature it's a foundation of a new way of working Now to wrap up our session, we have been talking a lot about autonomous operation resiliency. Now in order to do that, it requires a roadmap of governance, unified technology and upskill people so Chris if you are to give one piece of advice you know to a CTO that's looking into this area what kind of advice would you be giving to him? I think one thing that really is key is we've got to get away from operational resilience is simply resilience of the various components of the entire system. The point here is that systemic risk is really the biggest fear. So we've got to start thinking about operational resilience as the primary outcome, not so the compliance requirement. I mean at the moment I think that's not the case in most organizations. We've got to, instead of thinking about this system, this tool, this application, this particular component, we've got to think about how all these pieces fit into a critical set of business services and make them our focus and understand how that process as a whole is doing and how that is supported by the various potential component failures. And you can only do that if you've got the sort of unified observability and event fabric that allows you to bring these pieces together. So you can see what resilience really means from an end to end perspective. And that's going to be the thing that gets to overcome these sort of systemic problems that have been the bane of resilience since year dot. And that's really where I think AI is starting to make a big difference. The only way it's going to happen though is if people trust it to do the right thing. And that means you've probably got to layer in automation and agentic capabilities relatively slowly and incrementally. Often you worry about the low risk scenarios, which are perhaps less critical in some cases. You keep human beings firmly in the loop for the more high impact, the more risky kind of situations where regulators will be on your back if you get it wrong. So I think the journey to autonomous operational resilience is really a controlled progression rather than a big bang. So I think that story is really important because trust is insidious, right? In one sense, it's easy to lose and hard to get. And unless you can actually develop that trust in the human operators and your executives responsible for managing your operations, AI agents are not going to be trusted and there is going be a limit to what you can actually deploy in an autonomous fashion across your enterprises. Thanks Chris. Over to you, Sesenti. What would be your advice to your fellow industry leaders? Artificial intelligence and automations are tools to enhance efficiency and productivity, but these are still manipulated and used by humans, so we have to be certain that we are using the right tools. The promise of AI and automation can only be realised if people make it possible. Right, exactly. At Solawi, we provide that unified foundation, helping you to transit from a fragile state to an agile autonomous future. Thanks everybody. So we came to the end of our webinar, I'd like to give my sincere thanks to Chris from IDC and also Sesenti from Converge ICT joining us for today's session. So we look forward to having you in our next webinar. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Before you leave, we would appreciate if you could complete our survey form appearing on your screen. Your valuable feedback matters to us. We would like to invite you to join our largest virtual event, SolarWinds Day, your path to autonomous operational resilience, happening on April 16. In the session, you will learn how AI precision and intelligent context aware technology can cut through complexity, surface what matters most, and help teams move from reactive troubleshooting to resilient operations. Thank you again for your time and participation. Have a great day ahead.