Q2 saw businesses wondering how long the pandemic would last, and whether they should invest in a new normal, act as if things were normal, or wait it out.
April 2020
- Apple and Google announce that they will develop technology that enables contact tracing, first through APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities, and then to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform.
- Google Cloud makes its premium videoconferencing solution Google Meet free as people begin working from home.
Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) announces that Singtel Mobile Singapore and the Joint-Venture Consortium (JVCo) formed by StarHub Mobile and M1 have won its 5G Call for Proposal (CFP). Both companies will be allocated 100 MHz of 3.5 GHz radio frequency spectrum each to deploy 5G networks nationwide. SingTel, StarHub and M1 will also be assigned 800 MHz of mmWave spectrum each to deploy localised high-capacity 5G hotspots. JVCo will own key parts of the 5G network that will be leased to M1 and StarHub, which will continue to operate separately.
- Singapore Internet service provider (ISP) ViewQwest launches Wi-Fi 6 router and mesh router fibre broadband plans as it sets to make Wi-Fi 6 the standard wireless network in homes.
Vignesa Moorthy, CEO of ViewQwest said at the time of the launch, “Although more devices such as smartphones and laptops are adopting Wi-Fi 6, many homes are still unable to enjoy the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 as they are hesitant to upgrade their Wi-Fi due to the premium cost of Wi-Fi 6 routers. We want to introduce Wi-Fi 6 to more homes to ensure that families can tap on the latest Wi-Fi technology and enjoy strong, fast and consistent Internet within their accommodation.”
May 2020
- Dell Technologies announces Dell EMC PowerStore, a lineup of midrange storage arrays that are designed for six-nines (99.9999%) availability1 and which feature always-on deduplication, compression and a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction2.
- Twenty-four service providers from around the world now offer a combined total of 77 certified MEF 3.0 SD-WAN and Carrier Ethernet (CE) services. As of December 2020, the MEF Services Registry includes Maxis, PCCW Global, PLDT, Tata Communications and Telstra among others.
- Microsoft has built a supercomputer to train extremely large artificial intelligence models in collaboration with and exclusively for OpenAI. It represents a key milestone in a partnership announced in 2019 to jointly create new supercomputing technologies in Azure. OpenAI's is an AI research and deployment company whose mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence - autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work - benefits humanity.
- NVIDIA introduces the NVIDIA A100 GPU. The GPU offers the company’s largest leap in performance to date within its eight generations of GPUs. The NVIDIA DGX A100 system, also announced at the same time, features eight NVIDIA A100 GPUs interconnected with NVIDIA NVLink. By July 2020, NVIDIA A100 GPUs and DGX SuperPOD systems were benchmarked as the world’s fastest commercially-available products for AI training.
- Iran's Ports and Maritime Organization (PMO) discusses a cyberattack that took place on its systems, which damaged some private operating systems according to the Iranian Labour News Agency. This is followed in October by media reports of cyberattacks on two Iranian institutions, one of which was said to be the PMO.
"As organisations continue to diversify and transform their cyber supply chain to meet evolving customer demands and strengthen organisational resilience to disruption, they are also expanding their digital attack surface and elevating their cyber risks exposure. Any weak link in an organisation’s increasingly complex and vast network of partners, vendors and suppliers can be exploited and used as a point of entry by threat actors.
"What is equally worrying is that Ensign performed cyberthreat research on a group of companies across a range of sectors earlier this year, and we found that many were unaware of leaked third-party user credentials related to their corporate accounts...When we investigated the threat exposure of their key suppliers in the cyber supply chain, we found that there was a lack of enforcement and visibility of risks between the organisation and their suppliers.
"Organisations should recognise that their suppliers and service providers contribute to their cyber risk exposure. They can explore maintaining an inventory of key suppliers and service providers which key business activities depend on in the cyber supply chain, and then establish an assessment and enforcement regime on them to maintain an acceptable risk position."
- Xiang Zheng Teo, Head of Consulting, Ensign InfoSecurity.
June 2020
- Alibaba reports strong recovery post-COVID, with the total value of orders for imported products settled through Alipay on Tmall Global jumping 43% year-on-year during its 6.18 Mid-Year Shopping Festival. Small and medium-sized businesses on Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace also received a billion more orders during this year’s campaign year-over-year, the company said. Alibaba's Cainiao Smart Logistics Network said separately that it would expand its global logistics network and slash delivery times over the next three years in line with its goal to fulfill deliveries within 24 hours in China, and 72 hours globally.
- Alibaba Cloud commits to hiring 5,000 technology staff globally over the next 10 months.
- AMD announced it had exceeded its moonshot 25x20 goal set in 2014 to improve the energy efficiency of its mobile processors 25 times by 2020.
- Apple said it would transition the Mac from Intel chips to its custom silicon over two years. Said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO at the time: “With its powerful features and industry-leading performance, Apple silicon will make the Mac stronger and more capable than ever. I’ve never been more excited about the future of the Mac.”
- The company also announced macOS Big Sur, said to be its biggest update in more than a decade. Big Sur will enable the transition to Apple silicon. New versions of the operating system will continue to support Intel-based Macs, Apple said.
- The Asia Direct Cable (ADC) Consortium announces it is building a high-performance submarine cable connecting China (Hong Kong and Guangdong Province), Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The 9,400-km cable is expected to be completed by Q422. ADC includes CAT Telecom, China Telecom, China Unicom, PLDT, Singtel, SoftBank, Tata Communications and Viettel.
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| Source: Tata Communications. Srinivasan. |
"In this new digital world, submarine cables will be at the heart of everything we do as it enables the high-capacity transmission of data across different regions. This provides not only the cross-border movement of data but also skills, allowing the distributed workforce to collaborate, communicate and work seamlessly with others regardless of their geographical locations.
"A milestone in this area in 2020 is the building of the high-performance submarine cable that will connect China, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam by the Asia Direct Cable (ADC) Consortium, of which we are a member. This cable will serve as the connectivity backbone for these markets, catering to the rise in data traffic in the new normal."
- Srinivasan CR, Chief Digital Officer, Tata Communications.
- Dell Technologies launches Dell EMC PowerScale storage systems, which bring together the best in Dell EMC server hardware and storage software to help customers manage file and object data in core data centres, edge locations and the public cloud. The PowerScale family delivers up to 15.8 million input-output operations per second (IOPS) per cluster3. Enhanced inline data reduction makes the platform up to six times more efficient4.
- Honda announces on Twitter that some functions are not available. The media reports that operations around the world, including in India, Japan and Turkey, are affected. Malwarebytes suggests that the SNAKE ransomware was behind the attack.
"Both industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and operational technology (OT) belong to the category of cyber-physical systems (CPS) as they have infrastructure that straddles between the physical and digital world. Any successful cyberattack against IIoT and OT systems can result in grave, real-world consequences, including the loss of lives, safety failures, service disruptions and production downtime.
Unfortunately, the cyber risks that these systems are exposed continues to grow as more Internet of Things (IoT) devices become connected in the OT systems, greatly expanding the digital attack surface that threat actors can exploit to infiltrate critical infrastructures. At the same time, many OT systems are traditionally designed to focus on safety and reliability, with very little consideration on security by design. Consequently, the confluence of OT and IT systems are introducing a plethora of vulnerabilities to OT/IoT infrastructure and exposing them to an unprecedented level of cyber risk.
Evidently, organisations will need to adopt new cybersecurity approaches in order to mitigate the IIoT and OT risks and strengthen their security posture. Formulating a long-term, effective strategy would entail a fundamental mindset set to embrace Zero Trust for IIoT and OT, expanding this approach beyond users to include non-user devices."
- Chee Hoe Lee, Director, OT & IoT, Ensign InfoSecurity.
OpenAI releases, in private beta, a GPT-3-based API for accessing new artificial intelligence (AI) models that it has developed.
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| Source: Appier. Dr Sun. |
"In terms of general breakthroughs this year, probably the most significant has been in natural language processing (NLP) with the advancement of large-scale generative models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3). This technology is a language prediction model that is much better at modelling true human language than its predecessors.
"I expect this breakthrough to ignite development in conversational AI due to a confluence of three main factors: The technology was already advancing toward lighter weight but better performing models; superhuman-level speech recognition services have collected a very large corpus of natural conversational data for researchers to work with; and there has been strong need for things like better and faster online customer service and customer engagement due to COVID-19.
"While it has a way to go, it does appear to be a very powerful model for generating language designed to solve tasks specified by the task description or a few question-answer pairs. This means that while the technology is not able to generate completely convincing creative writing, for example, it does mean that we should see improvements in automated customer service and customer engagement across multiple languages."
- Dr Min Sun, Chief AI Scientist, Appier.
- Eight service providers are on track to be production-ready by end-June to deploy MEF 3.0 LSO Sonata APIs to automate ordering of MEF 3.0 Carrier Ethernet Access E-Line services. The companies include Bahrain's Infonas, HGC Global Communications and PCCW Global, both based in Hong Kong, as well as Sparkle of Italy - which has a presence in the Middle East and Asia. LSO stands for lifecycle service orchestration.
5G in 2020
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| Source: Dell Technologies. Goh. |
"By allowing organisations to extend the cloud to the mobile edge, it is enabling greater levels of efficiency, including significantly faster wireless connectivity and reduced network latency. This is paving the way for the development of applications and solutions not yet thought of. As we prepare for a future driven by data, we can expect organisations to make more investments in emerging technologies to catalyse 5G development and adoption."
- Eric Goh, VP & MD, Singapore, Dell Technologies.
*Entries are listed in alphabetical order within the month. These milestones are not meant to be exhaustive and are TechTrade Asia's curated interpretation of the year's technology highlights.
1 IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2019Q4, March 12, 2020 – Vendor Revenue.
2 Based on the Dell Technologies specification for Dell EMC PowerStore, April 2020. Actual system availability may vary.
3 Based on Dell Technologies analysis, May 2020. Actual results will vary.
4 Performance varies by cluster. Workload dependent. Based on Dell Technologies analysis, May 2020. Actual results will vary.
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