A clear disconnect exists between sustainability practices and Digital Transformation initiatives across organisations in Malaysia.
In a report by IT infrastructures and networks monitoring experts Paessler, titled ‘Keeping Watch: Monitoring Your Path to a Sustainable IT, which aims to shed light on the current state of sustainability practices among businesses, and deep dives into drivers and barriers in deploying sustainable IT practices, revealed that balancing the ESG metrics with growth targets (73%), cost of deployment to business (53%), lack of clarity from government bodies (43%) and lack of technical know-how on planning implementation (35%) as the top barriers to adopting sustainability practices in Malaysia.
About half of the organisations in Malaysia are optimistic on the business outlook for the next three years. The report revealed businesses in Malaysia view sustainability and digital transformation in silos and not as intertwined.
Organisations are working on developing sustainability frameworks and digital transformation strategies in a piecemeal manner. As a result, their resources, whether budgets, time or skills involved, are less effective.
They also lack the capabilities and the expertise to develop a sustainability framework and work on it, clearly highlighting a disconnect between the engaged sustainability practices and their digital transformation journeys.
At the same time, organisations in Malaysia are realising the benefits of IT infrastructure monitoring, a key cog in an organization’s IT strategy to help optimise energy consumption (95%), analyse the need for IT equipment (95%), monitor environmental factors like temperature, humidity, CO2 etc. (89%), and reduce emissions (84%).
Therefore, a sustainable IT strategy backed by a comprehensive monitoring framework must be a vital part of the business operations. This will ensure sourcing material; production processes and all other components of a sustainable business can be integrated by the overarching digital transformation strategy.
Paessler Asia Pacific Regional Sales Manager Felix Berndt (pic) said: “Many businesses see sustainability and profitability as a contradiction, but when the right values are measured, it results in cost efficiency and a competitive lead. It is imperative to build a robust IT strategy, a digital transformation strategy and develop a sustainability framework which are all integrated by a comprehensive IT monitoring framework. Bridging the gap between digital transformation and sustainability to make data-based decisions can result in resource optimization and bring economic benefits for businesses.”
Not on the same page
While sustainability is one of the top 3 business priorities for the next three years, it does not even feature as one of the top 5 challenges for businesses across markets and sectors.
Instead, challenges such as increasing competition, digital transformation, driving growth (top line), improving profitability (bottom line), and talent management are seen as top five challenges by businesses.
The top three drivers for adopting sustainable frameworks are reputation (45%), following industry operations standards (36%) and adhering to Regulatory framework and compliance (24%).
The technology, telecom, and data center vertical (82%) were seen as the top vertical which already has a sustainable IT strategy in place followed by manufacturing (79%) and essential services/ public sector (66%).
While the public sector lags in this regard, 31% said that they will embark on their sustainable IT strategy journey in the next year.
Digital transformation can enable sustainability by making businesses more efficient, reducing their environmental impact, and helping them meet sustainability goals.
Engaging the right digital technologies can help monitor and optimise energy usage, reduce waste, and streamline supply chains.
The knowledge and importance of a sustainable IT strategy can be improved if backed by an effective IT monitoring backbone.
Paessler believes monitoring plays a vital part in reducing humankind’s consumption of resources. Monitoring data helps its customers save resources, from optimising their IT, OT and IoT infrastructures to reducing energy consumption or emissions – for our future and our environment.
That is why Paessler offers monitoring solutions for businesses across all industries and all sizes, from SMB to large enterprises.
Paessler works with renowned partners, and together they tackle the monitoring challenges of an ever-changing world.
Paessler’s Keeping Watch: Monitoring Your Path to a Sustainable IT report was conducted by Intuit Research from Dec 2022 to March 2023, to understand the current state of sustainability practices among businesses, and deep dive into drivers and barriers in deploying sustainability IT practices.
Key business decision makers of large businesses (with revenue of USD 50 million to over USD 1 billion) were interviewed in six countries, namely, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Opinion was gathered from senior business decision makers across three key sectors – Manufacturing, Essential Services, and Tech / Telecom / Data centers.
