Embracing the Internet in Thailand 4.0

Each of the 23.9 million active Internet users in Thailand spends on average five and a half hours per day accessing the Internet on a personal computer or tablet and just over four hours per day from a mobile phone.
To address the country’s increasing demand for Internet connections, the government has launched initiatives over the years to boost the infrastructure. In mid-2016, the government established the Ministry of Digital Economy and Society to drive the country’s 20-year “digital economy” plan. 
It has announced that it aims to deploy broadband to all villages as well as double the nation’s bandwidth to meet the demands of growing economic activities.
 With steadily improving connectivity, the strong demand for digital content and high mobile usage, the Internet presents great potential for businesses to move online and flourish. However, moving online also means a heavier reliance on delivering content and data through the Internet to end-users, and businesses need to overcome new challenges that come with providing a fast, secure and seamless experience to their customers. Here are three tips on how to stand out from other businesses riding the online wave.
Highly distributed architecture – empower innovation. Today’s digital users expect highly available and rapid access to content and information, which puts the onus on businesses to provide Web applications that are able to load quickly and reliably, irrespective of device or location. With 47 per cent of online shoppers expecting websites to load in two seconds, speed and reliability matter before abandonment creeps in. 
Traditional ways of providing speed and reliability are fading and, more interesting, even modern cloud-based delivery platforms are hindered by their concentrated architecture, struggling to meet growing user expectations. 
Addressing such challenges with a highly distributed, highly intelligent cloud-based delivery platform empowers businesses to innovate their brands – knowing that their online presence will be always available, scalable and able to perform under all circumstances. 
Deliver the best experience – adapt to the situation. A picture is worth a thousand words, and more important, it is worth better customer engagement. 
Sixty-three per cent of shoppers on mobile and tablet devices say product images rank first in importance over any other content on the page. Furthermore, articles with relevant images will typically receive 94 per cent more views than those without.
This makes high-quality imagery extremely effective in engaging users online and businesses are increasingly leveraging image content for visually immersive Web experiences to increase the chances that they will consume more content or make a purchase.
This all sounds great, but providing such high-quality experiences to increasingly impatient users across myriad device platforms and varying Internet connectivity conditions is hard – particularly without having to sacrifice quality or speed. 
If you’re making money online and looking to save money online – perhaps doing both and beyond – being able to provide a seamless multi-platform experience with reduced time to market, along with a better user experience, will put businesses in a more advantageous position to drive better conversion rates. 
Cyber resilience – build a trusted brand. The online threat landscape is constantly evolving and attack methods are consistently growing in size, frequency and sophistication.
Attacks can be against any target for any reason from anywhere – from simply taking down a website for fun to state-sponsored hacking, often resulting in downtime, a data breach or defacement that ultimately affects reputations and tests the limits of public trust. 
Last year saw an estimated cost of US$400 billion (Bt14.4 trillion) to businesses caused by cyber-attacks, and the World Economic Forum has highlighted that a significant portion of cyber-crime goes undetected. Alarmingly, businesses reported even crude distributed-denial-of-service attacks cost them an average of $1.5 million annually.
Building and maintaining cyber-resilience is not easy in such a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Multi-layered defence with expert-led proactive approaches is just table stakes. Other techniques and considerations should be, but not limited to, the following. 
lRegular maintenance of Web-application defence configurations and network systems. 
lTimely intelligent monitoring that provides early detection and faster threat mitigation to minimise the impact of an attack. 
lAround-the-clock security expertise that is able to respond and mitigate in real time.

RICHARD CLEMENT is Thailand country manager of Akamai Technologies.