Neville Burdan (DXC)
DXC has appointed Neville Burdan as security leader across Asia Pacific, recruiting the seasoned cyber specialist from NTT.
Effectively immediately, Singapore-based Burdan will hold responsibility for the global system integrator’s (GSI) regional security division which includes cyber defence, digital identity, secured infrastructure and security risk management capabilities. The move will see him sync up with Seelan Nayagam as president of Asia Pacific and Mark Hughes as global president of security.
“I am honoured to be selected to lead the DXC security business by two very passionate, client-centric and people-centric leaders, thank you Seelan Nayagam and Mark Hughes,” Burdan wrote.
The switch brings down the curtain on a career spanning more than 16 years at NTT, following management positions at then Datacraft and Dimension Data running Microsoft, end-user computing and security practices.
Most recently, Burdan spearheaded the strategy and implementation of NTT’s cyber security solutions in Asia Pacific, overseeing regional teams with a specific focus on consulting and managed security services within physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure environments.
“It all started with Datacraft and setting up the Microsoft business to grow and prosper in Asia Pacific,” Burdan added. “Having built the Microsoft business and moved to information worker and then cyber security in Dimension Data, the journey was never boring. Best wishes, NTT.”
Prior to joining then Datacraft in 2006, Burdan spent more than eight years at Microsoft in both New Zealand and Singapore, holding technical positions while also helping to incubate emerging server technologies regionally. This was in addition to systems engineering roles at Digital Equipment Corporation, Open Technology and Consultech Engineering among others pre-2000.
According to IDC, spending on security solutions and services increased by 14 per cent year-on-year during 2021 across Asia Pacific, triggered by accelerated digitalisation, cloud migration, security transformation and increased cyber attacks.
Services remained the largest technology group with more than 45 per cent of the market share, notably managed security services and consulting services which accounted for over 50 per cent of the security services spending. Delving deeper, security hardware represented the second largest technology group with network security -- which includes unified threat management, VPN and firewall -- continuing to dominate the segment.
“The COVID-19 pandemic will further increase the multitude of security challenges,” noted Sharad Kotagi, market analyst at IDC.
“Organisations are rethinking the resiliency strategy, including cloud adoption, digitalisation of business models and workforce. Thus, investments in digital trust programs (security, privacy, and compliance technologies) will be one of the top priorities of organisations in the region.”
As outlined by IDC, industry verticals such as banking, telecommunications, federal/central, and state/local government continue to be the highest spenders on IT security -- accounting for more than 50 per cent of the total security spending in the region.
The industries reporting the fastest growth in 2021 were state/local government (20 per cent) and utilities (15.5 per cent) – driven by COVID-led digitalisation of utility transmission and distribution networks coupled with an increased focus on data security, compliance, and governance.
“With more organisations adopting cloud-first strategy and digitally enabled business environment, their reliability on security partners to address security needs will also increase,” Kotagi outlined.
Going forward, IDC expects investment in security-related products and services to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.1 per cent and reach US$39 billion by 2025 across Asia Pacific.
