AEC Deputy Secretary-General praises Huawei for its role in cyber security in the region

ASEAN's Economic Community (AEC) Deputy Secretary-General Dr Aladdin D Rillo visited the Huawei Cyber Security Transparency Center in Brussels, Belgium on Monday.

Rillo remarked that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has to ensure a level playing field to develop a 5G ecosystem for its digital transformation.

"We are very much committed to ensuring that market players like Huawei are engaged, because these private sector players are very important in terms of the ability to build the right infrastructure and develop the ecosystem," said Aladdin D Rillo.

AEC expressed its commitment to encourage the country members in the region to accelerate their digital transformation in various industry sectors and engage with different stakeholders to improve competency in the global competition.

"We continue to encourage ASEAN's countries to strengthen the cooperation, and we also need support from private players that have proven capable of delivering reliable and leading technologies, such as Huawei, especially in building innovation-friendly ecosystem, and to answer relevant issues related to big data, data privacy and cyber-security," remarked Dr Rillo.

According to him, cyber-security plays a very critical role in digital transformation in ASEAN, particularly in accelerating the pace of digital economy in the region based on 5G, AI, and IoT.

"There has been a strong emphasis on the digitalization in ASEAN. To do that, we need to have the right infrastructure."

Aladdin D Rillo said: "We are impressed on how Huawei carried out cyber security approaches as explained during our visit to Huawei Cyber Security Transparency Center. This further convinced us why cyber security measures are needed to optimize security in the era of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 in ASEAN."

The ASEAN region is currently experiencing rapid growth of the internet, digital, social media and mobile activities with 65 percent of internet penetration with more than 400 million internet users in the region. Internet penetration in the ASEAN region is experiencing double-digit growth in most segments.

In most countries of the region the digital sector is booming and attracting a lot of interests. With the internet penetration in the region is at its highest and continuing to grow, the implementation of cyber-security is necessary.