The operational landscape for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is undergoing a radical transformation. Driven by accessibility and competitive necessity, these organizations are moving into a new era of technology adoption, guided by artificial intelligence (AI) and strategic cloud utilization.
A recent Forrester Opportunity Snapshot, The Future of Operations: Advancing AI-Driven Innovation and Cloud Agility for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses, commissioned by Crayon, highlights this pivotal moment.
For cybersecurity professionals, the report underscores a critical shift: our mandate is no longer just to protect a static environment, but to architect security into a fast-moving, AI-enabled operational core.
The most significant finding for the security community is the strategic pivot by SMBs toward intelligent operations. The report clearly states that "SMBs' cloud priorities in 2025 are shifting toward AI expansion and business agility for growth." This trend is fueled by the cloud itself: "Cloud has democratized the accessibility to AI adoption; this unlocks new opportunities for SMBs... leveling the playing field against larger enterprises."
The security implication: This democratization means that AI is not being implemented slowly by a centralized data science team. It is being rapidly adopted across the business—in business applications, workforce productivity tools, and infrastructure—often via third-party services.
Expanded attack surface: Every new AI service integration or cloud agility project introduces new APIs, data pipelines, and third-party dependencies, each representing a potential entry point for an attacker.
Data governance challenges: AI systems thrive on data. As more data is funneled into these new tools, managing data residency, access control, and compliance (especially concerning regional privacy laws) becomes exponentially harder. Security teams must ensure they have comprehensive visibility into where data is flowing when leveraged by new AI services.
The study examines the operational domains driving investment, with "security" representing 20% of the focus, just behind "business applications" (23%) and ahead of "infrastructure" (19%). This high prioritization of security is positive, but it indicates a deeper integration requirement.
Security professionals can no longer operate solely as gatekeepers. They must become agile enablers focused on three integrated operational challenges:
Securing the infrastructure foundation: With 19% of the focus on infrastructure, the security team must treat the underlying cloud architecture (IaaS, Kubernetes, serverless functions) as the new perimeter. Traditional network monitoring and firewall rules are insufficient; cloud-native security tools that manage configuration drift, privileged access management (PAM), and identity within the cloud control plane are essential.
Governing business applications: As businesses chase growth through application agility, security must implement DevSecOps principles to secure the CI/CD pipeline. The integration of AI into these applications (23% focus) means we must now validate the security and integrity of the AI models themselves—guarding against prompt injection, data poisoning, and model extraction attacks.
Third-party risk management (TPRM) is critical: The report notes that SMBs are "decisively turning to third-party services for their capabilities" to drive AI adoption. This creates a supply chain risk bottleneck. Security teams must rapidly mature their third-party risk management programs, ensuring every new vendor adheres to rigorous security standards that cover both operational and AI-specific risks before integration is approved.
The Forrester research confirms that for APAC SMBs, AI and cloud agility are now central to the future of operations. This creates an urgent mandate for the cybersecurity profession: We must shift from reactive defense to proactive architecture.
Security teams must utilize this new budget and executive attention to establish robust, automated governance frameworks that accelerate the secure adoption of AI and cloud services, rather than blocking them. This means:
Automating compliance and monitoring: Leveraging Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools to handle the high velocity of change introduced by cloud and AI.
Focusing on identity: Treating Identity and Access Management (IAM) as the primary security control point, particularly across interconnected, hybrid environments.
Building a security-as-code culture: Integrating security policies directly into Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) templates to ensure that every new piece of infrastructure is provisioned securely by default.
The future of operations for SMBs is fast, distributed, and driven by intelligence. Cybersecurity professionals are the only ones who can ensure this agility is built on a foundation of trust and resilience.
RELATED: A presentation at the SecureWorld Seattle conference, November 5-6, 2025, will tackle the topic of "Cybersecurity Challenges for Small and Medium Businesses." Joining the panel discussion are Scott Benson, Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure, Mud Bay, Inc.; Aaron Hunt, Director, Information Security, KP LLC; and moderator Megan Slabinski, District President, Robert Half.