SHANGRI-LA, Boracay —- Officials of some of the biggest global technology companies on Thursday warned of an ever-widening attack surface exposing businesses and consumers in the emerging post-pandemic hybrid working space.

Brought together by VSTECS president and CEO Jimmy Go in this island paradise for the 2022 CXO Innovation Summit, about 400 delegates from software, hardware, cloud, and tech solution companies showcased the latest they have to offer consumers.

"Convergence" and "interconnectivity" among platforms emerged as the buzzword at the conference, with ease of use of devices and transactions like banking and sales making partners of what would typically be competing enterprises.

In a media conference at the sideline of the four-day summit with breakout sessions on everything that has to do with tech, representatives from Huawei, Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, Aruba, Yugabyte, Trend Micro, and Fortinet made for strange bedfellows.

They all put a premium on charting the direction of business-to-business enterprises and business-to-consumer activities while protecting people against web predators taking advantage of Internet vulnerabilities.

Arnie Alvarez, CTO and IT director of Huawei Philippines, said that Covid-19 had accelerated the digital transformation of nearly everything. Thus the giant smartphone company has been trying to "make everyone connected and everything intelligent."

For Dennis Sze, head of sales of Yugabyte South Asia, "everyone is going for speed. That's why the cloud option is rising, including in the Philippines. Speed and simplicity. Nobody likes downtime anymore, so this is where the shift in focus is in software."

A common thought expounded by tech executives is that companies must leverage artificial intelligence so that issues like cybersecurity are resolved automatically without end-user interventions.

With the pandemic forcing people and students to go online, VMware's Evenard Marquez, Trend Micro's Ian Felipe and Microsoft's Vett Watson agreed on the need for interoperability and to strengthen the security fabric of systems.

"We realized that every person we want to empower would be using different apps, platforms, and mobile phones, so we had to embrace that — the transformation that the Microsoft Office would have to be available on all platforms, on Android and IOS," Watson said.