Three critical challenges holding Vietnamese enterprises back on the digital transformation journey
Within the framework of the Industry and Trade Digital Transformation Forum 2025 held on December 3, 2025, the thematic session “Dual transformation in industrial manufacturing and energy” attracted participation from government authorities, research institutes, and the business community.
In the opening remarks, Mr. Pham Van Quan, Deputy Director General of the Department of Industry under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, stated that digital transformation is creating new operating models for industrial enterprises, while green transformation is an urgent requirement to meet sustainable development goals. These two processes closely reinforce each other, forming a critical foundation for enterprises to improve productivity, reduce emissions, and enhance competitiveness in an increasingly globalized economy.
During the panel discussion, a representative of VNETWORK’s Northern Vietnam business division presented the topic “Analyzing dual transformation challenges and moving toward a comprehensive transformation approach”, highlighting three major bottlenecks that are holding Vietnamese enterprises back on their digitalization journey. These challenges represent key points of friction that cause dual transformation initiatives to stall or even fail.
Talent scarcity: A challenge with no immediate solution
According to recent reports, Vietnam is facing a serious shortage of information technology professionals. In the field of information security alone, the projected shortfall is up to 700,000 specialists. More than 52.89 percent of enterprises lack sufficient technological solutions to respond to cybersecurity incidents, while 56.16 percent do not have dedicated security personnel.
In practice, many enterprises, particularly in manufacturing, energy, and retail, have an urgent need for digital transformation but still lack operational staff, implementation experts, 24/7 engineers, and teams specializing in data analytics and cybersecurity. As a result, system maintenance and governance remain inefficient and fragmented.
Limited investment capacity: A heavy burden for SMEs
The second bottleneck stems from financial constraints. The majority of Vietnamese enterprises are small and medium sized enterprises, where technology investment costs remain a top barrier.
Many businesses report difficulties in allocating budgets for high requirement systems such as cloud infrastructure for production operations, 24/7 monitoring and threat protection platforms, AI technologies for data analytics and process optimization, or the transition toward green operating models.
Traditional investment approaches that rely on building in house technology infrastructure, security operations centers, or DevOps teams force enterprises to bear high upfront costs, long deployment timelines, and limited short term efficiency.
Rising cybersecurity risks: An unprecedented threat landscape
As digital transformation deepens, enterprises are gaining opportunities to expand their markets while simultaneously facing increasingly sophisticated, large scale, and easily commoditized cyber threats. More concerning is that the boundary of attack targets has virtually disappeared, as organizations of all sizes are now potential victims.
This reality is reflected in data from VNETWORK. In the first six months of 2025 alone, the company’s systems recorded 1,178,591 cyber attacks. Common and highly dangerous attack types included zero day exploits, credential stuffing, SQL injection, cross site scripting, brute force attacks, account takeover, business email compromise, and email phishing.
Most notably, distributed denial of service attacks remain a major threat, accounting for 256,000 incidents. Modern DDoS campaigns often combine multi layer attacks targeting layer 3 and layer 4 at the CDN level and layer 7 at the web, application, and API level, directly impacting network infrastructure, web applications, and APIs.
The increasing complexity of these attacks enables them to bypass traditional security measures, causing severe service disruptions, reputational damage, and significant financial losses for enterprises regardless of scale.
To overcome these three bottlenecks, enterprises need a streamlined, secure, and flexible transformation model that integrates modern digital infrastructure, process digitalization, and comprehensive cybersecurity solutions to establish a foundation for sustainable growth.
Thai Nguyen Newspaper reports on VNETWORK at the event: Here.
Launch of the 2025 cybersecurity survey: An opportunity to receive an in depth report
VNETWORK not only leads in infrastructure and network acceleration solutions but continues to reinforce its pioneering role in shaping the future of cybersecurity. With this mission, the company has launched the 2025 cybersecurity landscape survey to build a comprehensive, accurate, and up to date view of enterprise digital defense readiness.
Participate in the survey: Here.
