KUALA LUMPUR (Jan 16): Malaysia needs more good service offerings generated from Malaysia by Malaysian companies that venture abroad in order to close the trade deficit in the services sector, says Deputy Minister of International Trade and Industry Dr Ong Kian Ming.

He cited the example of Securemetric Bhd, a homegrown software company that yesterday invested in a 5% stake in Indonesian digital startup PrivyID.

“With a company such as Securemetric venturing abroad, Malaysia will also benefit from some of this in terms of closing the services (trade) gap that we have in our current account, this is something that is very important to the industry.

“Since 1998, we have actually done pretty well in the goods sector where we have the surplus, but in the services sector we have always had a deficit for the longest time, so we need to close this gap,” he said in his speech at the launch of Securemetric’s Centagate Cloud here today.

Centagate (Centralised Authentication Gateway) is a comprehensive end-to-end customisable turnkey option that manages user authentication and supports multi-factor and multi-channel authentication.

Meanwhile, Securemetric chief executive officer Edward Law Seeh Key said enterprises today are challenged by skilled adversaries adept at capitalising on the smallest vulnerability or gap in defences.

“Therefore, a cybersecurity company like us would need to continue to adapt and innovate in order to stay ahead of the landscape.

“With such a cloud-native platform, we are able to meet high customer demand for a wide and flexible portfolio of solutions — from on-premise services to cloud-based services and managed security services — to combat the ever-increasing cyber threat,” he said.

Law said Centagate Cloud is a new way to defend enterprises’ electronic identity and access to their enterprise applications via a multi-factor, single sign-on and risk-scoring authentication platform.

At the launch today, Securemetric also signed two memorandums of understanding — with Joget Inc and Innov8tif Solutions Sdn Bhd — to establish and enhance collaboration in cross-technology innovation and excellence.