Alibaba Cloud: A Catalyst for Malaysian Companies Engage in the Digital Economy
Selecting the right platform to host your online services is a crucial step. The right cloud partner will make or break your cloud deployment and subsequently, interfere with the services rollout through the company.
According to IDC, the cloud market growth in Malaysia is not as high as expected, with only a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 24% over the next five years. As Malaysia is still experiencing growth in the cloud service sector, many players are vying to get a slice of the pie offered by the market.
There are several qualities for cloud service providers currently in the market (Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure and Alibaba Cloud, among others) that are important to have for a peace of mind. For one, the right cloud service provider should be flexible to anticipate their customer’s needs that is always evolving. Redundancy is also an important attribute for a cloud service provider to ensure critical data access is available to all without any problems
Options available to the customer is another facet of a cloud service provider that is important to have. Having similar offerings between cloud service providers means that customers can easily migrate from one provider to another with minimal downtime. Agility for customers is something that cloud service providers need to be on top of as well to support clients that are always evolving and changing as their businesses grow.
There are significant upsides and downsides between the three big cloud service providers in Malaysia. With similar offerings across the board, customers will have an easy time migrating between each other as required.
The biggest downside however is the after-sales support offered by each company. Names like Microsoft and Amazon are big, but their after-sales support does not reside in Malaysia – so there will be a lag in reaching help for any critical problems faced while deploying into the cloud.
This is where Alibaba Cloud comes into the picture. It offers a wide range of services for the customers to fit any needs and requirements, and with new solutions coming online frequently, Alibaba Cloud is flexible in offering the customers new services as and when it is required. With 56 availability zones, Alibaba Cloud delivers exceptional service for customers. 15 of the availability zones are in Asia Pacific, with two zones currently operating in Malaysia. No other cloud services have local availability zones running; currently only Alibaba Cloud offers that service here, making after-sales support a breeze.
Alibaba Cloud also features easy-to-use migration tools to easily migrate physical servers, Virtual Machines (VMs), and hosts on third-party cloud platforms to Alibaba Cloud. Its solutions meanwhile are designed to help customers to be more agile, with solutions such as Elastic Compute Service, Machine Learning Platform for AI and Anti-DDoS available for companies to turn their investment agile without breaking the bank.
Cloud services like Alibaba Cloud will enable companies to innovate and become a catalyst for companies to face challenges head-on. One of the biggest positives for companies deploying services to the cloud is the reduction of overhead cost. More resources are now available in to be repurposed for other initiatives such as R&D or human capital development. This repurposing of resources can help companies achieve innovation through R&D and human capital development, which is a win-win for all at the end of the day.
Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) and TNG Digital are some of the home-grown companies that have turned to Alibaba Cloud to help improve their efficiency in operations and, for PNB, advancing its digital transformation agenda. Alibaba Cloud was the perfect choice for PNB as it offers great time to market and scalability, two of the most important attributes the investment company is looking as part of their digital transformation agenda.
For TNG Digital, it was the professional service and support team offered by Alibaba Cloud that made the deal. Alibaba Cloud’s responsive and dedicated support team via DingTalk offered premium support that allowed TNG Digital to find fast solutions to any problem 24/7.
Malaysia and Alibaba Cloud are joining hands to drive the growth of the digital economy to power many of Malaysia’s future-making initiatives. Alibaba Cloud is also providing innovation through collaborations which are powering many companies to spend less time on maintenance and focus on that matters; embarking on their empowering journey to be a #MyFutureMaker.
Surina Shukri, CEO, Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation, on stage at the Kuala Lumpur Alibaba Cloud Summit
“Malaysia’s future makers” refers to companies of all sizes that are striving to make Malaysia a more prosperous, dynamic, and innovative nation – one that not only lives and breathes technology, but also contributes to its evolution. In two and half years, we have gone from one client in Malaysia to several hundred across a variety of industries, including mobile internet, finance, and governmental institutions. At Alibaba Cloud, we look forward to working together with all of the homegrown future makers here today to make these changes happen.”, said Kenny Tan, GM of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Malaysia and Thailand at the Kuala Lumpur Cloud Summit in July.
Kenny Tan, GM of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Malaysia and Thailand speaking at the recent Kuala Lumpur Cloud Summit
Companies like Genting and AirAsia discovered the power of Alibaba Cloud and have successfully integrated it within their organization as part of their #MyFutureMaker drive.
AirAsia uses Alibaba Cloud’s CDN network in China to enable improvements in the latency and Round-Trip Time (RTT) of the AirAsia’s website. At the same time, AirAsia’s and Alibaba Cloud’s security teams worked together to block illicit traffic, thanks to the extensive database of known hackers and their patterns – showcasing the partnership between AirAsia and Alibaba Cloud
Genting worked with Alibaba Cloud to create a convenient and customized solution for Genting’s migration that can efficiently handle massive volumes of data, manage heavy traffic and provide additional security. As of today, Genting continues to move more and more or their workloads to Alibaba Cloud.
As more companies adopt the cloud as part of their operational policies, it is imperative that they truly and thoroughly check all the options out there to see which companies are beneficial to them in both the short and the long term before choosing a partner to deploy with.
Alibaba Cloud ticks all the check boxes for companies looking to invest into the cloud. It has a complete suite of offerings that resonates with the current trend of cloud adaptation by companies. With solutions for basic infrastructure adoption in core functions such as HR, finance and CRM available, and all the way to high-level cloud-centric solutions such as Virtual Machines, Alibaba Cloud CDN and server load balancers, Alibaba Cloud is there to meet any needs and any challenges faced by Malaysian companies.
Alibaba Cloud can be the right choice, thanks to the right and attractive mix of features, options, and pricing package. The choice is ultimately with you, the customer, but the choice needs to be made soon, as many more companies around are now hopping onto the cloud bandwagon, and it will be unfortunate to be left behind in the dust.