AWS says there’s a high demand for cloud services in Malaysia and across Southeast Asia, promising USD 6 Billion infrastructure investment in Malaysia by 2037.
AWS plans to launch an AWS infrastructure Region in Malaysia to give both the private and public sectors more capacity to run their applications as well as serve more end users from data centres located within Malaysia.
As part of its commitment to the region, AWS claims it will invest USD6 billion (approx. MYR 25.5 billion) in Malaysia by 2037.
Prime Minister of Malaysia Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim says AWS’s commitment represents an international vote of confidence of growth in Malaysia’s digital economy.
“AWS has committed to the largest international technology investment to date in Malaysia, which will advance our Malaysia Madani vision of a highly skilled, innovative, prosperous, and sustainable economy. Bringing access to world-class AWS infrastructure, advanced technologies, and cloud skills programs to Malaysia will unlock opportunities for local businesses of all sizes to build and expand globally, cultivate a highly skilled workforce, spur new job creation, and deliver long-term economic growth. This is a vote of support for Malaysia’s leadership in the global digital economy, and we look forward to deepening our collaboration with AWS to advance our nation’s cloud-first ambitions,” says PM Ibrahim.
According to AWS VP Infrastructure Services Prasad Kalyanaraman, The new AWS Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, adding to the existing 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions globally.
“The new AWS Region reflects our deep and long-term commitment to customers and organizations in Malaysia, as well as our commitment to serving sizeable and fast-growing demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia. We are proud to support Malaysia’s digital transformation with the highest levels of security and reliability available on AWS cloud infrastructure. We look forward to helping Malaysian institutions, startups, and companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country and to spur job creation, skills training, and educational opportunities in the communities surrounding our data centers,” says Kalyanaraman.
AWS says it will launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Canada, Israel, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand. AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations, with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple Regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance.
According to Kalyanaraman, the new AWS Region will enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Malaysia, enable customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia.
Organizations in Malaysia are among the millions of active customers using AWS in more than 190 countries around the world. Enterprises in Malaysia choose AWS to innovate, drive cost efficiencies, and accelerate time to market-segment. Customers using AWS include Astro Malaysia Berhad, Axiata Group, Bank Islam Malaysia, CelcomDigi, Johor Corporation, PayNet, and Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS). Malaysian public sector customers use AWS to help drive cost savings and better serve local citizens.
These customers include Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation, BeEducation, Cybersecurity Malaysia, Department of Statistics Malaysia, Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, Pos Malaysia, and Tenaga Nasional Berhad (TNB). Malaysian startups and small businesses, including Baba Products, Carsome, Omesti Berhad, and StoreHub, are building their businesses on AWS to rapidly scale nationally and around the world.
According to PayNet Group CEO Farhan Ahmad, the national payments network and shared central infrastructure for Malaysia’s financial market-segment, PayNet uses AWS to run critical banking workloads, including the company’s MyDebit cashless payments system.
“As the nation’s operator of real-time retail payments infrastructure, we leverage AWS to meet the reliability, security, scalability, and compliance required by our customers. The launch of an AWS Region in Malaysia provides us with lower-latency access to cloud services to help ensure our customers have a seamless payments experience. We’re excited to see how this development can pave the way for other companies in the region to innovate with speed and uncover new opportunities,” says Ahmad.
PETRONAS Group CEO Datuk Tengku Muhammad Taufik also weighs in on the investment, stating that PETRONAS (which has a global footprint across 50 countries) has been an AWS customer since 2014.
“Our work with AWS has supported our digital solutions and enabled us to use the cloud as an accelerator. We have also leveraged Amazon’s working backwards methodology to ideate and scale innovation best practices across the group to pursue new growth opportunities. With the launch of the AWS Region in Malaysia, we look forward to further strengthening our collaboration with AWS to develop scalable solutions, deliver greater value to our stakeholders, and play a part in achieving Malaysia’s vision to become a regional leader in the digital economy,” says Taufik.
In the public sector, Pos Malaysia, Malaysia’s national postal and parcel service provider, has the largest delivery and retail network in the country, delivering to more than 10 million addresses and operating more than 3,500 retail touchpoints. As part of the company’s digital transformation, Pos Malaysia Chief Strategy Officer Sumesh Rahavendra says it plans to migrate the vast majority of its IT infrastructure to AWS.
“As we continue on our digital transformation journey to deliver a better customer experience, our collaboration with AWS has been instrumental in streamlining our processes, reducing IT costs by 50%, and driving greater organizational agility. We are excited about the launch of an AWS Region in Malaysia and look forward to incorporating deep analytics and machine learning initiatives into our operations to help further develop our products and services, enabling us to deliver smiles to the last mile,” says Rahavendra.
On the partner front, The AWS Partner Network (APN) claims to have tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support to customers. AWS ISVs, SIs, and consulting partners help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ cloud environments. Examples of Malaysia-based AWS Partners include Axrail, eCloudvalley, Exabytes, G-AsiaPacific, GHL, Maxis, Radmik Solutions Sdn Bhd, Silverlake Axis, Tapway, Uberfusion, and Wavelet.
One of its Partners, Maxis, signed a collaboration agreement with AWS in 2019 to deliver cloud technologies enabled by 4G. Maxis CEO Goh Seow Eng says it aspires to be the one-stop shop for all IT and connectivity services in Malaysia, and he believes AWS is key to achieving their goal.
“We look forward to providing businesses in Malaysia with greater access to world-class cloud solutions to accelerate cloud adoption and empower businesses to be better equipped for Industry 4.0, in line with the government’s cloud-first ambition.”
Silverlake Axis Group MD Andrew Tan agrees.
“Silverlake Axis’s collaboration with AWS has helped us create a future vision of our digital solution by modernizing 25 omnichannel applications such as transactions, loans, payments, and digital engagement. We can now offer customers various combinations of digital solutions with pay-as-you-go pricing, which provides a customized and seamless customer experience across all channels and any device. An AWS Region in Malaysia will be transformative for the technology services industry, providing secure, high-performing, resilient, and regulated infrastructure for digital banking workloads or insurtech businesses,” says Tan.
