Alibaba Cloud Malaysia’s Pledge to Country’s ICT Development

Kenny Tan

*Kenny Tan is GM of Alibaba Cloud Malaysia and Thailand

Our Founder and Executive Chairman Jack Ma recently opened our national office in Malaysia in the presence of Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng and Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo along with Chinese ambassador to Malaysia Bai Tian. This development was a significant milestone for the Alibaba Group as it’s our first ever official office in Southeast Asia and in Malaysia which houses our first electronic world trade platform (eWTP) hub out of China.

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From our perspective, this development also brought to life two key themes concerning Alibaba Cloud: (1) Investment and (2) Local Empowerment.

Investment


The Alibaba Group is passionate and committed to Malaysia’s nation-building efforts, and we will continue to contribute whatever we can to further grow Malaysia’s Digital Economy.

As international research firm Gartner rightly pointed out, Alibaba Cloud is alongside Amazon Web Services and Microsoft as one of the world’s top three cloud services providers. This position of strength puts us in an ideal position to catalyse digital transformation spanning both the Malaysian public and private sectors, with the aim of enriching the lives of the rakyat and local businesses.

Last year, Alibaba Cloud made history for Malaysia by opening the country’s first ever international data centre. Located strategically for Southeast Asian coverage, the data centre aims to address the surging demand for scalable and cost-effective cloud computing services among enterprises in the region.

As the first international public cloud platform in Malaysia, the data centre also provides Malaysian enterprises a local choice to build their businesses and run their applications on a powerful, reliable and secure cloud platform. Customers with low latency or data sovereignty requirements will be able to store and process huge amounts of data in Malaysia. By migrating IT infrastructure to the cloud, enterprises can leverage Alibaba Cloud’s scalable and cost effective cloud services to scale rapidly, accelerate innovation and expand their geographic reach.

Beyond Malaysia, it also provides flexibility for enterprises from Singapore, Hong Kong and Thailand to subscribe to services according to different disaster recovery and network speed requirements. The link to the data centres in Hong Kong and Singapore via Alibaba Cloud’s backbone network enables fast, stable, secure and private or dedicated connections among different cloud environments, providing customers efficient cross-border hybrid cloud solutions.

On top of this, Alibaba Cloud Malaysia has also established various operations team overseeing Cloud Architecture, Technical Support together with Sales and Marketing.

In this light, I am pleased to inform that Alibaba Cloud has launched our second availability zone (“Availability Zone B”) in Malaysia to expand our cloud footprint while bolstering cloud capacity, serving increasing customer demand locally and in the region. The new zone complements both Alibaba Cloud’s Availability Zones for Malaysia in heightening cloud security and ensuring business continuity through resilient cloud infrastructure.

Additionally, Alibaba Cloud plans to launch Malaysia’s first cloud based Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Centre in August which will mitigate risks and offer customers the highest level of protection against stronger DDoS attacks. The new centre will feature a variety of security functions including Anti-DDoS Pro, a service that defends against all types of DDoS attacks. This means that Financial Services Industry companies can now migrate their workload that require encryption to Alibaba Cloud. Enterprises can also be reassured of constant higher resilience and high availability hosting their application on Alibaba Cloud.

In addition to ensuring high availability and resiliency, Availability Zone B offers payment hardware security modules (HSM), elastic computing, database, networking and monitoring services. What’s more, SAP users could also now migrate their SAP HANA platforms to Alibaba Cloud.

GobindIt was indeed pleasing to note Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo had this to say: “I welcome Alibaba Cloud’s effort to further support and enhance Malaysia’s digital economy. The world moves ever closer towards e-commerce and we see a considerable surge in demand by local industries to participate in this new economy on a global platform. Malaysia is now pushing ahead with efforts to strengthen its infrastructure with a view towards making access to the Internet a basic human right and categorising facilities which enhance access to broadband as a public utility. The success of our trade on a global platform with assistance of companies like Alibaba Cloud depends on an efficient Internet environment. The advanced technology afforded by Alibaba Cloud opens new opportunities, which I believe will quite substantially benefit Malaysia in its efforts to raise competition and efficiency in this new industry.

Long and short of it all, Alibaba Cloud is committed to bringing elastic, scalable and secure cloud products and services to our Malaysian customers and neighbouring countries. The launch of our Availability Zone B and Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Center will enable us to offer even greater security and choice for our customers. At the same time, the launch will facilitate knowledge sharing with local enterprises and talents on how to use Alibaba Cloud technology to achieve highly secured and resilient cloud infrastructures.

Local Empowerment

The Alibaba Cloud Malaysia is a very good example of Alibaba Cloud’s localisation strategy by employing Malaysians, and we will continue providing employment for the country’s local talent.

In addition, we are proud of our Alibaba Cloud Academy, a programme undertaken by Alibaba Cloud Malaysia which target to train local professionals and students on the latest in Cloud Computing, Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning as well as Cloud Cybersecurity. We are also rolling out a “train the trainer” programme in Malaysia. This programme aims to train university lecturers together with local SI (system integrator) and ISV (independent software vendor) professionals so that they could then pass on their knowledge and expertise via Alibaba Cloud certified courses to other students and enterprises.

Moreover, the Create@Alibaba Cloud Startup (CACSC) contest also allows local startups to accelerate innovation and grow with Alibaba Cloud’s technology and support.

Potential startups selected will be given access to various Alibaba Cloud resources. This year, we will also select two promising startups from Malaysia to participate in the CACSC where they could then compete and challenge themselves against teams from other markets. Winners will be sponsored to participate in the global final held in China. Aside from giving just vouchers for startups, Alibaba Cloud Malaysia will also provide free consultation and guide startups on how they could leverage on the Alibaba Group ecosystem to excel in their areas of business.

Indeed, the next few weeks and months is going to be extremely busy and exciting for us at Alibaba Cloud Malaysia. That said, it’s something we at Alibaba Cloud Malaysia are passionate about: Because it’s about nation-building and doing whatever we can in the best interest of Malaysia and the country’s growth.

*Kenny Tan is GM of Alibaba Cloud Malaysia and Thailand