The adoption of cloud services in Malaysia has enabled many industries to navigate their business operations through the Covid-19 pandemic, despite movement restrictions that were put in place nationwide.
While the cloud adoption rate in Malaysia is seeing progress within certain sectors, some still struggle in integrating technology in their operations.
Nutanix Malaysia country manager Avinash Gowda (picture) said some digital native companies have leveraged on the advancement of cloud technology, while traditional companies are only starting to realise its full potential.
He cited the Asia Cloud Computing Association’s Asia Readiness Index 2020 where Malaysia is ranked eight out of 14 Asian nations in cloud readiness, which is a position held since 2018.
“This indicates that cloud readiness is advancing, but progress is stalling,” he told The Malaysian Reserve in an email interview recently.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) currently see a slower uptake in cloud adoption, said Gowda.
The main factors that are hindering cloud adoption in the segment include low skills in the information and technology field, limited resources and traditional mindsets.
“SMEs should overcome this by looking into their long-term requirements and tapping on readily available cloud technologies and services,” he said.
Meanwhile, the financial services industry (FSI) in the country is leading in digital transformation where rollouts of cloud adoption have been primarily on private cloud deployments due to the larger legacy investments and increased reputational risk exposure factors that are unique to traditional FSIs.
Gowda said traditional FSIs are starting to realise the importance of the tool as a competitive edge and there will be an acceleration of the technology in the industry.
“A PricewaterhouseCoopers report showed that 62% of Malaysia FSIs noted ‘pressure on margins’ as the top threat arising from the fintech disruption, and 22% believe that they may lose more than 20% of their revenues to fintech.
“This highlights the much-needed transformation for traditional banks and the cloud is quickly becoming the much-needed tool to support this.”
Besides banking, Gowda said the public sector is also among the segments that are leading in cloud adoption.
He said Nutanix has supported private cloud deployments in statutory bodies and ministries and it recently worked with public sector agencies to drive cloud-based applications to assist in contact tracing, electronic booking for health services and analytical data collection.
Commenting on the impact of the pandemic, Gowda said the situation has accelerated the arrival of multi-cloud reality in the country which requires the need for new skills, new technologies, as well as new alliances and collaboration.
He said businesses should move towards “software-defined infrastructures” and remove the need for physical access to data centres, while enabling central operations to be handled either remotely or by a skeleton staff.
“Businesses will need to leverage the flexibility, scalability and simplicity of software and cloud, especially as they build their business models around it,” said Gowda.
As most business operations were required to work from home since the enforcement of the Movement Control Order on March 18, Gowda said the shift has allowed employees to embrace and adapt to different tools, technology and work style. This enables employees to be more flexible, productive and efficient.
“Employees are now more empowered to operate at optimum efficiency. This is underwritten by technologies like the cloud, which enables humans and devices to merge, communicating intelligently in real-time,” he said.
Gowda added that to fully gain the benefits of cloud technology, businesses need to ensure their infrastructure can support advanced and new technologies such as the Internet of things devices and edge computing on one common platform for simple management.
“Different multi-clouds, hardware and operating systems can work together to run virtually anything anywhere in the new ecosystem and we’re proud to provide that platform that brings it all together,” added Gowda.
Source: https://themalaysianreserve.com/2020/09/01/malaysia-prepared-for-cloud-adoption/