MCO: Are Malaysian companies ready for Cloud adoption?

While the COVID19 outbreak has accelerated Cloud adoption across the globe, Alphaus Cloud, the multi-award-winning cloud cost management platform that enables the Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE), has recently shared their market survey on the Cloud adoption in Malaysia. In collaboration with Hitachi-Sunway Information Systems, the survey took about 3 weeks to complete and was conducted with 105 respondents ranging from IT engineers to Heads of Department and senior management individuals, including chief executive officers, chief operating officers, and chief technology officers from reputable organizations with the average size of 1200 employees. 

“The most significant gap, cited by 50% of our respondents, is the lack of “skill sets” to manage the post-cloud adoption environment, followed by the visibility to understand and manage complicated cloud billing. Imagine if you are in charge of paying the utility bills in your household and find family members constantly leaving the lights or air conditioning turned on even when it is not needed, what do you think would happen to your monthly billing? You will most likely end up paying high utility bills monthly. Your family members would not feel the pain because they are not paying the bills and would not understand how their actions are contributing to the high monthly billing. Unless you set a policy at home, to instill discipline and create a culture of accountability when using the utilities, the cost will continue to be exorbitant. The same goes for Cloud which is easy to deploy and scale. If you do not have the visibility of what’s going on, your organization may end up paying extra for services that are idle or not needed.” said Mohd. Atasha Alias, Director of Alphaus Cloud

Out of the 105 professionals who shared their insights in the Malaysia 2020 Cloud Market Survey, 89.2%  were from the private sector while the remaining 10.8 %  were from the government sector. Some of the findings from the survey were: 

• 77% of the respondents have adopted Cloud Infrastructure to facilitate their businesses

• 45.8% of the respondents are on Public Cloud, followed by 37.5% who are using both Public and Private Clouds (Hybrid Cloud), and finally, 16.7% are using Private Cloud

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) remains the highest public Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with 58% of the respondents using their services, followed by Microsoft Azure at 47%, Google Cloud Platform at 40%, and Alibaba Cloud at 11%. These figures resemble the global trend in Cloud usage.    

• 55% stated ICT and cybersecurity-related capital costs include equipment obsolescence and refresh as their top priority when choosing between on-premise versus on-Cloud solutions. On-premise requires the software to be installed locally on the computers or servers, as compared to on-Cloud solutions where the software is hosted by the vendor’s server and can be accessed via a browser.

• 81% mentioned scalability as their most important benefit of Cloud Computing to their organization. By adopting Cloud computing, an organisation can easily scale up or down their usage of IT resources as and when needed. In the long run, this allows businesses to continue growing without making expensive upgrades to the local servers or systems. The respondents also find that Cloud adoption allows them to rapidly launch new products and services 

As part of the cloud survey effort, Alphaus Cloud had also partnered with Malaysia-Japan Economic Association (MAJECA) and Malaysia South-South Association (MASSA) to organise a webinar with their members titled “The Best Time to Leverage on Cloud Technology: Take your business to Greater Heights”. 

“Managing data centres and equipment may not be the core business for an organisation and is typically relegated to a “cost of doing business. By adopting Cloud, organisations will be able to focus on the digital transformation of their core business, creating more value to the end customers and have the agility to respond quickly to unexpected events,” said Tan Tze Meng, a leader in Malaysia’s Cloud and Digital enablement landscape.

The survey result was shared at the recent inaugural KL Cloud Maestro Series organised to gather Cloud Champions; IT Professionals and Senior Executives to discuss the current trends in organisations in Malaysia; understand the responsibilities of the CCoE at any organisations should now be shared with other departments including the management, finance and operations. The event was held at Escape by Etiqa.