KUALA LUMPUR: The commencement of the Alibaba Cloud service in Malaysia will see an increased number of consolidation and migration of data centres in the country.
It will force current cloud service providers to re-look their data centre strategies, allowing them to benefit from hyper-converged and hyper-scale data centres without worrying about data sovereignty, said IDC Malaysia.
Head of Services, Sreenath Kandarpah said the data centres are the backbone that support the growth of large, small and medium enterprises and start-ups.
“In the past, Singapore was seen as the regional hub for global players to build their data centres across ASEAN.
“However, due to an increase in cloud adoptions and Malaysia’s strategic location, the global data centre service providers are already setting up or will set up their centres in Malaysia,” he said in a statement.
Sreenath said local and global cloud service providers should re-strategies themselves as the competition for cloud service providers focusing on the local market is expected to increase.
“To stay competitive, the service providers should re-evaluate their approach towards enterprises by creating an attractive pricing and add-on services.
“Malaysian enterprises have a preference for global data centre service providers such as AWS and Microsoft as they offer better service capabilities, process maturity, and ability to help them build best practices for IT environment.
“IDC foresees this landscape to change with Alibaba having their local presence.Yet, it will require a lot of effort on the part of Alibaba to build trust and confidence due to their competitors’ maturity in the market,” he added.
Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, opened its data centre in Malaysia on October, 30.
As demand for scalable and cost-effective cloud computing services among enterprises in the region surges, the centre will provide Malaysian enterprises a local choice to build their businesses and run applications on a powerful, reliable, secure cloud platform.-- BERNAMA