In order for businesses to thrive in the digital economy, businesses must adopt intelligent practices, as optimising workflows to enhance efficiency and speed of production is essential for delivering competitive products to the market promptly. Additionally, ensuring the quality and performance of digital products throughout their lifecycle, regardless of customers' locations, is vital. Whether it's a connected car's infotainment system, a financial management app, or an electric toothbrush with an associated dental hygiene app, these products must seamlessly function while users are on the move, attending business meetings, or enjoying vacations with their families.
Furthermore, the government intends to direct the development of the cloud sector. To help Malaysia achieve its 2030 goal of dominating the regional digital economy, the Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint places more emphasis on the adoption of the cloud. By signing the Cloud Framework Agreement (CFA) with four government-approved cloud service providers (Google, AWS, Azure, and Telekom Malaysia), the government also took the first step towards adopting the cloud. The CFA's primary responsibility is to counsel government agencies on cloud computing. Cloud computing is currently being used in a number of government verticals, as the government is particularly interested in digitally transforming the country.
This is why Malaysian businesses must take the necessary steps to ensure that they too are connected to the cloud. While most enterprises within the Southeast Asian region are rapidly adopting cloud usage, Malaysia in particular is still in the early stages of cloud adoption – despite the significant benefits that cloud services offer. The myriad of services in the cloud allow the automation of processes, the training and operation of AI software, and the provision of environments for software and product development, testing, and innovation, not to mention location-independent communication and collaboration tools for a mobile workforce.
The cloud has become the all-purpose enabler for business success.The question, which is often neglected in the formulation of a hybrid or multi-cloud strategy, is how to even get to the cloud. Even in regions with high cloud adoption, we can see that the most common way of accessing the cloud and transferring data to and from different services is via the public Internet. However, there are good reasons to avoid this route, such as the lack of controllability of the route that data takes, and the potential for security issues in the public Internet. In fact, it is far better to leverage direct interconnection using a distributed Cloud Exchange to access clouds. This can provide easy access to an integrated ecosystem of cloud providers with a single access, and allows the corporate network to be connected directly to the cloud networks in use. In this way, the connection bypasses the public Internet, ensuring shorter and more secure data pathways. In Malaysia, companies need more than just a cloud strategy, they also need a cloud interconnection strategy.
Connecting directly to clouds accelerates cloud services
In Malaysia – as it is with other developing countries around the world – the need for low latency and efficient cloud services is also recognised as a crucial factor in driving business success. With the increasing digitalisation and reliance on cloud applications, Malaysian businesses are striving to optimise their connectivity to the cloud to ensure faster response times and improved user experiences.
In a country where e-commerce is thriving, minimising delays is of utmost importance. Imagine a customer eagerly awaiting confirmation of their online purchase, only to experience a significant delay due to high latency. Such delays can negatively impact customer satisfaction and ultimately affect the reputation and profitability of businesses.
By establishing direct connections between the corporate network and the cloud service providers, Malaysian companies can significantly enhance the performance of their enterprise applications. This is particularly beneficial for production-related analytics and design applications, ERP and financial apps, and virtual conferencing apps used by businesses.
Moreover, direct interconnection and shorter data pathways between Malaysian companies, their cloud service providers, and Internet service providers (the end-customer access networks) can also benefit customer-facing applications, where businesses can improve the performance of their websites, mobile apps, and other digital platforms, leading to faster loading times and smoother user experience for customers.
By reducing latency and optimising connectivity through direct interconnection via an interconnection platform and an integrated Cloud Exchange, businesses in Malaysia can enhance their competitiveness, improve operational efficiency, and deliver exceptional digital experiences to their customers.
Connecting directly to clouds adds control
There are also major advantages to directly connect the enterprise infrastructure to relevant networks, especially in terms of security. Using the public Internet is, again, a risky choice here, because there is no way to control the pathways that the data takes. The Internet was conceived as a “best effort” tool for communication. This is not sufficient for securing business critical data or sensitive end-customer data. On the Internet, data is passed over from network to network based on the current situation and the policies of each network, and there is no way of controlling where the traffic is exchanged and who might be lurking in the shadows such as the threat of data leaks, or phishing servers disguised as legitimate destinations – luring either an employee or a customer to a fake log-in field where they input their credentials.
Setting up direct interconnection between the networks makes it possible to bypass the long and potentially dangerous route over the public Internet, thus lowering latency and improving security. Through direct interconnection, you know exactly which network is sending traffic and which is receiving it. This gives the legitimate partners full controllability over the data flows and minimises the risk of security breaches.
By accessing each cloud from multiple geographical locations (e.g. using different data centers within metro areas such as around Kuala Lumpur and Johor Bahru) via a distributed interconnection platform, you can also increase resilience, reducing the chance of downtime caused by localised outages at one of the access points. The connectivity to the cloud can be made even more robust by remotely accessing additional cloud regions from each of the cloud providers. This is possible through an interconnection platform that connects different metro markets as well as offering local interconnection, protecting systems against more broadscale incidents.
Connecting Clouds for Optimal Performance in Malaysia
Enabling direct communication between cloud environments is essential to maximise cloud connectivity in Malaysia. This can be achieved by connecting cloud environments directly to each other through a cloud routing service implemented on a Cloud Exchange. In various automated processes, data from one cloud needs to be seamlessly shared with applications running in another cloud. For instance, consider a smart factory that produces products for just-in-time delivery. It requires real-time access to customer order data, synchronisation with inventory databases and logistics systems, and continuous monitoring of product quality and production plant conditions using AI systems. These processes, often running in different clouds, are crucial for flawless and high-quality order execution.
Typically, data transfer between clouds involves transporting data from one cloud to the corporate infrastructure, and then to the second cloud service provider. Depending on the proximity of the corporate network to the nearest cloud on-ramps for each provider, this can result in significant detours for data. This not only introduces latency issues but also increases data backhaul costs. Implementing a cloud routing service substantially shortens the data pathway by directly interconnecting the cloud services at the on-ramp points within the Cloud Exchange platform, which in turn reduces the data's travel distance, regardless of the company's location, leading to faster transmission and cost savings.
While the corporate infrastructure can remain directly connected to the clouds, this pathway is only utilised when necessary. Time-sensitive use-cases, such as database applications, can seamlessly interact with each other across clouds, with such low latency that it seems as if they were operating within a single cloud environment. This represents an intelligent cloud interconnection strategy.
Cloud interconnection – breaking business barriers towards success
Once such interconnection is established, there are numerous possibilities to shape it. It becomes feasible to enhance connectivity resilience by ensuring redundancy in the lines used for each access point. Adopting a global approach to cloud connectivity allows Malaysian businesses to connect their worldwide operations and workforce to the nearest cloud on-ramps, ensuring constant low latency regardless of their location. Robust backup and disaster recovery processes can also be set up using a secondary cloud, closely synchronised in real-time through the cloud routing service.
There is no doubt that the cloud is an unrivaled tool for boosting productivity. However, cloud performance can be further accelerated by implementing the right connectivity measures. For certain applications, optimised interconnection is essential to ensure effective operations in the cloud. As applications evolve, the significance of this optimised interconnection will only grow. Developing a cloud interconnection strategy allows businesses to harness the full benefits of the cloud. Direct connections to clouds enhance security, performance, and the bottom line, while enabling cloud-to-cloud communication accelerates processes even further. With clouds operating at top speed, the possibilities for Malaysian businesses are limitless.
