Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Cloud Adoption in
Malaysia: Trends,
Opportunities, and
Challenges
Saeid Abolfazli, Zohreh Sanaei, Ali Tabassi, and Steven Rosen, YTL Communications
and Xchanging, Malaysia
Abdullah Gani, University of Malaya
Samee U. Khan, North Dakota State University
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mize computing processes and time to market. However, many factors, including enabler technologies,
IT friendliness, financial wealth, geographical location, and political stability, impact cloud adoption
worldwide, leaving various countries with noticeably
different cloud adoption rates. BSA|The Software
Alliance analyzed cloud readiness rates across the
globe to gain insights into adoption rates, challenges, and possible solutions to expedite cloud adoption in different countries.1 In 2011, the Asia Cloud
Computing Association (ACCA) began analyzing
and publishing an annual cloud readiness index of
14 countries in AsiaJapan, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan,
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Malaysia searches
Global searches
80
60
40
20
0
Aug Dec Mar Jul Nov Mar Jul Nov Mar Jul Nov Mar Jul Oct Feb Jun
2009 2009 2010 2010 2010 2011 2011 2011 2012 2012 2012 2013 2013 2013 2014 2014
FIGURE 1. Results from a Google search for cloud computing in Malaysia and worldwide. Search results from
Malaysia closely follow those of other countries worldwide, indicating a similar interest in the cloud.
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CLOUD ADOPTION
FIGURE 2. 1BestariNet leverages a nationwide cloud-based learning platform with the Yes 4G network and the
worlds first 4G-embedded Samsung Chromebook.
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and researchers in the near future. However, effective adoption of cloud services requires thorough revision of networking policies in such institutes and
requires competent staff to run and maintain such a
virtually unified cluster of resources.
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CLOUD ADOPTION
Wearable
cardiac
defibrillator
Middleware
Radiological
research center
Heterogenous cloud
computing
resources
Heart attack
information
Davids mobile
M-Health artifacts
Emergency alert!!!
4
Diagnosis center
Cloud-connected
ambulance
FIGURE 3. An exemplary cloud-based pervasive healthcare system: enhancing quality of life by incorporating cloud with
transportation, medical, and mobile computing sectors.
Moreover, enabling the cloud in the automotive industry for car and motorcycle manufacturers, such as Proton, Perodua, and DRB-HICOM, is
critical to realizing enhanced safety, efficiency, and
entertainment to effectively compete in the region
and throughout the world. Employing clouds and
vehicular clouds in developing highly standard complex design, manufacturing, and testing systems and
inventing new intelligent transportation systems and
in-vehicle infotainment can significantly boost safety and enhance the passengers experience, leading
to growth in market share. However, more work is
expected in this industry to set regulation and ensure that manufacturers comply.
For the large multiplicity of users and their mobility in transportation systems, cloud adoption is
slightly different from adoption for immobile users.
Successful cloud adoption in this industry demands
seamless integration of cloud resources, with carmounted computers, on-road infrastructures, and
pervasive devices scattered in urban and rural areas.
Because vehicles are capable of generating electricity for their own consumption, energy poverty of
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Agriculture Industry
Malaysias agricultural revenue in 2012 is reported
to be as much as $250 million, which is 7.3 percent
of the years gross domestic product (GDP). However, statistics show constant decrements since 2000.7
Factors such as climate change, aging of farmers,
the labor-intensive nature of Malaysias farming, and
pests are among the major reasons for this constant
drop. Cloud adoption can significantly improve agricultures profitability and GDP share in Malaysia.
Cloud-based agriculture and farming spans numerous activities, including agricultural agility, which
reduces time to market and improves user satisfaction; real-time farming information dissemination;
and remote monitoring of yields, resulting in efficient irrigation and effective pest fighting.
The best practice for cloud-based agriculture
is to integrate cloud with wireless sensors and pervasive mobile devices, making significant contributions toward smart farming that can significantly
decrease the farming burden and increase revenue,
given the aging of farmers in Malaysia. Pervasive
mobile farming infrastructures enable farmers, particularly older ones, to monitor and maintain their
farms anywhere, anytime without the need to physically visit the site. Such facilities not only provide
convenience to farmers, but also reduce labor costs
and encourage farmers to manage several plots of
land with varied types of products concurrently.
Tourism Industry
Another promising industry for cloud adoption is
tourism. Malaysia and Thailand have gained solid
positions in the global and regional tourist markets
in the last few years8 and are considered the most
competitive tourism markets in Southeast Asia.
While Malaysia has merely grown in number of
tourists and their receipts since 2010 (about 4 percent), Thailand could significantly increase its market share from 16 million visitors in 2010 to more
than 26 million tourists a year, which is about 67
percent growth. Thailands yearly tourism income
has grown more than 100 percent since 2010, from
US$20 million to US$42, whereas Malaysias tourism income has grown 16 percent, from US$18 to
US$21 million.
Cloud-based tourism could use cloud resources
to encourage tourists to visit hot spots in Malaysia
as well as to provide location-based and contextaware pervasive services for tourists while theyre
in the country. The first use requires that online
enterprises and individuals from all over the country engage in this industry. Such nationwide tourist
service providers can use cloud technologies to run
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5
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CLOUD ADOPTION
Although such jurisdictions benefit local entrepreneurs by protecting them from international competition and decelerating the emergence of giant and
reputable cloud service providers in local cloud markets, existing complexities, inconsistencies, and lack
of transparency have impacts on successful cloud
adoption in Malaysia. For instance, where should
multinational companies store their data? Who has
access to and possesses the data? What data is sensitive to cross-border storage? How does data sovereignty impact cloud federation? Answering these
questions and clarifying misunderstandings around
data sovereignty promote better cloud adoption.
Challenges
Despite the promise of cloud computing in these
areas, some important challenges hinder its speedy
adoption in Malaysia.
Data Sovereignty
Data sovereignty is the respect for the rights associated with databased on where the entity that has
control of the data resides.2 Governments usually
enforce data sovereignty to limit cross-border storage of (sensitive) data, which limits organizations
to exploiting local datacenters only, whereas external services can be more efficient and affordable. In
the ACCA report on the impact of data sovereignty
on cloud adoption in Asia, Malaysia could secure
eighth position among the 14 Asian countries studied.2 The report reveals that Malaysian lawmakers
enforce data sovereignty because theyre concerned
about data security and loss of control over the data
stored outside the country.
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utilization of cloud-based resources among users requires a great deal of research and development in
Malaysia and the rest of the world. Successful cloud
adoption requires delivery of cloud-based services
to a range of users with different skill sets, principles, and expectations. For example, one problem
in cloud-based educational systems is the lack of efficient interaction between trainees and e-learning
systems that inhibits development of writing skills
among students. The Apen A3 Smart Pen (www
.apenusa.com/products) is a domain-specific technology that can be integrated into cloud-based education systems, such as 1BestariNet, to improve
interaction and learning effectiveness among students. Erascan (see Figure 4) digitizes content as
its erased from the class whiteboard.14 Inventing
such domain-specific and cost-effective technologies
across domains is the key to successful cloud adoption worldwide.
Security, Privacy, and Trust
Security and privacy are major concerns impeding
cloud deployment in Malaysia that can also impact
global cloud adoption. The most significant issue is
comprehending and then minimizing the risks associated with cloud deployment. This problem is more
significant in off-premise clouds, where contents are
stored on the cloud vendors premises. Although data
owners have full control over the infrastructure,
hardware resources, and software systems with their
traditional physical servers or on-premise clouds, its
nontrivial to enforce the risk of letting contents stay
in a third-party premises. In this situation, the data
owner has limited access to monitor his or her property in the virtual servers in the absence of advanced
and detailed cloud-monitoring tools. In addition
to security threats from cyberattacks and privacy
violations, information disclosure from government
agencies is another challenge that decelerates cloud
adoption. Last year, Google positively responded to
a majority of about 27,477 information disclosure
requests by the US government.15 Efforts to ensure
safety of user property on the vendors premises,
minimizing security risks, and directing user privacy
issues are critical to cloud adoption in Malaysia.
the way for emergence of big data analytics for improving areas such as utility services, business intelligence, and security on a national scope.
Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Malaysian Ministry of
Higher Education under the University of Malaya
High Impact Research Grant UM.C/625/1/HIR/
MOE/FCSIT/03.
References
1. 2013 BSA Global Cloud Computing Scorecard,
report, BSA|The Software Alliance, 2013: http://
cloudscorecard.bsa.org/2013/assets/PDFs/BSA
_GlobalCloudScorecard2013.pdf.
2. The Impact of Data Sovereignty on Cloud Computing in Asia, tech. report, Asia Cloud Computing Assoc. (ACCA), 2013.
3. A. Kumar, Malaysian Cloud Investment Could
Touch US$900m by 2020, ComputerWorld Malaysia, 1 Nov. 2013; http://www.cio-asia.com/tech/
cloud-computing/malaysian-cloud-investment
-could-touch-us900m-by-2020.
4. L.S. Yin, Digitalizing the Malaysian Classroom:
Barriers, Insights, and Feasibility, Malaysian J.
Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2013, pp. 7590.
5. IBM and KPJ Healthcare Berhad Build Nationwide Cloud Infrastructure for Improved Medical
Services, press release, IBM Malaysia, 12 May
2014; www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/
43896.wss.
6. Transportation Blueprint 20102030 for Iskandar
Malaysia, tech. report, Iskandar Regional Development Authority, 2011; www.iskandarmalaysia
.com.my/pdf/blueprint/Transportation-Blueprint
.pdf.
7. Selected Agricultural Indicator, tech report, Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2013; www
.statistics.gov.my/portal/download_Agriculture/
files/Selected_Agricultural_Indicators_Malaysia
_2013.pdf.
8. UNWTO Tourism Highlights, report, UN World
Tourism Organization, 2014; www.e-unwto.org/
content/r13521/fulltext.pdf.
9. Z. Sanaei et al., Heterogeneity in Mobile Cloud
Computing: Taxonomy and Open Challenges,
IEEE Comm. Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 16, no. 1,
2014, pp. 369392.
10. Z. Sanaei et al., Hybrid Pervasive Mobile Cloud
Computing: Toward Enhancing Invisibility, InformationAn Intl Interdisciplinary J., vol. 16,
no. 11, 2013, pp. 81458156.
11. S. Abolfazli et al., Cloud-Based Augmentation
for Mobile Devices: Motivation, Taxonomies,
I EEE CLO U D CO M P U T I N G
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CLOUD ADOPTION
STEVEN ROSEN is director of IT at YTL Communications and the chief information officer at
Xchanging, Malaysia. His professional interests include architecting and leading technology teams and
managing datacenter operations in the healthcare,
banking, and insurance and capital markets business
sectors. Contact him at steven.rosen@ytlcomms.my.
ABDULLAH GANI is a professor of computer science at the University of Malaya, director of the Center for Mobile Cloud Computing Research, and a
visiting professor at King Saud University, Riyadh. His
research interests include self-organized systems, reinforcement learning, wireless-related networks, lightweight mobile cloud computing, and big data. Gani
has a PhD in computer science from the University
of Sheffield. Hes a senior member of IEEE. Contact
him at abdullah@um.edu.my.
SAMEE U. KHAN is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Dakota State
University. His research interests include optimization,
robustness, and security of cloud, grid, cluster and big
data computing, social networks, wired and wireless
networks, power systems, smart grids, and optical networks. Khan has a PhD in computer science from the
University of Texas, Arlington. Hes a senior member of
IEEE. Contact him at samee.khan@ndsu.edu.
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