The Malaysian government has given four cloud service providers conditional approvals to build and manage hyper-scale data centres and cloud services. The four cloud service providers are Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Telekom Malaysia.

The announcement is in line with the government’s efforts in accelerating and creating an effective ecosystem, paving digital infrastructure under the newly launched Digital Economy Blueprint or MyDigital initiative.

In his speech, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin said the government has also proposed the appointment of three local ICT companies as managed service providers to work with the CSPs to manage their services to agencies in the public sector. The three companies are Enfrasys Solution Sdn Bhd, Prestariang Systems Sdn Bhd and Cloud Connect Sdn Bhd.

“As part of the measures to empower cloud computing services in the public sector, the government, through its ‘Cloud First’ strategy, has targeted the migration of 80% of public data to hybrid cloud systems by the end of 2022. In addition, for a more effective and smooth data collection and management, this strategy also helps to reduce government costs in information technology management in the long run,” said the Prime Minister.

Tan Lee Chew, Managing Director, Worldwide Public Sector, ASEAN, AWS said AWS was pleased to be selected to join the Cloud Service Provider Panel for the Government of Malaysia by the Malaysian Administrative Modernization and Management Planning Unit.
 
“We continue to focus on listening to our customers’ needs in Malaysia and inventing on their behalf.  We’re ready to support the Government of Malaysia in their vision to transform the nation into a digital economy,” said Tan.
 
The Prime Minister also announced that Malaysia will start to get 5G Internet connectivity by the end of this year. Expected to be in stage, he believes Malaysia will emerge as one of the first countries in this region to build a 5G ecosystem using Internet and cloud services in real-time to enable instant sharing of information.
 
A total of RM15 billion is expected to be invested over a period of 10 years for the implementation of 5G nationwide and is also expected to create about 105,000 job opportunities. All licenced telecommunication companies will have equal access to this infrastructure, in marketing their 5G services to their customers.