Advancing Malaysia’s Modern Businesses Using AI and Lightning-Fast Clouds

Attributed by: Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX

In today’s dynamic business landscape, speed and efficiency plays a huge role. The modern business environment in Malaysia requires swift time-to-market, efficient manufacturing processes and logistics, rapid round-the-clock customer service, ground-breaking innovation and unparalleled concepts for crafting digital products and data-centric business models.

This scenario that has been unfolding worldwide is increasingly being reinforced by AI models, which are burgeoning both in number and potential. Readily accessible AI-as-a-service solutions that empower enterprises to train AI systems tailored to their precise needs, are hosted in the cloud. In reality, nearly all AI implementations stand to gain advantages by harnessing the capabilities of the cloud and augmenting AI with cloud-native agility, scalability, and the convenience of ubiquitous accessibility, 24/7.

The combination of cloud and AI is accelerating business processes massively. It has been shown that cloud adoption leads to faster revenue growth, lower operating expenses, and increased resilience in crises. In Malaysia alone, the rate of cloud adoption continues to grow, which is backed by the Government’s efforts of granting approvals for more data centres to be established throughout the nation and providing the infrastructure to facilitate cloud technology. In fact, a large number of Malaysian businesses are beginning to migrate their data and services to leverage public cloud due to its scalability.

In actual fact, a cloud and digital transformation process has the capability to reduce a company’s time to market by as much as 50%. Meanwhile, according to research by Accenture, AI adoption has the potential to boost profitability rates by on average 38% by 2035. Consequently, Malaysian companies need to update their cloud strategies to align with the swiftly evolving technological landscape, as emphasised by Ivo Ivanov, CEO of DE-CIX. The growing reliance on AI not only calls for an adaptable multi-cloud approach, but also underscores the significance of how companies establish connections to the cloud as a crucial element in achieving business triumph.

AI is helping companies to achieve their essential KPIs
Many business KPIs – such as product innovations based on customer behaviour – are becoming dependent on AI support. From the design of the product to the actual manufacturing process, and on to the usage by customers, AI supports efficiency, time to market, customer support, innovation, and personalisation.

Take one example: AI is now being embedded into the infotainment systems of cars, enabling not only personalisation according to the driver’s or passenger’s preferences, but also the detection of the state of the driver (such as tiredness), allowing the car’s system to take the appropriate mitigating actions.

To do this, the AI model needs data from the sensors within the car in almost real-time. The connectivity from the digital product to the cloud must therefore be resilient, reliable, and very fast. This also applies to e-health applications for telemedical diagnostics. As well as for the inclusion of AI into payment and e-commerce apps to increase sales by making more intelligent recommendations, and for chatbots providing after-sales support. With the latest releases of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM – among others – coming onto the Southeast Asian market in 2023, AI is booming, and with it the scale of potential and opportunities for businesses.

AI from the cloud has many advantages over a locally-hosted model: It is cloud-native, it is faster (as long as you get the connectivity right), more convenient, and vastly easier in terms of infrastructure planning. With the advent of AI-supported applications and services, the time has come for Malaysian enterprises to embrace multi-cloud.

Although a lot of AI training and processing will happen in one particular cloud environment, many other applications that feed data to or receive data from the AI model may well be housed in other clouds or in cloud-based applications. Companies that shy away from the assumed complexity of managing multi-cloud scenarios do so at the risk of missing out on such innovative potential.

Poor connectivity design slows everything down
In our fast-paced business world, agility, and flexibility – which are essential for keeping ahead of the competition in the race to the customer – depend on short decision pathways, and direct communication. The same goes for data and applications in the cloud: Short data pathways lead to faster reaction times. Therefore, the way you connect to your clouds and AI applications will impact on how efficiently you can do everything else.

Within the cloud, data can be processed at lightning speeds. But when the cloud is dependent on receiving data from external sources – for example from the company infrastructure or other clouds – this can slow things down. Because it’s not only the data, services, and applications in the cloud that are important, it’s also the speed that data can travel to and from the cloud.

The problem is that data cannot travel faster than the speed of light. While this may seem fast, making long and unpredictable detours through the public Internet to get data into the cloud may result in slowing down the process of transferring data to the cloud. What’s more, it also potentially places the data at risk of exposure during the process. Direct connections from the company infrastructure to cloud services can help to optimise the transmission of data by shortening and securing the data pathways.

Connecting the company’s IT infrastructure to a cloud exchange on an interconnection platform means that there is a direct pathway for you to access your clouds at the highest possible speeds. As a result, AI workloads are not subject to the capriciousness of the public Internet, and can thus offer close to real-time analytical insights, timely recommendations or warnings, and all manner of ingenious support.

But it’s not just about optimising the connectivity to the clouds – this is just the first step. The pathway between clouds can also be reduced dramatically by using a cloud routing service implemented directly on the interconnection platform. A cloud routing service makes it possible for clouds to ‘communicate’ directly with one another (cloud-to-cloud communication), so that data does not need to first travel back to the company infrastructure. Such a service also ensures interoperability between clouds, making an AI-enabling multi-cloud scenario more manageable and increasing the overall performance of applications across all systems.

Finally, by also directly connecting to end user access networks over an interconnection platform (also known as “peering”), the performance of customer-facing apps and customer service chatbots, as well as personalisation and customisation systems for example, can also be given a performance boost. In this way, you can make your data work for you – fast, flawlessly, and securely.

It isn’t just THE cloud – data needs a safe home in many clouds
Taking a step back from AI for a moment, there is one final KPI that cannot be ignored: business continuity. Many companies have come to realise that the cloud offers greater resilience compared to keeping data in on-premise infrastructure. But you shouldn’t need AI to understand that using just one cloud places the company at risk of cloud concentration.

By establishing an exclusive relationship of one cloud provider, this provider can become a single point of failure in the event of an outage. So, a multi-cloud strategy is more than just a nice-to-have, it’s an essential part of every business continuity and disaster recovery strategy. If set up correctly, a multi-cloud environment provides continuous access to company data and applications regardless of any localised issues.

This is where Malaysian companies  can leverage existing cloud routing services to set up continuous backups and the seamless and automated transition to the backup cloud in the event of an outage.

The race is on: getting ahead of the competition with AI from the cloud
So, the race is on. Even now, a significant number of businesses are already using AI support as part of their operations. To be a part of this exciting trend, businesses within the region would need to be in the cloud and making the most out of it by making sure that your cloud connectivity is robust, resilient, and lightning fast. Malaysian businesses exploring this untapped potential would be a major step forward in turning the country into a data hub, while ensuring business continuity for Malaysian customers.