PETALING JAYA: Amazon.com, Inc’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to invest US$6 billion (RM25.5 billion) in Malaysia to launch an infrastructure region in the country – representing the largest international technology investment made to date in the country.
AWS vice-president of infrastructure services, Prasad Kalyanaraman, said that by launching the AWS Region in Malaysia, they are showing their commitment to customers and organisations in the country, as well as their commitment to meeting the growing demand for cloud services in Malaysia and Southeast Asia.
“We are supporting Malaysia’s digital transformation with our secure and reliable AWS cloud infrastructure. We look forward to helping Malaysian institutions, startups, and companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country and to spur job creation, skills training, and educational opportunities in the communities surrounding our data centers,” he said in a statement today.
AWS is creating an infrastructure region in Malaysia to meet the increasing demand for cloud services in Malaysia and Southeast Asia. The new AWS region will enable customers with data residency preferences to store data in Malaysia while achieving lower latency, and at the same time serving the demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia.
The region will give developers, startups, entrepreneurs, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and nonprofit organisations, a choice for running their applications and serving end users from data centres located in Malaysia.
AWS offers a portfolio of services, including analytics, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage, and other cloud technologies.
Customers using AWS include Astro Malaysia Berhad, Axiata Group, Bank Islam Malaysia, CelcomDigi, Johor Corporation, PayNet, and Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas).
Malaysian public sector customers include Asia Pacific University of Technology & Innovation, BeEducation, Cybersecurity Malaysia, Department of Statistics Malaysia, Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia, Pos Malaysia, and Tenaga Nasional Bhd
Malaysian startups and small businesses, such as Carsome, Baba Products, Omesti Bhd, and StoreHub, are also building their businesses on AWS.
AWS regions consist of Availability Zones that place infrastructure in separate geographic locations, with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications.
The new AWS region in Malaysia will consist of three Availability Zones at launch, adding to the existing 99 Availability Zones across 31 geographic regions globally. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks.
AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple Regions to achieve fault tolerance.
AWS also said yesterday it has plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions including Canada, New Zealand and Thailand.
