MALAYSIAN companies are becoming more aware of the benefits that edge computing may possess to help them adapt to new norms, despite only a small percentage are familiar with the term.
According to the findings of a survey done by Tech Research Asia (TRA), only 27% of firms in Malaysia have multiple edge computing sites deployed while a larger 38% of the respondents shared that edge computing is new to them.
The respondents revealed that edge computing enabled them to lower their costs in information technology (IT) and operations, while also improving employee experiences by allowing them to cope with bandwidth and latency issues, among others.
Early adopters of edge computing in Asia Pacific have typically seen a reduction of IT and operational costs resulting in level of improvement over business ranging from a median of 5% to 10%.
When it comes to the type of solutions being used, the report highlighted that 32% of companies in Malaysia were using their existing data centres to deploy edge computing solutions, while 11% will be building new data centres and 9% decided to go with colocation facilities.
The report also showed that the higher education sector tops the list of being the industry with the highest adoption rate at 68%.
“The global pandemic and new learning models have made collaborations and sharing of resources among institutions more common,” it said.
Similarly, about half of those surveyed in the healthcare industry have adopted edge computing, of which 80% are existing users of some form of cloud computing service.
In the area of financial services, 63% of Asia Pacific’s financial services industry organisations have adopted edge computing, compared to 22% of the respondents that said they will move every workload to cloud.
Apart from edge computing, the report also studies the current state of infrastructure strategies across the region.
It showed that hybrid IT has come to the fore with 51% of respondents indicating they will have a mix of cloud and on-premises infrastructure, proving that businesses are no longer practicing a ‘cloud first’ approach that influences their decision making.
“There is a slight rise in the expected number of owned data centres and use of colocation. A total of 21% of the respondents plan to deploy new infrastructure,” said the report.
Meanwhile, 95% of the respondents are already using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and this trend is expected to remain constant, or even increase, over time.
In terms of market adoption, 28% of IT leaders across Asia Pacific are leveraging edge computing across multiple sites with an additional 38% more adopters in the next 24 months.
The top use cases for edge computing include:
- Customer experience: Using edge sites to provide better experiences and allow customers to access data and apps more securely and quickly.
- Employee experience: Reducing latency and allowing employees to be more productive, possibly with new IoT-driven functionality and experiences.
- Monitoring: Enabling pro-active maintenance of equipment and machinery, monitoring the health of building and assets, and ensuring CCTV security monitoring. – Dec 31, 2020
