CLOUD is not only a critical foundation for business resilience as Asia moves out of the pandemic, but it will also be a key driver of the region’s next wave of economic growth.
Research by global market intelligence firm IDC shows that Microsoft’s most recent data centre expansions in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Taiwan alone are set to generate more than US$21 bil in new revenues and will create 100,000 new jobs in the next four years.
“There is no doubt that during the past year we have seen the acceleration of digital transformation efforts across all industries,” explained Microsoft Asia president Ahmed Mazhari.
“Asia now accounts for 60% of the world’s growth and is leading the global recovery with the digitalisation of business models and economies.”
In this regard, cloud will continue to be a core foundation empowering the realisation of Asia’s ambitions, enabling co-innovation across industries, government and community, to drive inclusive societal progress, according to Ahmed.
In Malaysia, Celcom, a leading telecommunications company is embracing Microsoft Cloud in its pursuit towards becoming digital economy powerhouse in the region.
“We highly applaud Microsoft’s plans to establish its first data centre region in Malaysia, providing access to a secure, scalable, highly available, resilient and sustainable cloud services for the government, and across multiple industry verticals,” Celcom CEO Idham Nawawi pointed out.
“As the anchor telco tenant, we look forward to bringing the benefit of this data centre to our customers and partners.”
Below is how IDC envisaged Microsoft along with its ecosystem of partners and cloud-using customers are able to create more than 110,000 jobs, including nearly 19,900 new skilled IT jobs, in Malaysia, Indonesia and Taiwan during the next four years:
- Microsoft’s first-ever data centre region in Malaysia announced on April 19 that it will help generate up to US$4.6 bil in new revenue for the country’s ecosystem of local partners and cloud-consuming customers, and will create more than 19,000 new jobs;
- Microsoft’s Indonesia data centre region announced in February 2020 that it is forecast to add US$6.3 bil to the revenue of local cloud-using customers and partners, contributing to the creation of nearly 60,000 jobs.
- Microsoft’s Taiwan data centre region, announced in October 2020 that it will add more than US$10.4 bil in new revenues and will add about 30,720 jobs to the Taiwanese economy;
- New Zealand’s data centre region will be Microsoft’s first in the country, and the first by a major cloud provider.
- A new Azure region in China – China North – will effectively double the capacity of Microsoft’s intelligent cloud portfolio in the country during the coming years.
- With existing and announced data centre regions in Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan, Microsoft has also made a commitment to expand Azure Availability Zones to every country in which it operates a data centre region by end-2021. For instance, last year it launched three Availability Zones in Australia. – April 21, 2021
