THE growth in cloud computing has been a megatrend for the past few years thanks to its efficiencies and innovations that drive enduring business change at scale and speed.
As Malaysia strives toward a technologically advanced economy by 2030, the country has revamped its digital initiatives in the previous year, including MyDIGITAL – a 10-year digital economy blueprint emphasising cloud adoption as an accessible and fundamental step in the transformation journey.
Although COVID-19 has accelerated digitalisation in general, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-ups are still at risk of being left behind.
A larger decline in SMEs employment as against a decrease in national employment during the year indicated SMEs were hit significantly by the COVID-19 pandemic.
With start-ups at the core of these transformational innovative solutions and playing a critical growth engine for Malaysia, they can leverage cloud technologies to move into the same global opportunities as major enterprises.
This will help fast-track the path to effective and profitable digitalisation and the achievement of their goals due to its highly flexible nature.
Cloud computing offers tremendous benefits for start-ups in various ways including:
Cloud innovation enables cost efficiency
A huge advantage of cloud computing is the reduction in hardware costs. Previously start-ups require a large upfront investment in on-premises IT infrastructure and skilled workers.
On top of that, companies also need to buy on-premises hardware to build their own data centres before they could develop, test, and successfully launch new digital products or services.
For companies that are growing rapidly, these investments can be large, expensive, and inconvenient. Cloud computing alleviates these issues because resources can be acquired quickly and easily as needed.
Even better, the cost of repairing or replacing equipment is passed to the vendors.
Cloud also enables a pay-as-you-go and pay-as-you-grow investment strategy which makes it much easier to invest in cloud computing that automatically adjusts the resources as per the user’s needs and thus promotes low-cost computing.
This reduces costs and can help start-ups stay afloat in competitive business environments. For example, Sarawak Digital Economy Corporation Berhad (SDEC) have started to embark on cloud computing last year (2021), in order to digitalise Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Sarawak and to propel the state toward a digital future.
By leveraging on the cloud proven technology, SMEs can achieve business agility, elasticity and scalability in a better way and optimise the cost of IT management.
Scalable cloud infrastructure is more efficient
With the rapid innovations involved from day to day, start-ups are able to become faster, more reliable, and more efficient.
Cloud has driven the start-ups to maintain product quality by being agile and responsive to better meet customer demands and needs.
A variety of cloud services enables new on-demand business services to be created, rolled out, and delivered. This technology plays a key role in allowing start-ups to expand their businesses.
Take the agricultural industry, specifically durian cultivation as an example. The cultivation of durian is challenging, especially when the plantation grows to a larger scale due to the trees’ sensitivity to weather and soil conditions.
Most owners rely on traditional experienced farmers for advice on the most effective ways to fertilise and irrigate their plants, which resulted in low yield growth.
Hence, Regaltech, a Malaysian integrated solution provider, is leveraging cloud-based technology to innovate agritech solutions.
The Regaltech Durian Cloud platform, which is hosted on Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS), uses IoT solutions to help farmers analyse agriculture information accurately and make informed decisions.
The support of this technology in farming helps farmers to save money, time, manpower, improve crop production and bring about consistency in harvest yields.
Increase productivity through flexibility
One of the best benefits of cloud usage is to increase productivity through its flexibility.
Cloud computing enables the sharing of infrastructure in which large pools of systems are linked together in private or public networks.
It also can allow collaboration and file sharing, enabling enterprise teams to edit files in real-time and access them from anywhere in the world.
This convenience is what makes cloud computing so enticing for many businesses.
By scaling the needs on the cloud to align with changing goals and demands, businesses will be better equipped to deliver high-quality results with greater speed and agility, resulting in greater productivity and sharper business advantage.
In other words, the cloud is deemed to empower the start-up ecosystem.
For instance, ClicknCare – a local start-up that provides teleconsultation services connecting Bangladeshi workers with doctors – has deployed cloud computing.
With cloud technology, the business has made it possible to cater a website where users can book online video calls with certified doctors, while Bangla-speaking agents help patients with the delivery of medicines and other needs.
The flexibility of cloud adoption has filled the gap in Malaysia’s digital health by connecting doctors and patients in many emerging countries, which previously was impossible.
Cloud computing is a lucrative option for start-ups but it must be adopted at a specific stage of the business cycle to reap the benefits.
This would not be possible without a cloud provider that can support and evolve with them as they grow and that enables them to keep their data safe and protect against malicious attacks.
Start-ups can then focus on innovating and disrupting their industry with confidence when their cloud platform is as agile, highly secure and dynamic as they are. – June 9, 2022
Kun Huang is the Alibaba Cloud Intelligence general manager of Malaysia.
The views expressed are solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Focus Malaysia.
