Google earlier this week announced its plan to establish a cloud region here in Malaysia. Joining 11 other Google Cloud regions across the Asia Pacific, it will become the third cloud region for the company in Southeast Asia after Singapore and Indonesia.
Unlike other Google Cloud regions in Southeast Asia which are already up and running, the one in Malaysia is still in its early days and its rollout timeline has yet to be finalized. In fact, Google is currently still searching for a location to establish its Malaysian data centre as confirmed by Ruma Balasubramanian, the Managing Director of Google Cloud Southeast Asia to Lowyat.NET during a media briefing earlier today.
It is unclear at the moment whether Google will build its own data centre to host the cloud region as per what it has done in Singapore or have it running from third-party data centres. As noted in this documentation, a Google Cloud region may not necessarily run from Google’s own data centre although the company insists that Google Cloud’s infrastructure provides the same level of performance, security, and reliability regardless of whether it involved first-party or third-party data centres.
Regardless of that, the Malaysian cloud region will still offer three availability zones as per Google Cloud’s standard policy. The official website for Google Cloud noted that all regions have to offer at least these products at launch including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, Virtual Private Cloud, Key Management System, Cloud Identity and Secret Manager.
Within six months of a new region launch, customers can also expect these additional products such as Cloud Run, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud MemCache, Apigee, Cloud Redis, Cloud Spanner, Extreme PD, Cloud Load Balancer, Cloud Interconnect, BigQuery, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Dataproc, and Pub/Sub.
Meanwhile, Ruma has also confirmed that the company’s existing Dedicated Cloud Interconnect facilities which are located at AIMS Kuala Lumpur and CSF CX2 Cyberjaya will continue to exist even after the establishment of the Google Cloud region in Malaysia. As for the actual cost of investments to set up the Malaysian cloud region, it is something that the company would not publicly disclose though.
As part of the MyDIGITAL initiative and Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint, Google is one of the four cloud service providers that have received conditional approvals from the government to establish hyper-scale data centres in Malaysia. It has been estimated that these providers will be investing between RM12 to RM15 billion into the country within the next five years.
Having a Google Cloud region in Malaysia will allow Google to deliver high-performance and low-latency access to local companies regardless of their sizes. There are also benefits in terms of cost and regulatory compliances although even without a dedicated Google Cloud region here, it already has plenty of Malaysian customers including AirAsia Aviation, AirAsia Super App, Maxis, Media Prima, Malaysia Airlines, MRT Corp, and many more.
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