CLOUD ADOPTION Cloud Adoption in Malaysia: Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges

loud computing’s unique features, including the low capital investment, reduced total cost of ownership, high availability, elastic scalability, and lower complexity compared to traditional high-performance computing models, have made it the predominant ICT platform over the last few years. The cloud is rapidly being adopted in numerous domains worldwide, including education, healthcare, commerce, tourism, and scientifi c computing. Leading technological and industrial countries are rapidly adopting the cloud to not only shrink their computing costs but also to expedite and optimize computing processes and time to market. However, many factors, including enabler technologies, IT friendliness, fi nancial wealth, geographical location, and political stability, impact cloud adoption worldwide, leaving various countries with noticeably different cloud adoption rates. BSA|The Software Alliance analyzed cloud readiness rates across the globe to gain insights into adoption rates, challenges, and possible solutions to expedite cloud adoption in different countries.1 In 2011, the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) began analyzing and publishing an annual cloud readiness index of 14 countries in Asia—Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan,