COMPANIES that are usually involved in the provision of information technology (IT) services to the government could gain from the announcement of the MyDigital initiative which aims to see an 80% adoption of cloud storage in government services next year.

       The National Tech Association of Malaysia’s (Pikom) chairman Danny Lee tells StarBizWeek that there would be opportunities for local cloud service providers in the technology industry.

       “Government IT spending is a couple of billion ringgit each year and there are opportunities for cloud service providers to take advantage of this announcement,” Lee says.

       “It is a major boost for the adoption of cloud computing in the government IT sector.

       “There will also be a need to migrate data from standalone servers to the cloud server,” he adds.

       He notes that the pivot towards cloud storage by the government has been long in the making and Pikom is happy with this development.

       The Budget 2022 announced the Digital First Programme which will be introduced to increase the usage of the cloud which would indirectly reduce physical storage and spur the adoption of a paperless society.“There are issues relating to security and access rights but this can be worked out. This also increases productivity as jobs can now be done on the cloud.

       “The private sector has also done this for sometime already,” he says.

       Lee also notes that there are many other technical factors to consider in this move to the cloud: “there is the infrastructure part, services layer and the application on top.”

       Commenting on the National Digital Identity (NDI) which is slated to begin in 2022, Lee lauds this move since a growing number of countries are moving towards this direction.

       “It is a good move to provide access and certainty when transacting in government services – such as the e-Know Your Customer (eKYC) process and allows transacting on a government platform almost seamlessly,” he says.

       “This eKYC can also be expanded to the private sector organisations to know their customers better,” Lee adds.

       The NDI is an identity verification platform, which will be implemented to enhance connectivity between all kinds of transaction systems in order to ease and encourage safe digital transactions.

       Meanwhile, Lee also says that the Budget 2022 lacks enough of initiatives for the country to successfully make the leap to be a highly digital country.

       “There needs to be more fiscal initiatives to this end,” he says.