CLOUD ADOPTION

Cloud Adoption in
Malaysia: Trends,
Opportunities, and
Challenges
Saeid Abolfazli, Zohreh Sanaei, Ali Tabassi, and Steven Rosen, YTL Communications
and Xchanging, Malaysia
Abdullah Gani, University of Malaya
Samee U. Khan, North Dakota State University

Global cloud adoption creates opportunities and challenges. This article

surveys opportunities and challenges the Malaysian Government faced in
adopting cloud to inspire and encourage cloud adoption.

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loud computings 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 scientific computing.
Leading technological and industrial countries
are rapidly adopting the cloud to not only shrink
their computing costs but also to expedite and opti-

mize computing processes and time to market. However, many factors, including enabler technologies,
IT friendliness, financial 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 AsiaJapan, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan,

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2325-6095/15/$31 .00 2015 IEEE

100
Malaysia searches
Global searches

80

60

40

20

0
Aug Dec Mar Jul Nov Mar Jul Nov Mar Jul Nov Mar Jul Oct Feb Jun
2009 2009 2010 2010 2010 2011 2011 2011 2012 2012 2012 2013 2013 2013 2014 2014
FIGURE 1. Results from a Google search for cloud computing in Malaysia and worldwide. Search results from

Malaysia closely follow those of other countries worldwide, indicating a similar interest in the cloud.

Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, China, Indonesia,

India, and Vietnam.2 The aim is to identify the potential and challenges of cloud adoption and suggest solutions to the problem with the help of major
cloud vendors, government cloud stakeholders, decision makers, and cloud consumers.
As the largest and most heavily populated continent with giant movements toward technology
adoption, Asia has significant potential for adopting
cloud technology. Among Asian countries, Malaysia has shown noticeable interest in adopting cloud
computing in various sectors to not only become a
leading country in this paradigm shift but also to
rapidly meet increasing computing demands in various sectors. According to the BSA cloud readiness
report, Malaysia ranks 13th among 24 countries in
readiness to adopt cloud technology.1 It could also
secure eighth place among the 14 Asian countries
studied by ACCA.

Emerging Trends and Landscape

In Malaysia, deploying cloud-based ICT solutions has become the most important trend and is
expected to grow from US$43 million in 2012 to
about US$900 million by 2020.3 The cloud market
in Malaysia isnt mature, but its growing rapidly.
Figure 1 shows the results of a search for cloud
computing related to Malaysia and to the entire
globe for the period January 2011 to August 2014.
A comparative view of the results suggests a close
match between Malaysia and global cloud comJ A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5

puting, especially after mid-2010, which indicates

that Malaysian interest in the cloud is similar to
that of countries worldwide. A decreasing trend in
Google search results after mid-2011 suggests pervasive penetration of cloud computing into various
aspects of human life.
Malaysian government cloud stakeholders and
public and private institutes have recently initiated
efforts to promote adoption of cloud services in government organization and small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
1BestariNet
1BestariNet is a cloud-based education platform
initiated by the Malaysian Ministry of Education
and implemented by YTL Communications. The
1BestariNet infrastructure includes 1,000 CPU
cores to enable ubiquitous access of a variety of
cloud-based education services to a large number
of users, including approximately 500,000 teachers and administrators, 5 million students, and
4.5 million parents nationwide. Educational materials are available to more than 10,000 schools
via a 4G wireless network. The preferred and
default interacting device is a Samsung Chromebook bundled with the Yes 4G network provided
by YTL Communications, although other options
are also available.
Figure 2 presents a glimpse of cloud-based interactive devices, monitoring screens, and the 1BestariNet datacenter. The mobile lab cart shown in
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FIGURE 2. 1BestariNet leverages a nationwide cloud-based learning platform with the Yes 4G network and the
worlds first 4G-embedded Samsung Chromebook.

Digital Textbook Initiative

The DTI is another government initiative introducing cloud-stored digital textbooks to enable ubiquitous access of study materials to students. DTI
follows a self-education notion in which students
can access textbooks anywhere, anytime, from any
device with the aim of raising the quality of the national education system in Malaysia. However, it
might not progress as expected because some lecturers hesitate to accept paperless digital books as
the primary study material. They believe, you dont
have the feel of reading the book, the flipping of the
pages. The smell of the paper. Its cold electronics
you cannot draw on the iPad like you do with printed textbook.4

struggle to compete with large enterprises because

of their high capital and operation costs, particularly
ownership of ICT infrastructures and software systems. Such emerging markets are expediting cloud
adoption in Malaysia, where cloud vendors play a key
role by providing utility-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) to SMEs.
Enterprises that have adopted the cloud can keep
pace in their operational costs as their businesses
grow with almost no capital investment in ICT.
The SME cloud adoption program introduces
annual incentives of about US$250 to encourage SMEs to adopt SaaS cloud services, including accounting, customer relationship management
(CRM), content management systems (CMS),
e-learning, enterprise resource planning (ERP),
finance, and cloud-based mobile applications provided by local SaaS vendors. As a secondary aim, the
government is enhancing the quantity and quality of
Malaysian-made software products to increase local
jobs and national revenues.

SME Cloud Computing Adoption Program

The SME Cloud Computing Adoption Program is a
government-led nationwide program under Malaysias National ICT initiative that aims to expedite
cloud adoption in Malaysia among local SMEs and
to elevate the competitiveness and efficiency of local
SMEs in doing business. SMEs are rapidly emerging
in Malaysia, and many of them with finite budgets

Research and Development

Public universities and research institutes in Malaysia are also leveraging cloud service adoption to undertake efficient research and development efforts.
Among Malaysian public universities, the University of Malaya has already built a cloud datacenter
based on Open Stack, Microsoft Azure, and similar
cloud platforms that will be available to students

this figure contains 41 Chromebooks and is the

worlds first 4G embedded Chromebook cloud-based
interactive devices manufactured by Samsung and
offered by Yes for daily classroom sessions in Malaysian schools.

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and researchers in the near future. However, effective adoption of cloud services requires thorough revision of networking policies in such institutes and
requires competent staff to run and maintain such a
virtually unified cluster of resources.

Opportunities and Best Practices

Malaysia is one of several countries that are candidates to become a major cloud hub in Southeast Asia
if it can overcome current hurdles, most of which
involve data sovereignty (as a global concern). Political stability, a reliable energy source, high literacy,
English proficiency, government support and flexibility, low natural disaster risk, and relatively low
operational costs compared to neighboring countries
are some of the unique characteristics that make
Malaysia the main cloud hub in the region.
Although cloud adoption growth is fast in less
regulated sectors, its very slow in heavily regulated
ones such as financial services. Speedy cloud adoption in Malaysia needs government support, which
its likely to receive given initiatives such as 1BestariNet, through which the government has shown
a positive attitude toward relaxing regulations for
cloud adoption. It also needs good practices for effective and efficient cloud adoption. The potential
for cloud adoption is applicable to a wide range of
domains, including education, healthcare, agriculture, tourism, banking, and the automotive industry.
In the following sections, we briefly highlight some
of the immediate opportunities and best practices in
adopting cloud services in Malaysia.
Healthcare
Healthcare is one sector in which cloud adoption
can significantly enhance system efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability. The healthcare industry
requires a highly reliable, scalable, and pervasive
platform to connect healthcare providers, patients,
and insurance companies to realize expedient ubiquitous information sharing both nationally and
internationally.
Several government efforts are set to begin in
the near future to provide cloud-based services to
the healthcare industry. For instance, 1Gov*Net is a
secured nationwide ICT network infrastructure that
will soon be integrated with healthcare services to
fulfill the computing resource needs of e-healthcare
systems. IBM Malaysia recently announced the development of a nationwide cloud healthcare infrastructure for a private healthcare service provider
in Malaysia to deliver seamless healthcare services
to more than 2.5 million patient across 20 hospitals
per year.5 In a similar move, eKlinik, a SaaS cloudJ A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5

based healthcare system, aims to deliver real-time

healthcare information to patients, doctors, and
hospitals in Malaysia nationwide. Cloud computing
significantly reduces the capital investment, operational cost, management, and maintenance in the
healthcare sector and delivers unique features such
as cloud-based disaster recovery.
Medical tourism is another initiative by the
Ministry of Health that will be rewarded by cloud
adoption. Here, foreign patients can ask their home
hospitals to share medical history with Malaysian
caregivers. Effective cloud-adopted systems can significantly improve the quality of healthcare delivery
to tourists visiting Malaysia, allowing Malaysian
hospitals to access tourists medical records and insurance details in case of medical emergency.
The best practice for cloud-based healthcare
systems demands federation of on-premise medical
clouds and enabling access to off-premise cloud resources for real-time medical information sharing.
On-premise cloud infrastructures can best satisfy
the security and privacy concerns of sensitive medical data. However, nationally distributed healthcare
institutes require real-time sharing of medical information across entities and with other players of
the domain when people are capable of moving from
one area to another. Therefore, utilizing an integrated middleware that can provide real-time access
to distributed medical clouds is unavoidable. Consolidation and integration of medical services using
futuristic cloud-adopted healthcare platforms in
Malaysia can refine efficiency, quality, accessibility,
and fairness of healthcare delivery regardless of geographical limitations. Furthermore, such a virtually
unified/integrated medical cloud system requires information sharing and a change in the international
scale to enhance quality of diagnostic medicine and
service delivery scope.
Transportation and Automotive Industries
Considering Malaysias key role in regional transportation and its huge number of short- and long-term
visitors (such as tourists, students, and entrepreneurs), the transportation and logistics industry is
one of the most important industries to look to after cloud adoption. For example, MyTeksi is a new
urban taxi navigation system that provides convenient taxi booking via a cloud-based mobile reservation system. Several ongoing projects, started in
2010, aim to achieve a global logistics and freight
transportation hub by 2030; cloud adoption can substantially contribute to successful realization of this
aim.6 However, the cloud potential in this sector remains to be discovered.
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Cloud-based pervasive medical ecosystem

1

Wearable
cardiac
defibrillator

Middleware
Radiological
research center

Heterogenous cloud
computing
resources
Heart attack
information

Davids mobile

M-Health artifacts
Emergency alert!!!
4

Diagnosis center

Cloud-connected
ambulance

FIGURE 3. An exemplary cloud-based pervasive healthcare system: enhancing quality of life by incorporating cloud with
transportation, medical, and mobile computing sectors.

Moreover, enabling the cloud in the automotive industry for car and motorcycle manufacturers, such as Proton, Perodua, and DRB-HICOM, is
critical to realizing enhanced safety, efficiency, and
entertainment to effectively compete in the region
and throughout the world. Employing clouds and
vehicular clouds in developing highly standard complex design, manufacturing, and testing systems and
inventing new intelligent transportation systems and
in-vehicle infotainment can significantly boost safety and enhance the passengers experience, leading
to growth in market share. However, more work is
expected in this industry to set regulation and ensure that manufacturers comply.
For the large multiplicity of users and their mobility in transportation systems, cloud adoption is
slightly different from adoption for immobile users.
Successful cloud adoption in this industry demands
seamless integration of cloud resources, with carmounted computers, on-road infrastructures, and
pervasive devices scattered in urban and rural areas.
Because vehicles are capable of generating electricity for their own consumption, energy poverty of
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car-mounted computers is less important; however,

WAN latency in accessing distant clouds is a major issue. The best practice would be deployment of
federated scattered heterogeneous, granular cloud
datacenters to tackle long WAN latency.
Figure 3 is an example of a cloud-based pervasive healthcare ecosystem that demonstrates how
incorporation of cloud with transportation, medical,
and mobile computing sectors can enhance quality
of life by handling emergency situations. In this scenario, David experiences a heart attack in the park.
His smartphone receives medical information from
the cardiac defibrillator he wears and forwards this
information to the medical cloud while concurrently
contacting an ambulance. The cloud-based intelligent transportation system helps the ambulance
find the shortest and least congested route to David.
On the ambulance, the practitioner accesses Davids medical history via the cloud and updates his
records for the diagnostic centers use. Using a realtime integrated cloud-based medical system, doctors
can get on-time notification and provisioning of essential steps to save David after his heart attack.

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Agriculture Industry
Malaysias agricultural revenue in 2012 is reported
to be as much as $250 million, which is 7.3 percent
of the years gross domestic product (GDP). However, statistics show constant decrements since 2000.7
Factors such as climate change, aging of farmers,
the labor-intensive nature of Malaysias farming, and
pests are among the major reasons for this constant
drop. Cloud adoption can significantly improve agricultures profitability and GDP share in Malaysia.
Cloud-based agriculture and farming spans numerous activities, including agricultural agility, which
reduces time to market and improves user satisfaction; real-time farming information dissemination;
and remote monitoring of yields, resulting in efficient irrigation and effective pest fighting.
The best practice for cloud-based agriculture
is to integrate cloud with wireless sensors and pervasive mobile devices, making significant contributions toward smart farming that can significantly
decrease the farming burden and increase revenue,
given the aging of farmers in Malaysia. Pervasive
mobile farming infrastructures enable farmers, particularly older ones, to monitor and maintain their
farms anywhere, anytime without the need to physically visit the site. Such facilities not only provide
convenience to farmers, but also reduce labor costs
and encourage farmers to manage several plots of
land with varied types of products concurrently.
Tourism Industry
Another promising industry for cloud adoption is
tourism. Malaysia and Thailand have gained solid
positions in the global and regional tourist markets
in the last few years8 and are considered the most
competitive tourism markets in Southeast Asia.
While Malaysia has merely grown in number of
tourists and their receipts since 2010 (about 4 percent), Thailand could significantly increase its market share from 16 million visitors in 2010 to more
than 26 million tourists a year, which is about 67
percent growth. Thailands yearly tourism income
has grown more than 100 percent since 2010, from
US$20 million to US$42, whereas Malaysias tourism income has grown 16 percent, from US$18 to
US$21 million.
Cloud-based tourism could use cloud resources
to encourage tourists to visit hot spots in Malaysia
as well as to provide location-based and contextaware pervasive services for tourists while theyre
in the country. The first use requires that online
enterprises and individuals from all over the country engage in this industry. Such nationwide tourist
service providers can use cloud technologies to run
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their businesses with minimal capital and operation costs.

The best practice for the first use is to promote
online businesses to implement pay-as-you-go cloud
resources and offer miscellaneous pervasive services
to tourists. The government has already proposed
several new initiatives such as Connecting 1Malaysia to accelerate adoption of new online IT services
and cloud technology to increase the number of online individuals/businesses in Malaysia. To realize
the second use, convergence of mobile and pervasive
computers with the cloudthat is, mobile cloud
computing (MCC)9 can be adopted. MCC enables
efficient delivery of real-time resource-intensive
computations such as voice translators (speaking
in native languages), optical character recognition
(reading text in local language), road navigation, and
location-based services to help tourists traveling in
Malaysia. MCC can also realize location-based and
context-aware tourist services.
Its worth mentioning that preserving smartphone resources, particularly battery power, is crucial for tourists. Smartphones have become dominant
service-delivery points for tourists and are currently
used as GPS, cameras, music players, dictionaries,
notepads, and translators. While developing cloudbased mobile tourist systems, consideration must be
given to mitigating temporal and energy overheads by
leveraging lightweight solutions such as hybrid pervasive MCC.10
People Sector
Another niche area for cloud adoption is the people
sector, where individual users utilize cloud services
mainly through their mobile devices. Currently, the
most popular cloud services for users is storage,
such as Dropbox and Google Drive, where people
store their photos, videos, and audio files. However,
the cloud has huge potential in mobile computing,
and its services can augment the computing capabilities of mobile devices as well as personal computers. Using cloud-based resources, mobile users can
run their resource-hungry applications outside their
phones to save computing resources, particularly
the battery, and to perform computations that are
far more complex than their mobile device can support.11 However, long WAN latency (mostly due to
numerous intermediate hops12) for accessing cloud
resources is a serious threat that remarkably decelerates cloud adoption for mobile users.
One way to expedite cloud adoption for mobile users in Malaysia (as well as in the rest of the
world) is to reduce the number of intermediate hops
between mobile and cloud by leveraging proximate
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Although such jurisdictions benefit local entrepreneurs by protecting them from international competition and decelerating the emergence of giant and
reputable cloud service providers in local cloud markets, existing complexities, inconsistencies, and lack
of transparency have impacts on successful cloud
adoption in Malaysia. For instance, where should
multinational companies store their data? Who has
access to and possesses the data? What data is sensitive to cross-border storage? How does data sovereignty impact cloud federation? Answering these
questions and clarifying misunderstandings around
data sovereignty promote better cloud adoption.

FIGURE 4. Erascan is a whiteboard eraser that scans and digitizes whats

written on the board as it erases. Its one example of a domain-specific

technology innovation thats facilitating cloud adoption. (Photo courtesy
of Mimos Berhad.14)

resources, particularly desktops and smartphones.11

Although the profit of mobile application execution
in cloud-based resources might be lower compared
to desktop users, the number of mobile users is increasing at a significantly faster pace.

Challenges
Despite the promise of cloud computing in these
areas, some important challenges hinder its speedy
adoption in Malaysia.
Data Sovereignty
Data sovereignty is the respect for the rights associated with databased on where the entity that has
control of the data resides.2 Governments usually
enforce data sovereignty to limit cross-border storage of (sensitive) data, which limits organizations
to exploiting local datacenters only, whereas external services can be more efficient and affordable. In
the ACCA report on the impact of data sovereignty
on cloud adoption in Asia, Malaysia could secure
eighth position among the 14 Asian countries studied.2 The report reveals that Malaysian lawmakers
enforce data sovereignty because theyre concerned
about data security and loss of control over the data
stored outside the country.
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Competence and Awareness

One of the most vital hurdles in cloud adoption in
Malaysia is the lack of competent cloud engineers,
knowledgeable cloud lawmakers, and service consumers. Reportedly, 20 percent of Malaysian users
havent heard of cloud computing.13 Thus, developing varied technical programs and hands-on workshops for technical staff, decision makers, and
lawmakers in addition to cloud-awareness programs
for public users needs quick momentum in Malaysia. Some Malaysians might be familiar with the
concept of utility computing, but knowledge is limited, and leading universities and academic institutes must take the lead in educating and training
on cloud computing concepts and application. Gaining insight into the advantages, disadvantages, and
implications of adopting the cloud for stakeholders,
including lawmakers and service consumers, is a
significant need.
Results from recent interviews with parents
and school teachers undertaken in a few schools in
Sabah (northeast Malaysia) that are using the 1BestariNet educational platform suggest that parents
arent prepared to transition from traditional learning to cloud-based e-learning because they believe
computers are for entertainment rather than education.4 The interview revealed a series of hurdles (for
example, essential training, health and safety hazards such as the impact of using a smartphone for
several hours on a childs eyesight, impact on social
relationships, and nonintuitive interaction technology) that must first be overcome. One way to do so is
to train parents by demonstrating the potential and
usefulness of supervised cloud-based educational
materials and informing them about successful experiences in other countries.
Domain-Specific Technologies
Developing domain-specific technologies whose
cloud integration can enable efficient and effective

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utilization of cloud-based resources among users requires a great deal of research and development in
Malaysia and the rest of the world. Successful cloud
adoption requires delivery of cloud-based services
to a range of users with different skill sets, principles, and expectations. For example, one problem
in cloud-based educational systems is the lack of efficient interaction between trainees and e-learning
systems that inhibits development of writing skills
among students. The Apen A3 Smart Pen (www
.apenusa.com/products) is a domain-specific technology that can be integrated into cloud-based education systems, such as 1BestariNet, to improve
interaction and learning effectiveness among students. Erascan (see Figure 4) digitizes content as
its erased from the class whiteboard.14 Inventing
such domain-specific and cost-effective technologies
across domains is the key to successful cloud adoption worldwide.
Security, Privacy, and Trust
Security and privacy are major concerns impeding
cloud deployment in Malaysia that can also impact
global cloud adoption. The most significant issue is
comprehending and then minimizing the risks associated with cloud deployment. This problem is more
significant in off-premise clouds, where contents are
stored on the cloud vendors premises. Although data
owners have full control over the infrastructure,
hardware resources, and software systems with their
traditional physical servers or on-premise clouds, its
nontrivial to enforce the risk of letting contents stay
in a third-party premises. In this situation, the data
owner has limited access to monitor his or her property in the virtual servers in the absence of advanced
and detailed cloud-monitoring tools. In addition
to security threats from cyberattacks and privacy
violations, information disclosure from government
agencies is another challenge that decelerates cloud
adoption. Last year, Google positively responded to
a majority of about 27,477 information disclosure
requests by the US government.15 Efforts to ensure
safety of user property on the vendors premises,
minimizing security risks, and directing user privacy
issues are critical to cloud adoption in Malaysia.

everal of the cloud adoption initiatives and the

benefits discussed in this article can be a driving force for other regional and global countries to
deploy cloud technology to not only shrink their
capital ownership and maintenance expenses but
also to expedite the deployment process. Moreover,
such on-demand elastic computing resources pave
J A N U A R Y/ F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5

the way for emergence of big data analytics for improving areas such as utility services, business intelligence, and security on a national scope.

Acknowledgments
This work was funded by the Malaysian Ministry of
Higher Education under the University of Malaya
High Impact Research Grant UM.C/625/1/HIR/
MOE/FCSIT/03.
References
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_GlobalCloudScorecard2013.pdf.
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3. A. Kumar, Malaysian Cloud Investment Could
Touch US$900m by 2020, ComputerWorld Malaysia, 1 Nov. 2013; http://www.cio-asia.com/tech/
cloud-computing/malaysian-cloud-investment
-could-touch-us900m-by-2020.
4. L.S. Yin, Digitalizing the Malaysian Classroom:
Barriers, Insights, and Feasibility, Malaysian J.
Media Studies, vol. 15, no. 1, 2013, pp. 7590.
5. IBM and KPJ Healthcare Berhad Build Nationwide Cloud Infrastructure for Improved Medical
Services, press release, IBM Malaysia, 12 May
2014; www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/
43896.wss.
6. Transportation Blueprint 20102030 for Iskandar
Malaysia, tech. report, Iskandar Regional Development Authority, 2011; www.iskandarmalaysia
.com.my/pdf/blueprint/Transportation-Blueprint
.pdf.
7. Selected Agricultural Indicator, tech report, Department of Statistics, Malaysia, 2013; www
.statistics.gov.my/portal/download_Agriculture/
files/Selected_Agricultural_Indicators_Malaysia
_2013.pdf.
8. UNWTO Tourism Highlights, report, UN World
Tourism Organization, 2014; www.e-unwto.org/
content/r13521/fulltext.pdf.
9. Z. Sanaei et al., Heterogeneity in Mobile Cloud
Computing: Taxonomy and Open Challenges,
IEEE Comm. Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 16, no. 1,
2014, pp. 369392.
10. Z. Sanaei et al., Hybrid Pervasive Mobile Cloud
Computing: Toward Enhancing Invisibility, InformationAn Intl Interdisciplinary J., vol. 16,
no. 11, 2013, pp. 81458156.
11. S. Abolfazli et al., Cloud-Based Augmentation
for Mobile Devices: Motivation, Taxonomies,
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and Open Challenges, IEEE Comm. Surveys &

Tutorials, vol. 16, no.1, 2014, pp. 337368.
12. S. Abolfazli et al., An Experimental Analysis on
Cloud-based Mobile Augmentation in Mobile
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13. F.F. Moghaddam, O. Karimi, and M. Hajivali, A
Survey for Effectiveness and Influence Rate of
Cloud Computing Services in Malaysia, Proc.
IEEE 11th Malaysia Intl Conf. Comm. (MICC
13), 2013, pp. 283286.
14. Annual Report 2011, MIMOS, 2011; www.mimos
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_AnnualReport2011.pdf.
15. B. Bailey, Google, Yahoo Report Government Data
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google-yahoo-report-government-data-demands.

SAEID ABOLFAZLI is a technical lead and data

scientist at YTL Communications, Malaysia, and
Xchanging Asia Pacific, where he leads R&D activities in wireless networking and mobile computing.
His research interests include mobile and cloud computing. Abolfazli has a PhD in computer science and
IT from the University of Malaya. Hes a member of
IEEE. Contact him at abolfazli@ieee.org.
ZOHREH SANAEI is a technical lead and data scientist at YTL Communications, Malaysia, and Xchanging
Asia Pacific, where she leads scientific R&D activities.
Her research interests include heterogeneity in mobile
and cloud computing, wireless computing, and serviceoriented computing. Sanaei has a PhD in computer
science from the University of Malaya. Shes a member
of IEEE. Contact her at sanaei@ieee.org.

ALI TABASSI is the chief operating officer at YTL

Communications, Malaysia. His professional interests

include the development, integration, and operation

of wireless solutions in the telecommunications, networking, and IP industries. Tabassi has an MBA in
electrical engineering and mathematics.

STEVEN ROSEN is director of IT at YTL Communications and the chief information officer at
Xchanging, Malaysia. His professional interests include architecting and leading technology teams and
managing datacenter operations in the healthcare,
banking, and insurance and capital markets business
sectors. Contact him at steven.rosen@ytlcomms.my.

ABDULLAH GANI is a professor of computer science at the University of Malaya, director of the Center for Mobile Cloud Computing Research, and a
visiting professor at King Saud University, Riyadh. His
research interests include self-organized systems, reinforcement learning, wireless-related networks, lightweight mobile cloud computing, and big data. Gani
has a PhD in computer science from the University
of Sheffield. Hes a senior member of IEEE. Contact
him at abdullah@um.edu.my.
SAMEE U. KHAN is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Dakota State
University. His research interests include optimization,
robustness, and security of cloud, grid, cluster and big
data computing, social networks, wired and wireless
networks, power systems, smart grids, and optical networks. Khan has a PhD in computer science from the
University of Texas, Arlington. Hes a senior member of
IEEE. Contact him at samee.khan@ndsu.edu.

Selected CS articles and columns are also available

for free at http://ComputingNow.computer.org.

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