Internet Alliance lauds the ‘Cloud-First’ strategy for government agencies and public sector to boost the digital economy. Announced by the Prime Minister just before the upcoming Budget 2018, Cloud-First will become part of the National Agenda, starting with the public sector.
The Cloud-First strategy involves the adoption of cloud for government agencies to rapidly deliver innovative public sector services without incurring high levels of capital expenditure to invest in the IT infrastructure, such as data centres, services and storage.
“We are thrilled that the government recognises how the cloud is fundamental to digital transformation. It has become a powerful and cost-efficient method to deliver ICT solutions and services to support the economy. Therefore, prioritising government agencies to adopt cloud-based ICT solutions sets a strong example of how to be free from the high costs of initial equipment investments,” states Chan Kee Siak, President of IA.
At the same time, Chan calls on the government to consider lowering or exempting withholding tax for local organisations wanting to adopt cloud or other digital services.
“If the ‘Cloud-First’ strategy is to be a successful National Agenda, there should be economic incentive to boost it too. By lowering or even abolishing additional withholding tax for Malaysian businesses, they will feel incentivised to accelerate their adoption of cloud-based services and digital services,” he continues.
Apart from that, Chan also encourages the local government agencies and businesses to engage services from local Malaysian cloud providers, be it software-as-a-service (SaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud models.
