By Vaughan Woods, Regional Vice President, South Asia, Akamai
According to the Malaysian Internet Exchange (MyIX), the country’s Internet bandwidth consumption has more than doubled in the first six months of 2014 compared to the same period last year.
Meanwhile, the number of Internet users in Malaysia is expected to grow from to 25 million in 2015, according to the Finance Ministry’s Economic Report 2013/2014 .
With the Internet becoming increasingly pervasive in our modern society, the government’s Digital Malaysia national programme will be a key cornerstone in advancing the country towards a developed digital economy by 2020.
By connecting communities and allowing them to interact in real time, Digital Malaysia’s goals are to increase Malaysia’s Gross National Income, enhance productivity and improve the standards of living for all Malaysians.
However, several factors must converge to create a superlative online experience for the Malaysian netizen and to move the nation towards the fullest realisation of a Digital Malaysia.
Delivering a Superior Online Experience
Foremost among these is delivering a consistently superior online experience across the heterogeneous complexity of the Internet. Today’s users expect instant, reliable, and secure access to information and services from any location on any device they choose.
One of the best ways for organisations and the public sector to address dynamic user needs is with a situational solution that combines web delivery, acceleration and optimisation technologies. This combination allows a situational performance solution to make real-time decisions and intelligently apply optimisation regardless of the device, network, location and browser to deliver reliable, fast and secure online experiences.
For example: a user in a video call steps into a lift and their network connection is degraded; the solution would automatically reduce the video quality to ensure uninterrupted real-time flow of conversation and restore the higher definition when the user exits the lift.
Another way to ensure a superior online experience is to leverage cloud-based infrastructure solutions to accelerate web performance. These solutions can cache content in locations closer to the users and also scale to meet surges in online traffic. A great example of how this kind of solution can help business was the recent 24-hour “Single’s Day” international online sale hosted by Alibaba on 11 November 2014. The sale saw Alibaba record 278 million orders that totalled USD9.3 billion, with 42.6 percent of transactions made using mobile devices .
Despite underestimating the size of the surge in traffic and increased number of transactions they would need to process, Alibaba successfully harnessed scalable cloud solutions and intelligent situational performance solutions to ensure they delivered fast and responsive user experiences to customers all across the world.
Delivering Rich Media
Cloud-based solutions are also key to delivering rich media to users who expect instant access to media content on any screen and at the quality they expect. An effective content delivery solution should scale with the audience and address the ever-growing demand for faster access and higher throughput across a myriad of devices.
Once again, intelligence can be harnessed to automatically apply optimisations to meet the delivery needs of specific content types, e.g. large file downloads and live and on-demand streaming videos, and to deliver this content to any device, regardless of screen size and operating system, and the network it is on.
Comprehensive analytics in a content delivery solution ensures that the organisation has insight into the quality of experience (QoE) their users are receiving. This information can be critical to ensuring business success in industries that deliver online gaming or streaming video content.
Delivering IT Security
In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in the sophistication, magnitude and severity of attacks launched on websites and applications. As organisations rely more and more on the Internet for their mission-critical data and operations, they are increasingly challenged to ensure security for the enterprise and their end users, while pursuing the highest levels of performance.
To combat the on-going proliferation of cyberthreats, enterprises need a multi-layered defence architecture that can protect their perimeter against potential attacks. This protection needs to extend beyond the boundaries of their infrastructure and across the Internet to the very edge of the network itself.
To this end, it would be prudent for Malaysian businesses and the public sector to work with reputable Internet security specialists. In selecting a security partner, organisations should look for companies that not only have the specialised expertise but also the infrastructure to detect, identify and mitigate fast-changing online threats even before they can reach their target, which in return ensures uninterrupted website availability and performance even during an on-going attack.
Digital Malaysia is a grand programme that will not only accelerate Malaysia’s transformation into a high-income economy, but that will position the nation to take a leading role in the hyperconnected world that is emerging all around us.
Sound planning will ensure this bright future for all Malaysians.
