Utilizing Microsoft technologies to empower customers’ digital transformation

• At the recent Bersama Malaysia: Microsoft Cloud Summit 2022, Microsoft highlighted how the Microsoft Cloud is enabling companies and organizations from various industries to accomplish more.
• Organizations can better understand threat actor activities thanks to Microsoft’s new security solutions.

Microsoft launched the Bersama Malaysia initiative in April 2021 as a demonstration of its mission to enable every individual and organization to achieve more. This highlights its ongoing commitment and partnership with Malaysia to support the development of the country’s inclusive and sustainable digital economy.

The firm made three commitments when it first unveiled Bersama Malaysia last year:

• Open Malaysia’s first Microsoft data center region
• Equip 1 million more Malaysians with digital skills by the end of 2023
• Leverage the MyDigital Alliance Leadership Council to accelerate the pace of the country’s digital transformation

“Our commitment under Bersama Malaysia has changed for more than a year. The project has grown to include other growth sectors essential to our country’s transition to the digital economy. We are seeing more interest in technology today than ever before, whether it be for empowering digital natives and startups through our partnership with Cradle, equipping SMEs with skills and technology along with our partners, or the acceleration of AI adoption,” said Datin Lim Bee Wah, general manager of Microsoft Malaysia’s Small, Medium & Corporate (SMC) Group.

The company showed how Microsoft Cloud enables companies and organizations from various industries to achieve more at the recent Bersama Malaysia: Microsoft Cloud Summit 2022.

To provide its consumers with a better experience, local real estate firm Sime Darby Property upgraded its infrastructure by migrating its servers and core apps to Microsoft Azure. Similarly, the telecommunications firm Celcom Axiata Berhad evaluated its current infrastructure using Microsoft’s Cloud Adoption Framework before migrating its workloads to Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure helped Celcom accelerate innovation while also reducing costs and fostering agility. It also offered a more secure data ecosystem. Future-focused PETRONAS and Celcom are two critical tenants announced for Microsoft’s forthcoming Malaysian data center region.

AI is the future and beyond

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already altering our surroundings and will also change how organizations work in the future.

For instance, the energy company PETRONAS uses BakerHughesC3.ai’s technology, which Microsoft Azure supports, to increase productivity, asset integrity, and safety for its oil and gas operations. Aiming to accelerate the adoption of AI solutions and raise the effectiveness, dependability, and safety of its energy value chain, PETRONAS has also announced the opening of an AI Centre of Excellence in conjunction with international partners, including Microsoft.

Meanwhile, the largest expressway service provider in the country, PLUS Malaysia Berhad, started its digital transformation with Microsoft in 2019. By creating tools and apps to automate time-consuming manual operations, PLUS, which had previously relied on manual procedures and paper forms, increased operational efficiency while decreasing expenses.

PLUS had had trouble with legacy applications that were challenging to develop and demanded advanced programming abilities. The non-technical teams at PLUS were given the ability to construct business apps quickly by using a low-code Microsoft Power Platform, promoting a culture of continuous innovation.

Microsoft Malaysia secures everyone and everything

Knowing how the data is utilized, stored, and managed is essential in shifting your data to the cloud. Security teams struggle to manage risk more the more agile hackers become. Although cybercrime has changed significantly over time and continues to do so, cybersecurity strategies have mostly remained the same.

Because of this, Celcom has adopted a proactive strategy to combat the changing threat landscape. Since starting to use Microsoft Defender for Office 365 for attack simulation training, Celcom’s technical staff has been able to automate 70% of the time-consuming manual simulation-creation tasks. The company set out to improve its culture through awareness and training initiatives, and as a result, employees’ knowledge of potential cyber threats has hugely increased.

Further, they recently unveiled new security solutions to assist enterprises in locking down their infrastructure while lowering their entire attack surface, giving them a richer context on threat actor activities – Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management and Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence.

“All the work that we do here in Malaysia and for all Malaysians are guided by our mission to empower every person and every organization on this planet to achieve more. We remain steadfast in our partnership to enable every Malaysian individual and business to leverage our expertise and capabilities in technology to power our countries’ inclusive economic growth and resilience in the digital era,” concluded Lim.

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