TIME dotCom Berhad (TIME) subsidiary AVM Cloud Sdn Bhd (AVM Cloud) has been growing strongly for the past decade and, today, is one of Malaysia’s leading cloud players on par – and even better – than some international brand names.
This is because the company is helmed by strong leadership and management committed to empowering customers with the ability to innovate faster in a multi-cloud world, hence helping them realise greater productivity, profitability and operational efficiencies.
For a start, the company’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a robust private cloud that is offered in both multi-tenant and dedicated versions that integrate with the company’s public and hybrid cloud solutions.
AVM Cloud also offers a “Cloud-in-a-Box” version of its private cloud that resides on customers’ premises.
“The value proposition of Cloud-in-a-Box is the empowerment for organisations to have the ‘best of both worlds’,” said AVM Cloud Chief Executive Officer David Chan (left in above pic).
“Customers are empowered with a fully customizable hybrid cloud environment with a “pay-as-you-go, pay-as-you-grow” OPEX (operational expenditure) model, enabling them to scale as when the need arises,” he added.
“What’s more, their data will be stored in a Tier 3 Datacentre with some of the strictest certifications (PCI DSS, ISO, ISMS) in AVM Cloud, providing them with top notch security with 24/7 support reachable in multiple forms of contact.”
The components included in AVM’s Cloud-in-a-Box include servers, storage resources, an operating system, virtualization software and the company’s management utilities.
Meanwhile, the company’s Chief Technology Officer Kenny Lim (right in pic) shared that, in recent years, one of Malaysia’s largest banks deployed its Cloud-in-a-Box offering and realised substantial savings.
“The OPEX model enables organisations to manage their IT expenditure,” said Kenny. “The true business value of having a OPEX model is for IT operations be more agile, as the traditional CAPEX (capital expenditure) model results in organisations having high upfront costs and buying for maximum workload.”
AVM Cloud-in-a-Box – now in Generation 2
“With our Cloud-in-a-Box, there is no huge investments needed, and it comes fully equipped with with AVM Cloud Managed Services together with a Flexible Infrastructure Model,” said Kenny.
“With this value proposition, our customers have been able to realise cost savings, not having to hire numerous experts (hardware, network, security) to maintain the IT infrastructure, and embark on tech refresh exercise to replace legacy systems with the latest and most powerful ones.”
The success of the AVM Cloud-in-a-Box has resulted in the company announcing ‘Generation 2’ recently. Essentially, it another deployment option for customers to choose from.
Generation 2 provides the same architecture as its predecessor is an ‘all in one’ solution where AVM Cloud Management is deployed together with the customer compute cluster.
For Generation 2, the management cluster is no longer deployed on-premise with compute cluster, but instead is now deployed in an AVM Cloud data centre.
“This frees up more resources on the customer’s end, allowing for better cost-efficiencies,” said Kenny, adding that the Gen 2 compute cluster will be connected using a dedicated private lease line.
Generation 2’s benefits include customers being able to stay up-to-date with AVM Cloud’s product service offerings, where it is deployed in marketplace, cost optimisation when compared to Generation 1 – but with the same promise of reliable scalability and resiliency.
Kenny shared that the company is constantly listening to each customer’s unique needs so that they can provide the optimal solution for their IT requirements.
“For example, we successfully deployed the AVM Cloud for a customer that wanted to use it for the deep analytics needed to better understand its consumers and to fine-tune its strategies for new competitive products. The use cases for the cloud are as diverse as the clients we serve.”
A common theme among all of AVM’s customers is a strong desire to lower their software and hardware costs, as well as the capital expenditure required to operate their own data centres.
“As we are part of the TIME Group, our private and public cloud platforms are housed within secure hyperscale data centres under our sibling company, AIMS Data Centre Sdn Bhd (AIMS), thereby improving operational efficiency and agility for successful deployment of any cloud strategy,” said Kenny.
AIMS offers co-location, managed services and disaster recovery offerings from its interlinked data centres in Kuala Lumpur, Cyberjaya, Bangkok and multiple key cities in Vietnam. “With over two decades of industry experience, AIMS has grown into one of Southeast Asia’s most established, trusted and respected data centre operators,” said Kenny.
“In addition, TIME’s converged network streamlines and simplifies the infrastructure by interconnecting with global service providers and virtualised network services over cloud platforms via Malaysia’s first-ever horizontal network function virtualisation (NFVi) architecture so that organisations can optimise connections both locally and globally.”
Kenny also emphasised that data sovereignty and performance requirements principles should always be adhered to. “This is particularly important for customers from the public sector and financial services segments.”
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach, explained Kenny.
“For customers in industries such as oil and gas, manufacturing and others, some of them may only wish to have their non-critical data/workload to be moved to cloud while still having total ownership of their critical data/workload within the on-premise data centres.”
“We respect their choices – which is why we are strong proponents of having a hybrid cloud approach which promises greater control over resource management, being able to deploy applications faster and stronger security implementation and execution,” said Kenny.
Now with AVM’s Cloud-in-a-Box, customers have the choice of a private cloud solution that can be quickly or instantly provisioned, deployed and integrated within an IT environment or organisation.
“It enables the delivery of a complete private cloud solution in a relatively short period of time,” said Kenny.
“It is the perfect compromise for a dynamic cloud-like environment and workloads requiring close proximity with users and other infrastructure components, which make it extremely suitable for companies or government bodies that are required to fulfil regulations and compliances.”
