When Maxis Berhad moved its mission-critical workloads from Amazon Web Services’ Singapore Region to the AWS Malaysia Region in early February, the significance went beyond one telco’s infrastructure decision. It was a statement about how far Malaysia’s cloud ecosystem has come—and where it might be heading.
The telecommunications provider migrated 100% of its digital workloads, including the customer-facing Maxis and Hotlink apps, which serve millions of users, making it the first Malaysian telco to trust the AWS Malaysia Region with systems that cannot afford to fail.
For an industry where uptime is non-negotiable and latency directly impacts customer experience, this represents a fundamental shift in cloud strategy.
The Singapore default
For years, Malaysian enterprises have defaulted to AWS Singapore Region for mission-critical workloads. The logic was straightforward: Singapore’s cloud infrastructure was proven, battle-tested, and offered the redundancy that risk-averse IT teams demanded. Malaysia, despite its digital economy ambitions, simply didn’t have the same track record.
That calculation appears to be changing. The AWS Malaysia Region, which launched in August 2024, has matured quickly enough for Maxis to bet its core operations on it. The telco’s internal cloud engineering team led the migration, demonstrating technical confidence in both the platform and their ability to execute the transition without disrupting service.
The operational benefits are tangible. Hosting workloads locally reduces latency, which translates to faster app response times—critical for digital services where milliseconds matter in user retention. More significantly for Maxis’ balance sheet, eliminating cross-region data traffic removes a recurring cost burden. Cloud providers charge for data transfer between regions, and for a telco handling millions of customer interactions daily, those charges add up.
Data sovereignty meets digital infrastructure
Maxis CIO Ng May Ching framed the migration around data sovereignty, noting the company is “securing our data within Malaysia’s borders while improving efficiency to better serve our customers.” It’s positioning that aligns neatly with Malaysia’s broader digital agenda under the Madani Economy Framework, which emphasises local innovation and data residency.
But data sovereignty is more complex than geographic hosting. While keeping data in Malaysia addresses residency requirements and may improve public trust, questions about data control and access—particularly under US legal frameworks like the CLOUD Act that apply to American tech companies—remain relevant considerations for enterprises evaluating their cloud strategies.
What’s less ambiguous is the signal this sends to other Malaysian enterprises. If a telecommunications provider—an industry with stringent uptime requirements and regulatory compliance needs—trusts AWS Malaysia Region for mission-critical workloads, other sectors may follow.
Financial services, healthcare, and government agencies all face similar pressures around data residency, operational efficiency, and digital transformation.
What this means for the industry
Maxis isn’t just a cloud customer; it’s also an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and AWS Direct Connect Partner in Malaysia. This dual role positions the telco to guide other businesses through similar migrations, potentially accelerating enterprise adoption of AWS Malaysia Region across sectors.
Prateek Pashine, Maxis’ Chief Enterprise Business Officer, emphasised this angle: “Navigating local cloud migration for our own operations reinforces our ability to help Malaysian businesses achieve the same outcome.”
The subtext is clear—Maxis sees a business opportunity in enterprise cloud migration, leveraging its own experience as proof of concept.
For AWS, Maxis’ migration validates the nearly US$6.2 billion investment it’s making in Malaysia through 2038. Hussein Mohd Ali, AWS Malaysia Country Manager, described telecommunications networks as “the unseen infrastructure that keeps Malaysia’s digital economy running,” positioning the migration as evidence that AWS Malaysia Region can handle the most demanding workloads.
The question now is whether other Malaysian telcos—CelcomDigi, U Mobile, TM—will follow suit, or if competitive considerations around cloud strategy will keep some anchored to Singapore for redundancy.
There’s also the matter of disaster recovery planning: how enterprises balance the cost savings and sovereignty benefits of local hosting against the risks of regional concentration.
The bigger picture
Maxis’ migration is part of a broader pattern across Southeast Asia, where hyperscale cloud providers are racing to establish local regions to meet enterprise demand for data residency and lower latency.
AWS Malaysia Region joins existing AWS infrastructure in Singapore, Jakarta, and Hong Kong, reflecting the platform’s recognition that one regional hub won’t suffice as enterprises become more sophisticated about where their data lives.
For Malaysian enterprises watching this unfold, Maxis’s move raises practical questions about their own cloud strategies: Are workloads still defaulting to Singapore out of habit rather than necessity? Have internal risk assessments kept pace with improvements in AWS Malaysia Region’s capabilities?
And critically, what’s the true cost-benefit analysis of cross-region hosting when local alternatives have matured? The answers will shape not just individual company cloud strategies, but Malaysia’s position in the regional digital economy.
If AWS Malaysia Region proves capable of handling telco-scale workloads reliably, it removes a significant barrier to enterprise cloud adoption and strengthens the case for keeping digital infrastructure—and its economic value—within national borders.
Source: https://techwireasia.com/2026/02/aws-malaysia-region-maxis-migration-telco-enterprise-cloud/
