The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) will be implementing a light touch regulation on cloud services that are operating in Malaysia starting 1 January 2022.
The regulation involves Cloud service providers (CSPs) in Malaysia to apply for a licence from MCMC.
The office’s Minister, Tan Sri Annuar Musa had in a statement said that MCMC has taken into consideration the views of local and foreign industries who were concerned about the regulatory impact on investment in the cloud service sector, including operating costs.
Meanwhile, Annuar said the cloud service licensing under the Application Service Provider Class [‘ASP (C)’] licence which was liberalised in 2012 allowing foreign shareholding of up to 100% with a registration fee of RM2,500 a year only.
He also said through the light touch regulation, MCMC will have the opportunity to work with service provides to produce regulatory instruments such as technical codes as well as standard operating procedures (SOPs) on data security and protection based on international benchmarks.
He added that adhering to the regulation is important to ensure data security, data privacy data protection and user data flow that is essential to create a stable and uniform cloud services that create trusted and secure environment.
In its FAQ, MCMC defines cloud services as “any service made available to end-users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider’s server.”
Nonetheless, this regulation will not only apply to local cloud service providers, but for international companies that maintain an official presence in Malaysia as well.
As for international CSP that does not have a local presence but provide to end-users in Malaysia via a local data centre, they will be required to apply for the licence too.
The specific type of licence that all these CSPs and data centre operators have to obtain from MCMC is the ASP (C) which belongs to the regulator’s Applications Service Providers class licence.
The ASP (C) licence is valid only for a year, which means CSPs and data centre operators will have to renew their licence on an annual basis.
However, this new policy does not apply to web hosting and client server services which have been exempted from the class licence requirement for the past 21 years through the Communications and Multimedia (Licensing) (Exemption) Order 2000.
Read the statement from MCMC here:
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