In addition to that, the new regulation also aims to provide legal protection for consumers and public agencies. It will be put in place starting from 1 January 2022 and applies to local cloud service providers as well as international companies that maintain an official presence in Malaysia. For international CSP that does not have a local presence but provide cloud services to end-users in Malaysia via a local data centre, the data centre will be the one that has to apply for the licence. 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. Since the ASP (C) licence is valid for only one year, this means CSPs and data centre operators have to submit renewal applications on 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. (Source: MCMC, KKMM / Facebook. Images: MCMC, Exabytes, NTT)