Malaysian technology firm Dagang NeXchange (DNeX) and Google Cloud have announced a multi-year deal to provide sovereign cloud services in the country.
Under the agreement, DNeX will be authorised by Google Cloud to operate Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) as a Managed GDC Provider (MGP), with a focus on air-gapped configurations for organisations in Malaysia. This means that GDC, as a Google Sovereign Cloud solution, operates entirely within the customer’s chosen environment, requiring no connectivity to a Google Cloud region or the public internet,
MGPs are strategic partners that collaborate with Google Cloud to drive the adoption of GDC air-gapped, by providing expert deployment, operational, and managed services to end customers.
The partners strongly emphasise that this strategic partnership addresses the country’s growing demand for cloud solutions that meet strict data residency, security and privacy requirements, particularly within regulated industries like public services, financial services, healthcare and energy.
This, they explain, will enable organisations in Malaysia to accelerate their digital transformations with best-in-class AI and analytics capabilities, while offering data sovereignty, operational sovereignty and software sovereignty.
DNeX will offer deployment options for Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped on-premises or within partner data centres, with flexible hardware options – including general-purpose central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs) – to address organisations’ specific workload requirements.
Through GDC, DNeX will also provide organisations in regulated industries with access to Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s enterprise AI platform. GDC also allows organisations to use Gemma, Google’s family of open AI models, and Google Cloud’s pre-trained models for speech recognition, translation, and optical character recognition (OCR) – with support for more than 100 languages, including Bahasa Malaysia – in an air-gapped environment.
In addition DNeX and Google Cloud say they are exploring the creation of an AI Centre of Excellence (CoE). An AI CoE will help upskill Malaysians and DNeX’s workforce in particular. This will enable the group to embed enterprise-ready AI into all its line of businesses. DNeX also plans to integrate large language models (LLMs) into its key IT services offering.
Google Cloud’s strategic partnership with DNeX builds on Google Cloud’s previously announced plans to establish its first Google data centre and Google Cloud region in Malaysia.