CLOUD ADOPTION

Cloud Adoption in Malaysia: Trends, Opportunities, and Challenges

Saeid Abolfazli, Zohreh Sanaei, Ali Tabassi, and Steven Rosen, YTL Communications and Xchanging, MalaysiaAbdullah Gani, University of Malaya Samee U. Khan, North Dakota State University

Global cloud adoption creates opportunities and challenges. This article surveys opportunities and challenges the Malaysian Government faced in adopting cloud to inspire and encourage cloud adoption.

loud computing’s unique features, including the low capital investment, reduced total cost of ownership, high availability, elastic scalability, and lower complexity compared to traditional high-performance com-

puting models, have made it the predominant ICT platform over the last few years. The cloud is rapidly being adopted in numerous domains worldwide, in-cluding education, healthcare, commerce, tourism, and scientifi c computing.

Leading technological and industrial countries are rapidly adopting the cloud to not only shrink their computing costs but also to expedite and opti-

mize computing processes and time to market. How-ever, many factors, including enabler technologies, IT friendliness, fi nancial wealth, geographical loca-tion, and political stability, impact cloud adoption worldwide, leaving various countries with noticeably different cloud adoption rates. BSA|The Software Alliance analyzed cloud readiness rates across the globe to gain insights into adoption rates, challeng-es, and possible solutions to expedite cloud adop-tion in different countries.1 In 2011, the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA) began analyzing and publishing an annual cloud readiness index of 14 countries in Asia—Japan, New Zealand, Austra-lia, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan,

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Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam.2 The aim is to identify the po-tential and challenges of cloud adoption and sug-gest solutions to the problem with the help of major cloud vendors, government cloud stakeholders, deci-sion makers, and cloud consumers.

As the largest and most heavily populated con-tinent with giant movements toward technology adoption, Asia has signifi cant potential for adopting cloud technology. Among Asian countries, Malay-sia has shown noticeable interest in adopting cloud computing in various sectors to not only become a leading country in this paradigm shift but also to rapidly meet increasing computing demands in vari-ous sectors. According to the BSA cloud readiness report, Malaysia ranks 13th among 24 countries in readiness to adopt cloud technology.1 It could also secure eighth place among the 14 Asian countries studied by ACCA.

Emerging Trends and LandscapeIn Malaysia, deploying cloud-based ICT solutions has become the most important trend and is expected to grow from US$43 million in 2012 to about US$900 million by 2020.3 The cloud market in Malaysia isn’t mature, but it’s growing rapidly. Figure 1 shows the results of a search for “cloud computing” related to Malaysia and to the entire globe for the period Janu-ary 2011 to August 2014. A comparative view of the results suggests a close match between Malaysia and

global cloud computing, especially after mid-2010, which indicates that Malaysian interest in the cloud is similar to that of countries worldwide. A decreas-ing trend in Google search results after mid-2011 sug-gests pervasive penetration of cloud computing into various aspects of human life..

Malaysian government cloud stakeholders and public and private institutes have recently initiated efforts to promote adoption of cloud services in gov-ernment organization and small and medium enter-prises (SMEs).

1BestariNet1BestariNet is a cloud-based education platform ini-tiated by the Malaysian Ministry of Education and implemented by YTL Communications. The 1Be-stariNet infrastructure includes 1,000 CPU cores to enable ubiquitous access of a variety of cloud-based education services to a large number of us-ers, including approximately 500,000 teachers and administrators, 5 million students, and 4.5 million parents nationwide. Educational materials are avail-able to more than 10,000 schools via a 4G wireless network. The preferred and default interacting de-vice is a Samsung Chromebook bundled with the Yes 4G network provided by YTL Communications, although other options are also available.

Figure 2 presents a glimpse of cloud-based in-teractive devices, monitoring screens, and the 1Be-stariNet datacenter. The mobile lab cart shown in

Malaysia searchesGlobal searches

Aug2009

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FIGURE 1. Results from a Google search for “cloud computing” in Malaysia and worldwide. Search results

from Malaysia closely follow those of other countries worldwide, indicating that Malaysian interest in the

cloud is similar

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this figure contains 41 Chromebooks and is the world’s first 4G embedded Chromebook cloud-based interactive devices manufactured by Samsung and offered by Yes for daily classroom sessions in Malay-sian schools.

Digital Textbook InitiativeThe DTI is another government initiative introduc-ing cloud-stored digital textbooks to enable ubiq-uitous access of study materials to students. DTI follows a self-education notion in which students can access textbooks anywhere, anytime, from any device with the aim of raising the quality of the na-tional education system in Malaysia. However, it might not progress as expected because some lec-turers hesitate to accept paperless digital books as the primary study material. They believe, “you don’t have the feel of reading the book, the flipping of the pages. The smell of the paper. It’s cold electronics you cannot draw on the iPad like you do with print-ed textbook.”4

SME Cloud Computing Adoption ProgramThe SME Cloud Computing Adoption Program is a government-led nationwide program under Malay-sia’s National ICT initiative that aims to expedite cloud adoption in Malaysia among local SMEs and to elevate the competitiveness and efficiency of local SMEs in doing business. SMEs are rapidly emerging in Malaysia, and many of them with finite budgets

struggle to compete with large enterprises because of their high capital and operation costs, particularly ownership of ICT infrastructures and software sys-tems. Such emerging markets are expediting cloud adoption in Malaysia, where cloud vendors play a key role by providing utility-based infrastructure as a ser-vice (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) to SMEs. Enterprises that have adopted the cloud can keep pace in their operational costs as their businesses grow with almost no capital investment in ICT.

The SME cloud adoption program introduces annual incentives of about US$250 to encour-age SMEs to adopt SaaS cloud services, includ-ing accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), content management systems (CMS), e-learning, enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance, and cloud-based mobile applications pro-vided by local SaaS vendors. As a secondary aim, the government is enhancing the quantity and quality of Malaysian-made software products to increase local jobs and national revenues.

Research and DevelopmentPublic universities and research institutes in Malay-sia are also leveraging cloud service adoption to un-dertake efficient research and development efforts. Among Malaysian public universities, the Univer-sity of Malaya has already built a cloud datacenter based on Open Stack, Microsoft Azure, and similar cloud platforms that will be available to students

FIGURE 2. 1BestariNet leverages a nationwide cloud-based learning platform with the Yes 4G network and the

world’s first 4G-embedded Samsung Chromebook.

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and researchers in the near future. However, effec-tive adoption of cloud services requires thorough re-vision of networking policies in such institutes and requires competent staff to run and maintain such a virtually unified cluster of resources.

Opportunities and Best PracticesMalaysia is one of several countries that are candi-dates to become a major cloud hub in Southeast Asia if it can overcome current hurdles, most of which involve data sovereignty (as a global concern). Politi-cal stability, a reliable energy source, high literacy, English proficiency, government support and flex-ibility, low natural disaster risk, and relatively low operational costs compared to neighboring countries are some of the unique characteristics that make Malaysia the main cloud hub in the region.

Although cloud adoption growth is fast in less regulated sectors, it’s very slow in heavily regulated ones such as financial services. Speedy cloud adop-tion in Malaysia needs government support, which it’s likely to receive given initiatives such as 1Be-stariNet, through which the government has shown a positive attitude toward relaxing regulations for cloud adoption. It also needs good practices for ef-fective and efficient cloud adoption. The potential for cloud adoption is applicable to a wide range of domains, including education, healthcare, agricul-ture, tourism, banking, and the automotive industry. In the following sections, we briefly highlight some of the immediate opportunities and best practices in adopting cloud services in Malaysia.

HealthcareHealthcare is one sector in which cloud adoption can significantly enhance system efficiency, effec-tiveness, and reliability. The healthcare industry requires a highly reliable, scalable, and pervasive platform to connect healthcare providers, patients, and insurance companies to realize expedient ubiq-uitous information sharing both nationally and internationally.

Several government efforts are set to begin in the near future to provide cloud-based services to the healthcare industry. For instance, 1Gov*Net is a secured nationwide ICT network infrastructure that will soon be integrated with healthcare services to fulfill the computing resource needs of e-healthcare systems. IBM Malaysia recently announced the de-velopment of a nationwide cloud healthcare infra-structure for a private healthcare service provider in Malaysia to deliver seamless healthcare services to more than 2.5 million patient across 20 hospitals per year.5 In a similar move, eKlinik, a SaaS cloud-

based healthcare system, aims to deliver real-time healthcare information to patients, doctors, and hospitals in Malaysia nationwide. Cloud computing significantly reduces the capital investment, opera-tional cost, management, and maintenance in the healthcare sector and delivers unique features such as cloud-based disaster recovery.

Medical tourism is another initiative by the Ministry of Health that will be rewarded by cloud adoption. Here, foreign patients can ask their home hospitals to share medical history with Malaysian caregivers. Effective cloud-adopted systems can sig-nificantly improve the quality of healthcare delivery to tourists visiting Malaysia, allowing Malaysian hospitals to access tourists’ medical records and in-surance details in case of medical emergency.

The best practice for cloud-based healthcare systems demands federation of on-premise medical clouds and enabling access to off-premise cloud re-sources for real-time medical information sharing. On-premise cloud infrastructures can best satisfy the security and privacy concerns of sensitive medi-cal data. However, nationally distributed healthcare institutes require real-time sharing of medical in-formation across entities and with other players of the domain when people are capable of moving from one area to another. Therefore, utilizing an inte-grated middleware that can provide real-time access to distributed medical clouds is unavoidable. Con-solidation and integration of medical services using futuristic cloud-adopted healthcare platforms in Malaysia can refine efficiency, quality, accessibility, and fairness of healthcare delivery regardless of geo-graphical limitations. Furthermore, such a virtually unified/integrated medical cloud system requires in-formation sharing and a change in the international scale to enhance quality of diagnostic medicine and service delivery scope.

Transportation and Automotive IndustriesConsidering Malaysia’s key role in regional transpor-tation and its huge number of short- and long-term visitors (such as tourists, students, and entrepre-neurs), the transportation and logistics industry is one of the most important industries to look to af-ter cloud adoption. For example, MyTeksi is a new urban taxi navigation system that provides conve-nient taxi booking via a cloud-based mobile reser-vation system. Several ongoing projects, started in 2010, aim to achieve a global logistics and freight transportation hub by 2030; cloud adoption can sub-stantially contribute to successful realization of this aim.6 However, the cloud potential in this sector re-mains to be discovered.

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Moreover, enabling the cloud in the automo-tive industry for car and motorcycle manufactur-ers, such as Proton, Perodua, and DRB-HICOM, is critical to realizing enhanced safety, efficiency, and entertainment to effectively compete in the region and throughout the world. Employing clouds and vehicular clouds in developing highly standard com-plex design, manufacturing, and testing systems and inventing new intelligent transportation systems and in-vehicle infotainment can significantly boost safe-ty and enhance the passenger’s experience, leading to growth in market share. However, more work is expected in this industry to set regulation and en-sure that manufacturers comply.

For the large multiplicity of users and their mo-bility in transportation systems, cloud adoption is slightly different from adoption for immobile users. Successful cloud adoption in this industry demands seamless integration of cloud resources, with car-mounted computers, on-road infrastructures, and pervasive devices scattered in urban and rural areas. Because vehicles are capable of generating electric-ity for their own consumption, energy poverty of

car-mounted computers is less important; however, WAN latency in accessing distant clouds is a ma-jor issue. The best practice would be deployment of federated scattered heterogeneous, granular cloud datacenters to tackle long WAN latency.

Figure 3 is an example of a cloud-based perva-sive healthcare ecosystem that demonstrates how incorporation of cloud with transportation, medical, and mobile computing sectors can enhance quality of life by handling emergency situations. In this sce-nario, David experiences a heart attack in the park. His smartphone receives medical information from the cardiac defibrillator he wears and forwards this information to the medical cloud while concurrently contacting an ambulance. The cloud-based intel-ligent transportation system helps the ambulance find the shortest and least congested route to David. On the ambulance, the practitioner accesses Da-vid’s medical history via the cloud and updates his records for the diagnostic center’s use. Using a real-time integrated cloud-based medical system, doctors can get on-time notification and provisioning of es-sential steps to save David after his heart attack.

Cloud-based pervasive medical ecosystem

Heterogenous cloudcomputingresources

David’s mobileHeart attackinformation

Wearable cardiacdefibrillator

Cloud-connectedambulance

Diagnosis center

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Radiologicalresearch center

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Emergency alert!!!

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FIGURE 3. An exemplary cloud-based pervasive healthcare system: enhancing quality of life by incorporating cloud with

transportation, medical, and mobile computing sectors.

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Agriculture IndustryMalaysia’s agricultural revenue in 2012 is reported to be as much as $250 million, which is 7.3 percent of the year’s gross domestic product (GDP). Howev-er, statistics show constant decrements since 2000.7 Factors such as climate change, aging of farmers, the labor-intensive nature of Malaysia’s farming, and pests are among the major reasons for this constant drop. Cloud adoption can significantly improve ag-riculture’s profitability and GDP share in Malaysia. Cloud-based agriculture and farming spans numer-ous activities, including agricultural agility, which reduces time to market and improves user satisfac-tion; real-time farming information dissemination; and remote monitoring of yields, resulting in effi-cient irrigation and effective pest fighting.

The best practice for cloud-based agriculture is to integrate cloud with wireless sensors and per-vasive mobile devices, making significant contribu-tions toward smart farming that can significantly decrease the farming burden and increase revenue, given the aging of farmers in Malaysia. Pervasive mobile farming infrastructures enable farmers, par-ticularly older ones, to monitor and maintain their farms anywhere, anytime without the need to physi-cally visit the site. Such facilities not only provide convenience to farmers, but also reduce labor costs and encourage farmers to manage several plots of land with varied types of products concurrently.

Tourism IndustryAnother promising industry for cloud adoption is tourism. Malaysia and Thailand have gained solid positions in the global and regional tourist markets in the last few years8 and are considered the most competitive tourism markets in Southeast Asia. While Malaysia has merely grown in number of tourists and their receipts since 2010 (about 4 per-cent), Thailand could significantly increase its mar-ket share from 16 million visitors in 2010 to more than 26 million tourists a year, which is about 67 percent growth. Thailand’s yearly tourism income has grown more than 100 percent since 2010, from US$20 million to US$42, whereas Malaysia’s tour-ism income has grown 16 percent, from US$18 to US$21 million.

Cloud-based tourism could use cloud resources to encourage tourists to visit hot spots in Malaysia as well as to provide location-based and context-aware pervasive services for tourists while they’re in the country. The first use requires that online enterprises and individuals from all over the coun-try engage in this industry. Such nationwide tourist service providers can use cloud technologies to run

their businesses with minimal capital and opera-tion costs.

The best practice for the first use is to promote online businesses to implement pay-as-you-go cloud resources and offer miscellaneous pervasive services to tourists. The government has already proposed several new initiatives such as Connecting 1Malay-sia to accelerate adoption of new online IT services and cloud technology to increase the number of on-line individuals/businesses in Malaysia. To realize the second use, convergence of mobile and pervasive computers with the cloud—that is, mobile cloud computing (MCC)9—can be adopted. MCC enables efficient delivery of real-time resource-intensive computations such as voice translators (speaking in native languages), optical character recognition (reading text in local language), road navigation, and location-based services to help tourists traveling in Malaysia. MCC can also realize location-based and context-aware tourist services.

It’s worth mentioning that preserving smart-phone resources, particularly battery power, is cru-cial for tourists. Smartphones have become dominant service-delivery points for tourists and are currently used as GPS, cameras, music players, dictionaries, notepads, and translators. While developing cloud-based mobile tourist systems, consideration must be given to mitigating temporal and energy overheads by leveraging lightweight solutions such as hybrid perva-sive MCC.10

People SectorAnother niche area for cloud adoption is the people sector, where individual users utilize cloud services mainly through their mobile devices. Currently, the most popular cloud services for users is storage, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, where people store their photos, videos, and audio files. However, the cloud has huge potential in mobile computing, and its services can augment the computing capa-bilities of mobile devices as well as personal comput-ers. Using cloud-based resources, mobile users can run their resource-hungry applications outside their phones to save computing resources, particularly the battery, and to perform computations that are far more complex than their mobile device can sup-port.11 However, long WAN latency (mostly due to numerous intermediate hops12) for accessing cloud resources is a serious threat that remarkably decel-erates cloud adoption for mobile users.

One way to expedite cloud adoption for mo-bile users in Malaysia (as well as in the rest of the world) is to reduce the number of intermediate hops between mobile and cloud by leveraging proximate

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resources, particularly desktops and smartphones.11 Although the profit of mobile application execution in cloud-based resources might be lower compared to desktop users, the number of mobile users is in-creasing at a significantly faster pace.

ChallengesDespite the promise of cloud computing in these areas, some important challenges hinder its speedy adoption in Malaysia.

Data SovereigntyData sovereignty “is the respect for the rights associ-ated with data—based on where the entity that has control of the data resides.”2 Governments usually enforce data sovereignty to limit cross-border stor-age of (sensitive) data, which limits organizations to exploiting local datacenters only, whereas exter-nal services can be more efficient and affordable. In the ACCA report on the impact of data sovereignty on cloud adoption in Asia, Malaysia could secure eighth position among the 14 Asian countries stud-ied.2 The report reveals that Malaysian lawmakers enforce data sovereignty because they’re concerned about data security and loss of control over the data stored outside the country.

Although such jurisdictions benefit local entre-preneurs by protecting them from international com-petition and decelerating the emergence of giant and reputable cloud service providers in local cloud mar-kets, existing complexities, inconsistencies, and lack of transparency have impacts on successful cloud adoption in Malaysia. For instance, where should multinational companies store their data? Who has access to and possesses the data? What data is sen-sitive to cross-border storage? How does data sov-ereignty impact cloud federation? Answering these questions and clarifying misunderstandings around data sovereignty promote better cloud adoption.

Competence and AwarenessOne of the most vital hurdles in cloud adoption in Malaysia is the lack of competent cloud engineers, knowledgeable cloud lawmakers, and service con-sumers. Reportedly, 20 percent of Malaysian users haven’t heard of cloud computing.13 Thus, develop-ing varied technical programs and hands-on work-shops for technical staff, decision makers, and lawmakers in addition to cloud-awareness programs for public users needs quick momentum in Malay-sia. Some Malaysians might be familiar with the concept of utility computing, but knowledge is lim-ited, and leading universities and academic insti-tutes must take the lead in educating and training on cloud computing concepts and application. Gain-ing insight into the advantages, disadvantages, and implications of adopting the cloud for stakeholders, including lawmakers and service consumers, is a significant need.

Results from recent interviews with parents and school teachers undertaken in a few schools in Sabah (northeast Malaysia) that are using the 1Be-stariNet educational platform suggest that parents aren’t prepared to transition from traditional learn-ing to cloud-based e-learning because they believe computers are for entertainment rather than educa-tion.4 The interview revealed a series of hurdles (for example, essential training, health and safety haz-ards such as the impact of using a smartphone for several hours on a child’s eyesight, impact on social relationships, and nonintuitive interaction technol-ogy) that must first be overcome. One way to do so is to train parents by demonstrating the potential and usefulness of supervised cloud-based educational materials and informing them about successful ex-periences in other countries.

Domain-Specific TechnologiesDeveloping domain-specific technologies whose cloud integration can enable efficient and effective

FIGURE 4. Erascan is a whiteboard eraser that scans and digitizes what’s

written on the board as it erases. It’s one example of a domain-specific

technology innovation that’s facilitating cloud adoption. (Photo courtesy

of Mimos Berhad.14)

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utilization of cloud-based resources among users re-quires a great deal of research and development in Malaysia and the rest of the world. Successful cloud adoption requires delivery of cloud-based services to a range of users with different skill sets, prin-ciples, and expectations. For example, one problem in cloud-based educational systems is the lack of ef-ficient interaction between trainees and e-learning systems that inhibits development of writing skills among students. The Apen A3 Smart Pen (www .apenusa.com/products) is a domain-specific tech-nology that can be integrated into cloud-based ed-ucation systems, such as 1BestariNet, to improve interaction and learning effectiveness among stu-dents. Erascan (see Figure 4) digitizes content as it’s erased from the class whiteboard.14 Inventing such domain-specific and cost-effective technologies across domains is the key to successful cloud adop-tion worldwide.

Security, Privacy, and TrustSecurity and privacy are major concerns impeding cloud deployment in Malaysia that can also impact global cloud adoption. The most significant issue is comprehending and then minimizing the risks asso-ciated with cloud deployment. This problem is more significant in off-premise clouds, where contents are stored on the cloud vendor’s premises. Although data owners have full control over the infrastructure, hardware resources, and software systems with their traditional physical servers or on-premise clouds, it’s nontrivial to enforce the risk of letting contents stay in a third-party premises. In this situation, the data owner has limited access to monitor his or her prop-erty in the virtual servers in the absence of advanced and detailed cloud-monitoring tools. In addition to security threats from cyberattacks and privacy violations, information disclosure from government agencies is another challenge that decelerates cloud adoption. Last year, Google positively responded to a majority of about 27,477 information disclosure requests by the US government.15 Efforts to ensure safety of user property on the vendor’s premises, minimizing security risks, and directing user privacy issues are critical to cloud adoption in Malaysia.

everal of the cloud adoption initiatives and the benefits discussed in this article can be a driv-

ing force for other regional and global countries to deploy cloud technology to not only shrink their capital ownership and maintenance expenses but also to expedite the deployment process. Moreover, such on-demand elastic computing resources pave

the way for emergence of big data analytics for im-proving areas such as utility services, business intel-ligence, and security on a national scope.

AcknowledgmentsThis work was funded by the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education under the University of Malaya High Impact Research Grant UM.C/625/1/HIR/MOE/FCSIT/03.

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and Open Challenges,” IEEE Comm. Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 16, no.1, 2014, pp. 337–368, 2014.

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SAEID ABOLFAZLI is a technical lead and data scientist at YTL Communications, Malaysia, and Xchanging Asia Pacific, where he leads R&D activi-ties in wireless networking and mobile computing. His research interests include mobile and cloud com-puting. Abolfazli has a PhD in computer science and IT from the University of Malaya. He’s a member of IEEE. Contact him at abolfazli@ieee.org.

ZOHREH SANAEI is a technical lead and data scien-tist at YTL Communications, Malaysia, and Xchanging Asia Pacific, where she leads scientific R&D activities. Her research interests include heterogeneity in mobile and cloud computing, wireless computing, and service-oriented computing. Sanaei has a PhD in computer science from the University of Malaya. She’s a member of IEEE. Contact her at sanaei@ieee.org.

ALI TABASSI is the chief operating officer at YTL Communications, Malaysia. His professional interests include the development, integration, and operation of wireless solutions in the telecommunications, net-working, and IP industries. Tabassi has an MBA in electrical engineering and mathematics.

STEVEN ROSEN is director of IT at YTL Com-munications and the chief information officer at Xchanging, Malaysia. His professional interests in-clude architecting and leading technology teams and managing datacenter operations in the healthcare, banking, and insurance and capital markets business sectors. Contact him at steven.rosen@ytlcomms.my.

ABDULLAH GANI is a professor of computer sci-ence at the University of Malaya, director of the Cen-ter for Mobile Cloud Computing Research, and a visiting professor at King Saud University, Riyadh. His research interests include self-organized systems, rein-forcement learning, wireless-related networks, light-weight mobile cloud computing, and big data. Gani has a PhD in computer science from the University of Sheffield. He’s a senior member of IEEE. Contact him at abdullah@um.edu.my.

SAMEE U. KHAN is an associate professor of electri-cal and computer engineering at North Dakota State University. His research interests include optimization, robustness, and security of cloud, grid, cluster and big data computing, social networks, wired and wireless networks, power systems, smart grids, and optical net-works. Khan has a PhD in computer science from the University of Texas, Arlington. He’s a senior member of IEEE. Contact him at samee.khan@ndsu.edu.

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