MCMC releases information paper on regulating cloud services

20 April 2022

On 17 December 2021, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (“MCMC”) released an information paper on the regulation of cloud services (“Information Paper”). This follows the advisory notice issued by MCMC on 16 October 2021 in relation to the implementation of cloud service regulation which provides that the regulation would be in force beginning 1 January 2022. The Information Paper provides further clarification on the regulatory framework, as follows:

• A grace period from 1 January 2022 to 31 March 2022 is allowed for a company to manage its affairs and regulation takes effect on 1 April 2022.
• It is noted that cloud services for the purpose of ASP (C) licence registration will mean “any service made available to end users on demand via the Internet from a cloud computing provider’s server.” The Information Paper further clarifies that “end user” means any natural or artificial person the cloud services are being provided to.
• In relation to local presence, the Information Paper provides illustrations of companies required to be registered under the Applications Service Providers Class (“ASP (C)”) licence. Where a company which is not a locally-incorporated company has a local branch, the said branch is not required to be registered under the ASP (C) licence as the branch is not considered as local presence.
• The licensing requirement under the ASP (C) licence will not be imposed on local companies that merely resell cloud services products provided by large cloud service providers, without having any control whatsoever on the cloud service products as such resellers are not regarded as cloud service providers by MCMC.