14 DAY TRIAL // The cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group has opened up an official data center in Hong Kong. This is the fourth of its kind and it comes only a week after the company launched the third one in Beijing.
The new site was announced on Monday by Alibaba. The data center was built with the help of Towngas Telecom and it will be operated jointly. This should help support customers in China and other countries in Southeast Asia.
“In the past, Chinese companies venturing outside the PRC often needed to add Web servers in local markets, subjecting them to differing sets of regulations governing the Internet in each country in which they were operating. Renting offshore AliCloud servers located in Hong Kong will simplify their internet activities,” reads the announcement.
Alibaba said that other companies would face a lot of issues when trying to move to new regions, including some related to the language spoken there, license registrations, policies, and even currency exchanges. The company simply wants to help everyone out and simplify the already stressful process.
Competition in the cloud-computing market has been heating up around the world, despite security fears sparked by the disclosure of the NSA’s mass surveillance scheme that has expanded in the entire world and can reach any type of technology, especially cloud servers.
Companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM and more have already joined the fight, alongside many others, making for a pretty crowded activity area.
Alibaba has been talking about its desire to expand its cloud service beyond China for a while now, announcing plans to establish data centers outside China back in December. Furthermore, the company then said that it had received the first gold certification in the world for cloud security. The acknowledgement came from the British Standards Institute.
The company has been creating partnerships left and right with the Chinese government, as well as players in the financial sectors, in order to create public cloud computing platforms. It has also been working with banks to help enhance their cloud computing security considering just how important it is to keep financial data away from prying eyes.
Alibaba is currently preparing for the Initial Public Offering in the United States. Its presence on the stock market is eagerly awaited and it is expected that Alibaba’s IPO will be the largest one in the tech industry and among the biggest ones in the world overall.