Alibaba Group has redressed a glaring weakness in its global cloud operations -- a paltry presence in Europe -- by simultaneously opening two data centers in London yesterday.
Alibaba Cloud or "Aliyun," the cloud computing company of the Alibaba Group, said the two London data centers are its first in the United Kingdom. It will provide business customers with round-the-clock security and engineering support and real-time monitoring.
The company said its decision on locating in London was driven by the rapidly growing customer demand in the UK. It said it's expanding quickly across Europe and is always looking for good talent to join its team.
Alibaba Cloud also said the benefit of having two data centers in one location gives it the ability to recover or maintain key IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.
Alibaba Cloud said the launch in London as part of its expansion into Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). It operates two other data centers in EMEA: one in Frankfurt, the other in Dubai. With the addition of its new London centers, Alibaba Cloud now has 52 data center zones across 19 different regions. It plans on expanding further.
Alibaba Cloud provides cloud computing services for online businesses and Alibaba's own e-commerce network. Alibaba Cloud's international operations are headquartered in Singapore.
Establishing a firmer foothold in London ends a more than year-long search for a new European location for Alibaba Cloud, which is the largest cloud computing company in China.
Despite this distinction, Aliyun contributes a meager part of Alibaba Group's overall revenues, but it is growing rapidly.
Alibaba hosts more than a third of all websites in China. It also operates in 19 data center regions and 42 availability zones around the world. From October 2017 to February 2018, Aliyun opened data centers in Malaysia, India, and Indonesia.
In 2016, Alibaba Group debated on where to locate its second European data center after Frankfurt, which opened in November 2016. London was a top choice among the potential locations along with an unnamed city in Sweden.
Europe is really a weak region for us, "very weak," said Lin Luo, Alibaba's deputy director for international government and public affairs at the time.
Alibaba Cloud's services are available on a pay-as-you-go basis. These include data storage, relational databases, big-data processing, Anti-DDoS protection, and content delivery networks (CDN).
Alibaba Cloud provides PaaS, IaaS and SaaS services. These services include e-commerce, big data, IoT, and data customization.
