Alibaba Group’s cloud SBU Alibaba Cloud have launched their second data center in India with an availability zone in the city of Mumbai. With this launch, Alibaba say that they will be providing cloud-based data center services to enterprises as well as startups in the country that are looking to deploy heavy workloads.
Alibaba Cloud say that they are expecting strong demand from the enterprise and startup segment in India as a result of growing awareness about cloud technology across the Asia-Pacific region. They claim that these enterprises need holistic data center services that encapsulate all areas – storage, network, big data, analytics etc.
With the new availability zone in Mumbai, Alibaba said that they will offer a wide range of services such as elastic computing, storage, database, network, application services and big data analytics to support the requirements of local governments and enterprises. They also say that these dual availability zones will further enhance the level of security of Alibaba Cloud’s data centers in India.
Speaking about the launch, Alex Li, General Manager, Alibaba Cloud India, commented:
Alibaba Cloud has always empowered enterprises of all sizes to tap into opportunities in the digital age. The commencement of the second availability zone reiterates our focus on India as a key market in Alibaba Cloud’s global expansion strategy.
According to Alibaba Cloud, the launch will also consolidate their footprint in the APAC (Asia Pacific) region to compete with the likes of Microsoft and AWS. In order to better their position in this market, Alibaba are taking data localization seriously by taking recommendations made by Justice BN Srikrishna on the privacy laws in India.
Li continued:
We (have) set up our first Zone in India earlier this year, and given the strong growth we have seen in the past few months, we are now launching the second one. While I will not be able to comment on the investments made, I can tell you India is a big commitment for us.
This launch is all set to spur the race for the cloud in the APAC market. It will be interesting to see how Alibaba makes the most out of this move after they launched their first hub in India, back in January.