Tech mogul Alibaba have launched two cloud data centers in the U.K. to boost their operations in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region. With this launch, Alibaba will be leveraging the connectivity of their centers at Frankfurt and Dubai to expand in the European region and provide security, engineering and real-time monitoring support.
According to Alibaba, European enterprises have transformed themselves digitally and need infrastructure on a large scale to support this massive change. They claim that the competitive environment in the market and the increase in the adoption of cloud applications has led to this change.
By launching two cloud data centers in the U.K., Alibaba believe that they will facilitate European enterprises with cloud-based services that will focus on round-the-clock real-time monitoring, engineering support and full-time security. They say that one of the key advantages of having two data centers in London was the ability to recover or maintain key IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.
Speaking about the launch, a spokesperson for Alibaba, commented:
As part of our commitment to continue expanding into Europe and across EMEA, we are launching two U.K. availability zones in addition to the existing ones in Frankfurt and Dubai. Our decision on the location is driven by the rapidly growing customer demand in the U.K.
Alibaba say that the data centers will also provide other services such as elastic computing, storage, database, network, application services and big data analytics. They believe that by providing a wide range of services, Alibaba will be able to pull enterprises from different segments.
The spokesperson continued:
The United Kingdom is one of the fastest growing European markets for Alibaba Cloud, and many of our customers are in key verticals such as retail, finance, media, education and research, and logistics.
We are also working with many global and local partners to make sure we are offering best-in-class technologies, services and consulting to customers.
The tech mogul said that with these data centers, Alibaba’s total tally reaches 52 hubs with 19 cloud regions worldwide. It will be interesting to see how Alibaba competes against the likes of Google, IBM and Microsoft as they expand their cloud prowess across Europe.