Tech giant Alibaba have decided to boost their public cloud and security prowess by signing a deal with SUSE and Fortanix respectively. As per the terms of the deals, Alibaba will be expanding their global strategic partnership with SUSE to cater to the growing need for SAP workloads, whereas with Fortanix they will be launching a Self Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) to protect sensitive data.
According to Alibaba, customers keep their most important business data on the cloud and deploy myriad tools to keep it protected. They also say that the rate of adopting cloud applications has increased as a result of an increase in cloud security products.
Keeping this trend in mind, Alibaba partnered with Fortanix to launch an SDKMS data encryption solution to protect critical business data. They say that this tool will allow Alibaba to strengthen their Intel SGX cloud servers as well as their Runtime Encryption platform.
Xiaoning Li, Chief Security Architect of Alibaba Cloud, commented:
Fortanix is one of the leaders in Intel SGX technology and their Runtime Encryption can bring applications that were previously constrained due to security issues to the cloud.
Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service™ (SDKMS) allows customers to encrypt all their data in Alibaba Cloud, while keeping the keys protected from Fortanix and Alibaba Cloud. We are glad to partner with Fortanix to provide a cutting-edge cloud security options to our users.
In addition to this, Alibaba have also signed a deal with SUSE to extend their public cloud prowess in a bid to respond to the rising demand for SAP workloads. As a part of this deal, Alibaba has joined the SUSE Cloud Service Provider Program, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications to reach SAP customers globally.
Naji Almahmoud, Vice President of Global Alliances at SUSE, commented:
We are excited about our partnership with Alibaba Cloud, as it offers customers agility, pay-as-you-go capabilities and system availability up to 99.999 per cent.
SUSE and partners such as Alibaba Cloud are enabling customers to manage complexity, reduce cost and deliver the business-critical services that are powering their own digital transformation.
This is not the first time Alibaba have sealed a double deal to consolidate their cloud product portfolio. They had done something similar a few months ago with the likes of Siemens and Bolloré to boost their cloud and IoT capabilities.