Aliyun, Alibaba’s cloud hosting services business, has announced the opening of its first overseas data center in Silicon Valley, signifying an important move to serve clients globally. The center will initially target Chinese enterprises based in the United States with the plan to gradually expand its products and services to international clients in the second half of this year.
The Silicon Valley data center initially will provide a variety of cloud hosting services that are expected to attract overseas Chinese businesses as they develop various kinds of applications. U.S. businesses will also be sought as Aliyun learns more about the needs of overseas companies. Aliyun has existing data centers in Hangzhou, Qingdao, Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
“Aliyun offers users top-notch cloud computing products and services at competitive prices,” said Ethan Sicheng Yu, Vice President of Aliyun. “Now Aliyun hopes to meet the needs of Chinese enterprises in the United States, and the ultimate objective of Aliyun is to bring cost-efficient and cutting-edge cloud computing services to benefit more clients outside China to boost their business development.”
Aliyun’s customers range from start-ups to established corporations in digital entertainment, consumer electronics, financial services and mobile communications space. As of June 30, 2014, over 1.4 million customers were using Aliyun services directly or indirectly through independent software vendors, according to the company.
Cloud Security
The Chinese cloud provider claims to provide a high level of data security. According to Aliyun, its cloud security service called YunDun last year successfully fended off a hacker attack on a Chinese gaming app company that is believed to be the largest DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack ever recorded on the mainland. Occurring on Dec. 20, this incident lasted 14 hours and peak attacking traffic reached 453.8 gigabytes per second.
Established in September 2009, Alibaba Cloud Computing (www.aliyun.com) develops highly scalable platforms for cloud computing and data management, and provides a comprehensive suite of cloud hosting services.
