Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of the Alibaba Group founded by Chinese entrepreneur Jack Ma, announced the opening of two availability zones in the UK on Monday in addition to its Frankfurt and Dubai data centers launched in 2016.

(Photo: CGTN)

Similar to those locations, the UK data centers will offer 24/7 on-site support, including elastic computing, storage and database capabilities, network and application services and analytics, security and engineering, among other services, which satisfy the growing demand of Chinese overseas and European clients. Stronger disaster-recovery capabilities will be established given that the data is spread between the two available centers.

With the development of the global cloud computing market, increasing enterprise experience has led to a maturity of products, technology and deployments of companies. Tony Lock, Distinguished Analyst and Director of Engagement of information technology consultancy Freeform Dynamics, said that the arrival of Alibaba Cloud to Europe is an important milestone not only for the company, but for the market, by providing another significant worldwide cloud option for businesses in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

In the increasingly complex, digitally-driven world, Alibaba Cloud is a robust and scalable public cloud platform that will offer British partners insight into the Chinese market, according to Sean Harley, chief information officer at Ascential, a London-based marketing optimization service that uses the Alibaba Cloud in China.

Alibaba Cloud is the world's fifth-largest cloud provider, behind Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and IBM. With its latest facility, Alibaba Cloud now has 52 availability zones in 19 regions around the world, including the five largest cloud computing markets: the United States, the UK, Germany, Japan and China.

"At Alibaba Cloud, we are – and always have been – committed to our customers. Our expansion into the United Kingdom, and by extension into Europe, is in direct response to the rapidly increasing demands we have seen for local facilities within the region," said Yeming Wang, General Manager of Alibaba Cloud EMEA, in an interview with Businesswire. "Using AI-powered and data-driven technology, our latest data centers will offer customers complete access to our wide range of cloud services from machine learning capabilities to predictive data analytics – ensuring that we continue to offer an unparalleled level of service."

(Compiled by Xu Zhitao)