Alibaba employees introduce "city brain" to visitors at an event in Beijing on Thursday. [Photo: Li Xuanmin/GT]

Alibaba Group has cooperated with the government in Beijing's sub-center of Tongzhou to launch a cloud-based "city brain" for local environmental protection, Alibaba's executive announced on Thursday at a cloud summit in Beijing marking the 10th anniversary of the establishment of Alibaba's cloud business.

"The city brain is able to scan the whole Tongzhou district every 10 minutes and provide real-time monitoring of potential environmental pollution rather than being spotted by inspection staff," Xu Shijun, general manager of Alibaba Cloud Computing's digital governance business unit, said at a press briefing.

As the cloud-based solution is more efficient, it could also be expanded into areas such as transportation, firefighting and public service, speeding up the digital transformation of city governance, Xu said.

In addition to developing a smart city based on cloud technology, the company also announced plans at the summit to move all of its group business to public cloud servers as well as help other tech companies to "migrate basic infrastructure for information technology (IT) to the cloud."

"The new 'all-in-cloud' era has arrived as the cloud becomes more intelligent, secure, stable and big data-driven," said Zhang Jianfeng, president of Alibaba Cloud and Intelligent Business Group, at the event. Zhang said that currently about 60 to 70 percent of Alibaba's business is run on public cloud servers, and the group will move all its business to cloud servers within the next one to two years.

Industry insiders also believe that 2019 will be the banner year for "all-in-cloud" technology.

There are already cases of big companies withdrawing plans to develop basic IT infrastructure by themselves and moving operations to public cloud servers. For example, US video website Netflix has migrated its operations to Amazon Web Service's cloud.

Alibaba's cloud computing arm has the largest share of the Chinese cloud computing market, with its total market share greater than the sum total of the next eight biggest cloud computing players, according to an IDC report.