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The future of cloud computing: Is geography the next big challenge?
This is an era of major transformation in terms of how global businesses are choosing to run their business software infrastructure. Increasingly, they are gravitating towards cloud data centres instead of in-house ones and this has become enormous business for companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
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It is into these competitive waters that Alibaba has chosen to swim and its latest plan to play catch-up involves cornering India’s fast growing market for cloud infrastructure. The Chinese company’s recent announcement indicated that its first Indian data centre would be based out of Mumbai starting January, 2019.
It was only a matter of time before Alibaba launched its India cloud plan considering it has pumped serious money into Indian payment solutions firm PayTm with the intention of surfing India’s burgeoning digital revolution.
In addition to basic infrastructure services like storage and big data functionalities, Indian customers of the Chinese firm will also avail of other offerings such as elastic computing, networking and analytics. The India push will now expand to 33 global zones that include Japan, Australia, the Middle East and Europe.
“As we build out the Alibaba Cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is now firmly in place. This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond,” said Simon Hu, Senior Vice President of Alibaba Group and President of Alibaba Cloud, according to Techcrunch.
On one hand, Alibaba’s move comes at exactly the right time. A new survey suggests that businesses will transplant the majority of their IT workloads from in-house centers run by teams of their own engineers to the cloud by 2020 and the transition will be further bolstered by advances in AI and machine learning.