Alibaba Cloud has set in motion plans to expand into Southeast Asia with the announcement of their third data center in Indonesia and a Philippines Ecosystem Alliance.
The initiatives were driven by fast-growing demand from customers who are adopting cloud technologies and progressing digital transformation strategies at a rapid pace.
Not one, not two, but three data centers
Indonesia’s data center market is fueled by an increasing number of Internet and social media users as well as greater connectivity and cloud adoption across the country.
The Minister of Communication and Information Technology, Johnny G. Plate believed Alibaba Cloud’s third data center will accelerate the country’s digital transformation efforts.
The expansion comes after Alibaba Cloud built its first data center in 2018, and a second last year. Upon completion of the third in 2021, Alibaba Cloud will have 64 availability zones across 21 regions worldwide.
The digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group also announced its plan to build the first data scrubbing center in the country to help customers fend off cyberattacks, particularly affecting the finance and gaming industries.
“Cyberattacks have grown in intensity and sophistication, especially at a time when more businesses are moving their IT infrastructure onto cloud,” said Leon Chen as Country Manager at Alibaba Cloud Indonesia.
Alibaba Cloud’s new scrubbing center will help detect, analyse and remove large volumes of malicious traffic to defend distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
As Southeast Asia’s largest and fastest growing digital economy, other tech giants including Google and AWS have also expanded their services in Indonesia.
Alibaba Cloud was also named the largest IaaS provider in Asia Pacific by a recent Gartner report, while Tencent Cloud was third across the region and Huawei Cloud placed third in China.
Accelerating digital transformation in the Philippines
Along with their announcement for a third data center in Indonesia, Alibaba Cloud also revealed the formation of the Alibaba Cloud Philippines Ecosystem Alliance to speed up digital transformation in the country.
“The Philippines is a booming market with a big group of young and digital savvy population. There is strong demand for digital transformation in accordance with the local government’s ‘cloud-first’ initiative,” said Leo Liu, General Manager of Hong Kong, Macau, Korea and Philippines for Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.
The alliance will bring together thousands of Alibaba Cloud’s partners and customers to promote cloud adoption and analytics intelligence for businesses of all sizes.
“Digitalisation will be the global economic bedrock in the post-COVID era. This is why we are determined to enhance our efforts in supporting businesses here in their digital transformation journeys,” said Allen Guo, Alibaba Cloud’s Head for Philippines.
The global cloud provider will invest US$283 million this year to train partners and create solutions as well as committing to the aim of training 50,000 IT professionals and certifying at least 10,000 of these within the next three years.
Alibaba Cloud recently worked with telecommunications giant PLDT to provide hybrid cloud and security solutions for eSports matches during the Southeast Asian Games in 2019.
PLDT’s Enterprise and International Data Regional Head for Asia Pacific, Jeff Mendoza, said: “We are looking forward to fortifying this partnership and cooperation as we face this new era of cloud modernisation.”
Over the next three years, the largest provider of public cloud services in China looks to continue its global expansion by investing an additional US$28 billion on its cloud infrastructure, from operating systems, servers, to chips and networks.
