Zoom Video Communications has opened its first data center in Southeast Asia with a new facility in Singapore.

The new data center in Singapore brings the video conferencing provider’s total to 18 facilities worldwide, Reuters reports.

The company also plans to hire more employees in Singapore, including engineers and sales staff, said Abe Smith, the Head of International at Zoom.

Zoom’s boom brings security concerns

Zoom’s video conferencing services have seen huge increases in users, as countless people across the world have been forced to work from home due to the coronavirus pandemic. 

Mr. Smith said there was a 65-fold increase in users of its free services and a tripling in paying customers in Singapore since January.

More than 400 schools in the city state have also been using the platform, particularly following the country’s circuit breaker in April.

But the company has also come under fire over privacy and security issues.

Security researchers this year discovered that Zoom rerouted some calls through its servers in China, despite some of these coming from outside the country, putting data localisation and privacy laws into question.

But Zoom said this took place in “extremely limited circumstances”. To rectify the concern, Zoom said it had taken its mainland China data centers off an approved list of backups for users outside China and gave users the option to choose where their calls are routed.