Alibaba Cloud has expanded its data-center services to the United Kingdom, launching two of them in the country on Monday.
The cloud-computing arm of Chinese technology giant Alibaba Group said the new data centers are the result of growing demand for its services in Europe. In addition to allowing clients to upgrade their digital infrastructure and boost efficiencies in their operations, Alibaba Cloud will offer stronger disaster-recovery capabilities given the services are spread between the two centers.
“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. We are incredibly proud to take this latest step in our continued investment in EMEA,” said Yeming Wang, general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa for Alibaba Cloud.
The UK data centers join those already in operation in Frankfurt, Germany and Dubai in the EMEA region. Similar to those locations, the UK data centers will offer 24/7 on-site support including both security and engineering, elastic computing, storage and database capabilities, network and application services and analytics, among other services.
Alibaba Cloud breaks its global coverage into regions, with availability zones spread out within them. Each availability zone has one or more data centers. In this case, the U.K., which sits in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region, has two new availability zones and one data center in each zone.
With its latest facilities in the UK, Alibaba Cloud now operates 52 availability zones in 19 regions around the world, including also the U.S., Australia, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and India. Established 2009, Alibaba Cloud is the world’s third-ranked infrastructure-as-a-service provider, behind only Amazon and Microsoft, according to research firm Gartner.