Alibaba Cloud boosts capacity of Hong Kong data center

Alibaba Cloud has more than doubled the capacity of its data center in Hong Kong to help the company meet glowing demand for cloud services in Asia-Pacific.

The expanded Hong Kong data center will be used to meet enterprises’ demand for high availability and data recovery and provide greater access to services such as data storage and analytics, enterprise-level middleware and cloud security services.

The expansion forms part of Alibaba Cloud’s efforts to expand its global network coverage, and follows recent data center openings in Australia, Japan, Germany and the UAE.

Alibaba Cloud said Hong Kong was selected due to its status as the gateway to China’s economy for international businesses and its region-leading role in terms of cloud adoption – the city scored the highest in the Asia Cloud Computing Association’s Cloud Readiness Index 2016.

“Since our entry into Hong Kong in 2014, Alibaba Cloud has become one of the largest public cloud providers in the market in less than two years. More companies have come to realize the importance of changing their traditional IT mind-set to embrace the new data technology,” Alibaba Cloud Global general manager Ethan Yu said.

“We are confident that the expanded data center facility, together with our scalable and secure cloud offering, will better meet the needs of the digital transformation in key local sectors such as hospitality and financial services.”

Alibaba Cloud’s Hong Kong operations has customers in sectors including financial services, retail, hospitality and media. The company also recently launched anti-DDoS security products together with PCCW Global.