Alibaba Cloud has opened the doors on its UK data centres, adding to its global footprint and promising 24/7 support as well as real-time monitoring.

The move confirms the Chinese provider’s UK move, with the company now operating 52 availability zones in 19 regions worldwide. The others outside Asia Pacific are two regions in the US, and one region each in Frankfurt and Dubai, while outside China Alibaba has representation in Singapore. Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Mumbai and Tokyo.

This publication broke the news last month that Alibaba was launching operations in the UK after spotting a new landing page with ‘London is calling’ as its headline. As per September’s specifications, the new facility is set to have 99.99% availability, cooling configured with N+1 redundancy, and dual availability zones for stronger disaster recovery.

Alibaba also brought out a customer for the grand launch, with Sean Harley, CIO at London-headquartered business media firm Ascential, saying working with Alibaba was key to its success on a global scale, particularly through the complex market of China.

“At Alibaba Cloud, we are – and always have been – committed to our customers,” said Yeming Wang, Alibaba Cloud general manager EMEA. “Our expansion into the United Kingdom, and by extension into Europe, is in direct response to the rapidly increasing demands we have seen for local facilities within the region.

“Using AI-powered and data-driven technology, our latest data centres 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,” added Wang. “We are incredibly proud to take this latest step in our continued investment in EMEA.”

According to a recent note from GlobalData, Alibaba is gaining significantly in Asia Pacific outside its Chinese heartland, betting big on emerging markets such as India, Malaysia and Indonesia, while competing with others in the developed markets of Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Australia.

China is an anomaly in the cloud infrastructure market. According to figures from Synergy Research, the top 10 vendors in the country are all local players. As a result of Alibaba’s dominance, the company ranks second behind AWS in the Asia Pacific region. Every other region has an AWS-Microsoft-Google leadership.

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