Picture credit: CenturyLink
Communications provider CenturyLink has opened up a Shanghai data centre and announced the availability of its managed hosting service in China.
The latest expansion continues the telco’s aggressive move to the cloud, after a series of data openings this year including Toronto, Reading and Chicago. Back in May CenturyLink slashed prices on its cloud storage, in line with competitors, and in August they announced launch of CenturyLink Private Cloud, which aims to combine the security of private with the agility of public cloud.
The expanse in Asia brings the total number of data centres at CenturyLink to 57.
“For multinational corporations looking to grow their customer base, entering China presents enormous opportunities and challenges,” said Gery Messer, CenturyLink Asia Pacific managing director. “CenturyLink makes it easy for businesses to host within China’s borders, offering access to the same highly secure managed services and consistent IT experience available across our global footprint.”
The current strategy for CenturyLink is a simple one: create solutions for collocation, hybrid and cloud services on customer demand – private and public mashed together. Back in August Richard Seroter, director of CenturyLink Cloud, told CloudTech the company wanted to create a “single pane of glass” effect, whereby customers can manage a variety of agile infrastructure services in one interface.
Last year, a report on behalf of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission found there was a ‘distrust in foreign technology’, among other causes, which prohibited the growth of cloud computing in China. Amazon Web Services (AWS) opened up a Chinese region in December last year.
CenturyLink is partnering with Chinese IT solutions provider Neusoft to deliver the managed service. “This collaboration offers clients a unique opportunity to expand their IT presence into China by leveraging the resources of two world-class global IT providers to help simplify the complexities inherent in China,” said Angela Wang, Neusoft senior vice president.
