Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has laid out Wednesday, July 22, plans to protect user data on its cloud computing platforms globally, stressing the company’s intention to expand services overseas, especially in the U.S. where it plans to build a second data center, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Aliyun, Alibaba's cloud computing unit, also issued a "Data Protection Pact," giving customers--from developers to government agencies and consumers--"absolute ownership" over all of their data, as well as the rights to access, share, exchange, transfer or delete their data at any time.
The pact also stated that Aliyun is responsible for establishing management and internal audit systems for improving capabilities to protect against threats and the recovery of data in disasters.
Simon Hu, Aliyun's president, said during the conference on July 22 that the cloud unit analyzes more than 100 terabytes of information each day to detect security threats such as software weaknesses and malware as part of its efforts to safeguard user data.
The report said that although Aliyun is only a small portion of Alibaba's overall business, it is expanding rapidly both at home and abroad. The unit is also China's largest provider of public cloud computing services and has been working to migrate the data of government agencies onto the cloud.
In May, Aliyun entered a joint venture in the Middle East with Meraas, a state-owned holding company in Dubai, in an effort to provide cloud services in the region, after opening its first overseas data center in Silicon Valley earlier in March.
A second date center is also set to open in the eastern part of the U.S., according to its executives, as well as in Europe, Japan and Southeast Asia.
Hu also admitted that that Aliyun faces challenges in the U.S. market as it tries to attract local customers.
"Chinese companies providing software services in the U.S. still face problems of culture and trust. I think it takes a certain amount of time for more clients to accept and observe Aliyun's services," Hu told reporters during the conference.
Hu noted that majority of Aliyun's global customers are Chinese companies operating overseas.
The report said that Aliyun has 1.4 million customers using Aliyun services directly or through independent software vendors as of the end of June 2014.