Alibaba Cloud Division Aliyun Shares Cloud Privacy Commitment as it Vies for Global Business

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This article originally appeared at The WHIR

Alibaba’s cloud division Aliyun held its inaugural Data Technology Day in Beijing on Wednesday, where it revealed a new lineup of cloud products and solutions and a “Data Protection Pact” to assure enterprises of the security of data in the cloud.

Aliyun shared its vision for the future of what the company calls “the Data Technology economy” with over 2,000 developers, entrepreneurs, government agencies, industry players and partners, an economy in which Aliyun is planning to be a major global force.

Aliyun president Simon Hu also said that the company will invest in data centers in the US, India, and the Middle East as part of a bid to challenge AWS for cloud market share lead in three to four years, Bloomberg reports. Aliyun announced a joint venture with Dubai holding company Meraas to deliver services to the Middle East in May.

The Data Protection Pact is essentially a data privacy commitment to customers, but also a suggestion or challenge to other cloud service providers to treat data similarly to how the financial industry treats customer’s money. The pact includes a three-point proposal “to the technology industry and the entire society.”

Aliyun asserts that data generated on its platform is owned by the customer, who has rights to free and safe access, and to share, exchange, transfer or delete it at any time. It says the selection of services to securely process data is the right of the customer, and that data cannot be altered or transferred by Aliyun. Finally, it says that customer data protection on the platform is Aliyun’s responsibility, as money deposited in a bank becomes that institution’s responsibility. This means that similar management, control and internal auditing systems, as well as threat protection, data recovery and related security practices must all be adopted.

The company presented more than 14 cloud products and 50 solutions it has developed for enterprises and developers across eight sectors, including gaming, multimedia, government, medical, IoT, and finance. More than 200 partners provide additional solutions, and Aliyun expects that number to grow to over 2,000 in the next few years.

“The huge amount of data and advanced computing capacity has brought great business opportunities to the industry,” said Wensong ZHANG, Chief Technology Officer of Aliyun. “Deep learning and high-performance computing have been widely adopted in Alibaba Group for internal use. Aliyun will roll out high-performance computing services and accelerators based on GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) technology that could be applied in image recognition and deep learning to expand the boundaries of business.”

New solutions include SSD cloud storage servers, batch computing services used in gene sequencing and graphics rendering, and Virtual Private Cloud systems for cloud and hybrid databases compatible with Oracle systems.

Aliyun partnered with EnterpriseDB last week to offer customers a diversified relational database suite, and launched an international partnership program in June. Those moves forecasted Wednesday’s announcement of a global enterprise services push, but the company will also need to avoid disruptions like the one it suffered in June to leverage its huge investments.

This first ran at http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/alibaba-cloud-division-aliyun-shares-cloud-privacy-commitment-as-it-vies-for-global-business