Alibaba Cloud’s new data centre in Mumbai is slated to open in January 2018 and will cater for the increasing demand for cloud services arising from small and medium-sized enterprises.

In order to help enterprises of all sizes move to the firm’s platform, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba will create a local team of professional consultants to offer service planning, implementation, and after-sales support.

Taking into consideration the rapid growth displayed by the Indian economy, Alibaba Cloud believes the market will offer tremendous business opportunities. Also in its globalisation strategy, India is earmarked as a key market.

Simon Hu, SVP of Alibaba Group and president of Alibaba Cloud said:

"We are excited to be officially opening our new Mumbai, India data centre in early 2018, enabling us to work closely with more Indian enterprises. These local enterprises are innovative and operating in growth sectors, and we look forward to empowering them through our cloud computing and data technologies.

As we build out the Alibaba Cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is now firmly in place. This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond."

With the new data centre, Alibaba Cloud will provide Indian enterprises with a comprehensive suite of cloud computing products including largescale computing, storage resources, and Big Data processing capabilities. Other data centre services to be offered include elastic computing, database, storage and content delivery, networking, analytics and big data as well as security.

At present, Alibaba Group’s cloud computing arm has 33 availability zones throughout 16 economic centres worldwide, with coverage extending across mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, the Middle East, Europe, India and the US (East and West Coast).

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