Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, has today announced the opening of two availability zones in the UK, in addition to its Frankfurt and Dubai data centres launched in 2016.

This expansion not only extends Alibaba Cloud's capabilities within Europe, but also serves to highlight the provider's ongoing commitment to the region. Alibaba Cloud's local footprint is steadily increasing, with data centres across three EMEA locations: Frankfurt, Dubai, and now London.

Answering an increase in demand for Alibaba Cloud services across the EMEA region, the pair of high performance availability zones will enable organisations in the region to accelerate the upgrade of their digital infrastructure enabling more efficient digital transformation initiatives. Business continuity is also a clear focus, with dual availability zones offering stronger disaster recovery capabilities.

The London location also boasts 24/7 on-site support - including both security and engineering - as well as real-time monitoring and a ticketing system with SLA guarantees. The new data centres offer a wide range of Alibaba Cloud product lines, including: Elastic Computing, Storage, Database, Network, Application Services and Big Data Analytics.

Fortanix Inc., the leader in Runtime Encryption, today announced its partnership with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, to integrate its Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) with the Alibaba Cloud platform, introducing new levels of security and privacy with Runtime Encryption key management in the cloud.

Alibaba Cloud is among the world's top three IaaS providers according to Gartner and the largest provider of public cloud services in China according to IDC. It launched commercial Intel® Software Guard Extensions (Intel® SGX)-powered cloud servers as Elastic Compute Service (ECS) bare metal instances in April. Working with Fortanix, customers can now keep their most precious applications secure with new levels of security and privacy for encryption keys in the cloud. This new partnership enables secure cloud adoption for even the most sensitive workloads by allowing prospects to securely adopt the cloud with unmatched privacy for their encryption keys offered by Fortanix SDKMS.

"Fortanix is one of the leaders in Intel SGX technology and their Runtime Encryption can bring applications that were previously constrained due to security issues to the cloud," said Xiaoning Li, Chief Security Architect of Alibaba Cloud. "Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service allows customers to encrypt all their data in Alibaba Cloud, while keeping the keys protected from Fortanix and Alibaba Cloud. We are glad to partner with Fortanix to provide a cutting-edge cloud security options to our users."

The Computing Conference 2018, Alibaba's annual flagship event, will showcase an array of cutting-edge technology from the company and its partners from September 19 to 22.

The theme of this year's Conference is Empower Digital China, and more than 60,000 participants-including entrepreneurs and developers across China-are expected to attend the four-day event in Hangzhou, Alibaba's home base.

Now in its ninth year, the world-class technology festival will feature the hottest trends in areas such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT) and the blockchain. The Conference also aims to open up a dialogue among top industry experts around technology's influences on the economy and society.

The Computing Conference is Alibaba's largest annual technology showcase. It has transformed from a local forum of 20 Internet companies in 2009 to an event that takes place throughout different cities in China before ending in Hangzhou.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today announced the launch of their second availability zone ("Availability Zone B") in Malaysia to expand its cloud footprint and bolster its cloud capacity, serving increasing customer demand locally and in the region. The new zone complements Availability Zone A which was launched last year in heightening cloud security and ensuring business continuity through resilient cloud infrastructure.

Alibaba Cloud will also continue to invest in Malaysia by setting up the first cloud based Anti-DDoS Scrubbing Center in August. The center will mitigate risks and offer customers the highest level of protection against stronger DDoS attacks. The new center will feature a variety of security functions including Anti-DDoS Pro, a service that defends against all types of DDoS attacks.

Grazed from Blue Medora

Blue Medora today announces support for two new cloud platforms - Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud - for BindPlane, the industry's first monitoring integration as a service (MIaaS). 

BindPlane addresses the common challenge most data center operations teams experience - gaining a comprehensive view of what's going on across their IT ecosystem. BindPlane dramatically expands observability for large enterprises monitoring hybrid and multi-cloud environments, and is now available across AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM, Google and Alibaba cloud environments.

The Multi-Cloud Challenge

WANdisco, the Live Data Company, announces it has entered into a non-exclusive OEM ('Original Equipment Manufacturer') sales agreement with Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group.

Under the sales agreement, WANdisco Fusion, a solution that seamlessly replicates transactional data at petabyte scale without downtime or disruption, will be sold as a standard component on Alibaba Cloud, covering several key aspects including Live Data migration to Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Cloud for disaster recovery and hybrid big data with Alibaba Cloud.  The partnership represents a substantial increase in WANdisco's addressable market and a significant extension of its channel strategy.

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today announced the commencement of operations for its first data center in Indonesia. The data center is the first global public cloud platform in the country that will now provide a local choice for Indonesian businesses, particularly SMEs and startups, by offering a powerful, reliable and cost-effective cloud product and services. Alibaba Cloud's data center will also help Indonesian customers with low latency or data residency requirements to store and process data within the country.

The data center will offer a comprehensive suite of cloud products and services ranging from elastic computing, database service, networking, security and middleware to analytics and big data. This full range of Alibaba Cloud's solutions will satisfy the surging needs of local enterprises across a range of industries including e-commerce, media, Fintech, gaming, logistics, transportation and manufacturing. In particular, the big data service "MaxCompute", a big data platform that allows users to store and process massive amounts of structural data to levels as high as terabyte or even petabyte, will bring sophisticated data intelligence services such as data processing, analytics and machine learning to Indonesian businesses, empowering data-driven innovation and business transformation.

"As the only global cloud services provider originating from Asia, we are uniquely positioned with cultural and contextual advantages to provide innovative data intelligence solutions and computing capabilities to customers across this region," said Alex Li, General Manager of Asia Pacific, Alibaba Cloud.

Grazed from Alibaba Cloud

Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, today launched eight products ranging from big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to infrastructure, security and private cloud solutions at the Mobile World Congress that is taking place in Barcelona Spain. The array of products will meet the surging demand for powerful and reliable cloud computing services as well as advanced AI solutions among European enterprises to support them to capture opportunities in this digital transformation era. Bringing together these products with the expertise and real experience available from Alibaba Cloud, customers can put in place cutting edge solutions particularly in areas such as online and offline retail integration, smart manufacturing and smart city development.

The new products being launched for European enterprises fall into a number of inter-related categories. In relation to data technology and AI, Alibaba Cloud is launching three key products - Image Search solutions, which allow users to search for information online and offline using images; Intelligent Services Robot, a chatbot for business; and Dataphin, an intelligent data engine developed to cope with the cross-industry big data development, management and application needs.

Infrastructure and security will continue to be crucial as the foundation and fundamental consideration for enterprises undertaking cloud migration. In view of this, Alibaba Cloud will launch ECS Baremetal Instance, a new high performance computing solution of ECS that combines the strengths of virtualized systems and bare metal servers. When connected as a supercomputer, ECS Baremetal Instances becomes a Super Computing Cluster that will reduce network latency to the level of micro-seconds while offering elasticity and supercomputing capabilities.

Express Logic, provider of the comprehensive X-Ware IoT Platform powered by the industry leading ThreadX RTOS, announced today turnkey support for all the leading cloud providers. Among this group are Alibaba, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Baidu, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Tencent, and Xively. Designed from the ground up to be industrial grade, and developed entirely in-house by Express Logic engineers, the X-Ware IoT Platform leverages its size, performance, safety, security, ease of use, and other advanced features to provide best-of-class IoT connectivity for deeply embedded IoT sensors, devices, edge routers, and gateways.

Powered By ThreadX

Express Logic's high-performance ThreadX RTOS is at the heart of the X-Ware IoT Platform. With over 6.2 billion deployments, as certified by VDC Research, ThreadX is arguably the world's most widely deployed RTOS. ThreadX provides embedded developers with priority-based preemptive scheduling, preemption-threshold scheduling, optimized context switching, real-time event trace, downloadable memory-protected application modules, and full determinism, all accessed through a highly intuitive API. ThreadX is deployed in environments where small footprint, low overhead, high performance, solid reliability, and fast time-to-market are essential. ThreadX is ideally suited for cloud-infrastructure connectivity and related products from such sectors as consumer electronics, medical and scientific instrumentation, industrial control and automation, automotive, aerospace, and more.