Alibaba Cloud overhauls its hybrid cloud strategy
Alibaba Cloud has announced a 'revamp' to its hybrid cloud strategy, shifting its focus towards security, compliance, scalability and reliability in its offerings, with a similar change directed towards its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program.
As part of the new strategy, Alibaba also launched new appliances to support the private cloud utilisation needs of enterprises.
The appliance, with a dual power source network ports and a hot backup disc, acts as a bridge between customers' on-premise servers and the public cloud without compromising network security and efficiency.
"A key observation from 2020 is that hybrid cloud deployments will accelerate in the time to come as it expedites the digital transformation requirements of businesses everywhere," says Alibaba Cloud Intelligence hybrid cloud business general manager Kevin Li.
"At Alibaba Cloud, we are committed to making it easier for enterprises of any scale to accelerate their digital transformation requirements.
"We want to create an ecosystem for hybrid cloud partners so that together we can allow businesses to compete in the digital era.
It comes after the company launched a physical server to integrate with Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) solution with embedded backup capabilities to public cloud.
The Hybrid Cloud Storage Array (HCSA) is an enterprise-level storage appliance, blending in with the Alibaba Cloud storage service. It connects local storage with the elastic, scalable and unlimited public cloud storage to create a smooth hybrid cloud environment with ease of operation.
HCSA supports multiple hybrid cloud modes such as cloud caching, replication, tiering and snapshots with its fully redundant hardware design to ensure there is no single point of failure during operation. With HCSA, customers can implement cross-team file management and collaboration, unified heterogeneous storage management, and storage extension from local server to public cloud.
Alibaba's Hybrid Cloud Partner Program, also launched recently, enables service delivery with hybrid cloud partners and provides an ecosystem to plan, design, and resell services to propel customers' hybrid cloud adoption journey, the company says.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise senior director and general manager for APAC channels Christanto Suryadarma says its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud to deliver the next generation of hybrid cloud has kicked up another gear.
"We are pleased to take our partnership with Alibaba Cloud to the next level as an Alibaba Hybrid Cloud Partner," says Suryadarma.
"Through our Global Channels ecosystem and innovation portfolio, we will accelerate collaboration with Alibaba Cloud Solutions and create new synergies to help customers accelerate their digital transformations, harness the full power of their information, wherever it resides, and benefit from a modern cloud experience on-premises through our unique consumption offering and as-a-service vision.
