Alibaba supports data localization in India

Chinese e-commerce behemoth, Alibaba is showing interest in Indian startups that have a high-frequency use case and has invested in Indian companies like Paytm and BigBasket. Alibaba has also backed data localization in India. Alibaba Cloud is interested to grow its presence in the country. Two years ago, it started to expand in India. Alibaba built a data center in India last year; it was the company’s first data center in the country and is looking for more such opportunities to boost its presence in the Indian cloud market.

Data localization has been proposed by the Indian government for data protection. The banking regulator has made it obligatory for all the payment companies to store data locally.

According to Simon Hu, President of Alibaba Cloud, the company is always interested in data localization in every country in order to encourage data security as it understands that it is a big challenge to build the trust to store data overseas. "We need to respect laws on data security and privacy. It is the most fundamental one. We insist on the localization of data. Indian data should be stored in India. That is our principal," Hu said in a session at the Alibaba Cloud Computing conference in Hangzhou. 

The cloud business for Alibaba is growing rapidly and the revenue is reportedly increased to 93%.  However, the share from the overseas market is still not satisfactory as per Simon Hu. "In the future, we hope to see a 50-50 share from overseas," Hu said.