Cloud has become a strategic enabler for businesses seeking higher agility, efficiency, and scale. As compared to traditional IT setups that require a huge upfront investment in physical hardware, moving to the cloud helps businesses lower their total cost of ownership (TCO), pay for the resources they consume, avoid vendor lock-ins, free up their technical resources from mundane infrastructure management tasks, and focus more on other critical areas of their business. From a simple lift-and-shift approach to complex re-architecting of core applications, and uncovering hidden insights from dormant customer data - cloud offers multiple avenues for business growth.
Cloud also helps businesses to provision resources on demand without waiting to setup new hardware unlike traditional ways of infrastructure management and orchestration. Moreover, companies can scale these resources up or down basis the requirements making it all the more cost-effective. E-commerce businesses, for example, can simply scale up resources during peak shopping festival times and scale down resources soon after the festival is over. Modern cloud players also support auto-scaling so that companies can focus more on their core business.
Alibaba Cloud, a business unit of Alibaba Group (NYSE: BABA) offers a wide range of purpose-built cloud computing products and solutions to global enterprises along with supporting the technology needs of its own e-commerce ecosystem. Alibaba Cloud products span across different areas such as networking, security, data, elastic computing, monitoring, and media services, among others. Moreover, Alibaba Cloud also analyzed multiple use cases and has come up with custom solutions for Finance, Gaming, Security, E-commerce, New Business Set-up in China, and DevOps, among others.
Alibaba Cloud was ranked a top three cloud services provider globally (based on IaaS and IUS Providers' global revenue in 2017) in the newly published Market Share Analysis: IaaS and IUS, Worldwide, 2017 report, 28 June 2018, issued by Gartner, one of the world's leading research and advisory companies. There are multiple global customers that achieved significant benefits by leveraging Alibaba Cloud products and solutions. Alibaba Cloud's robust ecosystem allows companies like Ford to deliver custom digital solutions for customers in China. Alibaba Cloud comes with a strong "China" experience and supports Ford's "In China, For China" strategy.
With the support of Alibaba Cloud's click and deploy infrastructure, Schneider Electric is able to shift from a traditional equipment provider to a unique and innovative online service provider. Alibaba Cloud's Elastic Compute Servers (ECS) offers them flexibility with auto-scaling features and load balancing. These capabilities help improve reliability and manage traffic in real-time.
Today an organization's IT ecosystem includes multiple applications, databases, in-house infrastructure, mobile devices, and cloud. Traditional firewall based perimeter security cannot offer defense against increasingly sophisticated malware and other cyber threats. In such an environment, security practitioners need to clearly identify how their present security posture protects their data and digital assets. Also, they have to be sure, with respect to their cloud vendor's security responsibilities.
Therefore, in this ever-evolving threat landscape, Alibaba Cloud relies on a multi-layered approach to secure its platform and cloud users. For instance, Alibaba Cloud counters application layer attacks with its advanced Web Application Firewall (WAF). WAF protects your web applications against intrusion by blocking malicious traffic, OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, zero-day vulnerabilities, SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) and more. On the other hand, its Anti-DDoS service works at the Network Layer to protect your servers by redirecting malicious traffic to scrubbing centers close to the traffic source. This service can counter more than 1,000 DDoS attacks daily.
AirAsia, as mentioned above, worked together with Alibaba Cloud's security teams to eliminate illicit traffic during the initial days. Alibaba Cloud helped them uncover complex attacking patterns and implement Web Application Firewall (WAF) with customized rules along with custom built captcha solutions. AirAsia identified 90% of the traffic as bots with the help of Alibaba Cloud solutions. Apart from AirAsia, customers like HKExpress have implemented Alibaba Cloud security solutions. HKexpress is an online portal that allows visitors to check, browse and reserve flight tickets online. They were facing cyber security threats and their concerns grew larger and larger as they weren't able to tackle these threats and attacks. Alibaba Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) security team helped them resolve this by implementing the same anti-bot technology that is currently protecting the Alibaba Group websites and businesses.
Multinational corporations (MNCs) spread globally with multiple offers, stores, or branches and a central headquarter (HQ) benefits immensely by moving to the cloud. Most MNCs want to connect global offices with the HQ but building a cross-region network is very difficult, especially during the expansion period due to limited resources. Companies require a solution that helps them build a global network easily and cost-effectively. Alibaba Cloud's Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN) helps achieve this. Using CEN, companies are able to setup a reliable global network, and not only integrate global branch offices with the HQ, but also integrate their internal business systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system efficiently. Alibaba Cloud's CEN lets MNCs build a global cross-region network in just four simple steps that take less than five minutes. It comes with 56 availability zones and 19 regions globally. Moreover, there is no hassle of big upfront investment, making CEN most desirable and cost-effective solution.
Alibaba Cloud offers optimized database services to its customers. Most companies have very less time to handle database crisis and Alibaba Cloud database services monitor, backup, and recover database automatically so that companies can focus more on the business. Database service comes with features that are developed with years of experience helping companies save 90% of database operations and maintenance costs. ApsaraDB RDS for SQL Server, for instance, monitors and manages database services automatically reducing 60% of maintenance workload.
E-commerce companies, for instance, can leverage database services to resolve performance issues in handling large numbers of concurrent user requests during peak times. It helps increase business performance by 100%, supports high-security mode, and protects data from SQL injections. Apart from e-commerce, gaming applications and websites are also data-intensive and data is critical to their business. Alibaba Cloud helps them improve the scalability of computing resources and deploy game server databases within minutes. It leverages active/standby architecture and data transmission encryption to ensure automatic disaster recovery and business continuity.
It is important that at a time when an increasing number of businesses are exploring avenues for higher efficiency with multi-cloud, Alibaba Cloud's impressive suite of services provides a definite edge and an unmatched value proposition. Empower your business growth in 2019. Cut costs on cutting-edge technology with up to 50% off. Special offer valid until March 24, 2019 (23:59:59 UTC+8).
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WAF(Web Application Firewall)
A cloud firewall service utilizing big data capabilities to protect against web-based attacks
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ECS(Elastic Compute Service)
Elastic and secure virtual cloud servers to cater all your cloud hosting needs.
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CEN
A global network for rapidly building a distributed business system and hybrid cloud to help users create a network with enterprise level-scalability and the communication capabilities of a cloud network
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