Alibaba Cloud started introducing new features and services realizing the need for small and medium enterprises (SME) to fully realize the benefits of a hybrid cloud. The newly upgraded cloud solutions address issues that may arise using the public cloud.

Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group, hopes that through its newly upgraded product offerings, SMEs “will be able to take advantage of public cloud’s highly elastic, scalable and available characteristics.

To fully realize its objectives, the company also unveiled new appliances and strengthened its Hybrid Cloud Partner Program.

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“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,” said Kevin Li, general manager, Hybrid Cloud Business, Alibaba Cloud Intelligence. “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.

Alibaba Cloud also wanted to highlight the importance of having a backup, especially for SMEs which may have little or no knowledge of IT operations, with a physical server to integrate with Hybrid Backup Recovery (HBR) solution with embedded backup capabilities to the public cloud. The appliance acts as a bridge between customers’ on-premise servers and the public cloud without compromising network security and efficiency. It also has a dual power source, network ports, and a hot backup disc, which according to the firm, “will ensure a safe and stable operating environment for users without consuming extra computing resources.”

Hybrid Cloud Storage

With Hybrid Cloud Storage Array (HCSA), an appliance with enterprise level storage, SMEs can blend with the Alibaba Cloud storage service and connecting the local storage with the elastic, scalable, and unlimited public cloud storage. The company assures that 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 easily implement cross team file management and collaboration, unified heterogeneous storage management, and storage extension from local server to the public cloud,” the company said in its media release.

Alibaba Cloud’s Hybrid Cloud Partner Program is designed “to provide an ecosystem for capable partners to plan, design, and resell services to propel customers’ hybrid cloud adoption journey. Alibaba Cloud will also offer free technical resources to qualified partners under the program including free ZStack licenses with unlimited CPU cores.”

The program includes current global partners such as DXC Technology, Equinix, HPE, NCS, Whale Cloud; European partners Arrow Electronics, Softline Group, and APAC partners AsiaPac, B&Data, Blue Power Technology, Cloudify, CTC Global, DiGiCOR, and Sen Spirit.