During Mobile World Congress, Alibaba Cloud explained its plans for Europe – and specifically the UK – with the country being a big priority for the company going forwards.

Yeming Wang, general manager of Alibaba Cloud, Europe spoke exclusively to Information Age about this venture into the UK, and how businesses can embrace the now-necessary cloud.

How can businesses successfully adopt cloud solutions into their infrastructures, especially from legacy environments?

There are two ways for businesses to adopt cloud-based solutions. The first one is an invasive adoption, which means migrating from their existing IT infrastructure to cloud-based virtual machines and storage.

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The second way is a non-invasive approach, adopting cloud-based middleware and interfacing it with the legal system at the critical components. The business needs to consider which part of their organisation they want to adopt their cloud-based solutions into first.

As a global cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud is committed to helping companies analyse the bottleneck their legacy IT infrastructure causes, and make recommendations on the best go-to-cloud plan.

Why is it important for businesses to do this and what are the benefits?

First, cloud allows enterprises to run their existing business with lower costs and higher efficiency, bringing faster throughput and higher processing capabilities. This means they are able to spend fewer resources on maintaining their IT infrastructure and focus more on the business strategy.

Second, the data intelligence empowered by cloud computing will bring valuable insights into how enterprises operate, making their business flow more data-driven and more competitive in the digital age, improving their overall efficiency while reducing costs.

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We are in the era of digital transformation, where the decision-making around how a business operates is increasingly a strategic one. Cloud computing and AI solutions will be a strong technology tool for enterprises to increase ROIs and drive business innovations.

How can businesses make their data cloud-ready?

For businesses to make their data cloud-ready, businesses need to identify the critical anchor points where data brings value to their business flow. They then need a platform to digitalise the procedures from data fusion, data processing and data management in real time. Finally, they need to maintain stable variables and continuous data flows in order to build sophisticated algorithms, updated with their evolving business landscape.

Alibaba Cloud supports customers throughout all the steps above to ensure a smooth adoption of the cloud technology, including all the necessary tools. For example, at Mobile World Congress this year we launched Dataphin, an intelligent data engine developed to cope with cross-industry big data development, management and applications needs. The solution helps users save time and cost in data analytics, offering comprehensive big data solutions to businesses and maximising data value.

What business value does Alibaba Cloud add?​ What are Alibaba Cloud’s plans for the UK?

As a global cloud service provider, Alibaba Cloud provides a comprehensive suite of products and services ranging from cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, internet middleware and cloud security.

Alibaba Cloud was originally created to provide products and technologies to back-up Alibaba Group’s IT infrastructure, serving its various businesses across sectors including e-commerce, logistics, and finance. We have since acquired extensive expertise in applying our cloud-based AI capabilities across various verticals including transport, manufacturing, healthcare, environment and tourism.

>See also: Businesses need to talk about the cloud

We are therefore well-equipped to help companies across various sectors to tackle their challenges and succeed in the digital age with tailored solutions. For us, this is the true meaning of inclusive technology, which differentiates us from other cloud service providers.

We are committed to investing in the UK market and leveraging our technologies to help UK enterprises transform their businesses digitally. The UK is at the forefront of Europe for technological innovations, especially in areas such as retail, finance and logistics. It is also the hub of many world-famous research institutions and where many multinational corporations locate their headquarters.

Therefore, there is real potential in the market for the adoption of cloud computing technologies, and we are dedicated to supporting local organisations by bringing our technology and expertise and helping them scale-up internationally.