Alibaba Cloud earns validation from Singapore banking association

Alibaba Cloud said it has become the first public cloud supplier in the industry to obtain the Outsourced Service Providers Audit Report (OSPAR) validation by the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) in February 2019.

The validation, designed to ease any compliance burden faced by financial firms that host and manage sensitive data through cloud and outsourcing service providers, is expected to lower compliance-related adoption barriers for Alibaba Cloud in Singapore.

To retain the validation, Alibaba Cloud will be subject to strict standards set by the ABS, which will appoint external auditors to conduct regular compliance reviews of its cloud services in areas such as physical and IT security, as well as workplace processes.

The OSPAR validation follows 70 other security and compliance accreditations that Alibaba Cloud has picked up globally, such as Germany’s Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalogue (C5) and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

It also secured accreditations from the Trusted Cloud Competence Network in Denmark, the National Electronic Security Authority (Nesa) in the United Arab Emirates, and has a cross-regional value-added telecommunication services business licence in China.

Alibaba Cloud said it also carries out independent self-assessments and audits on existing risk controls in regions such as Hong Kong, so as to ensure its services and operations meet regulatory requirements and security and compliance guidelines of financial firms.

Larry Liu, international compliance lead for Alibaba Cloud, said securing OSPAR compliance “in one of the world’s premier financial hubs means our customers can divert more resources to revenue-generating activities, while knowing they have a trusted and reliable partner in us”.

Alibaba Cloud was recently named first in the Asia-Pacific market share for IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and IUS (infrastructure utility services) in two consecutive years by Gartner in its latest report on the region’s IT services market.

The Chinese cloud supplier has been aggressively expanding its footprint across the region, starting with its international headquarters in Singapore that it opened in 2015.

It currently operates 15 availability zones in Asia-Pacific outside China, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Japan. The company set up its second datacentre in Jakarta this year in in an effort to meet “strong customer demand” for its services in Indonesia.