Sets example for other firms to comply with Cybersecurity Law: expert
Apple Inc announced that it will build its first data center in Southwest China's Guizhou Province Wednesday, in compliance with China's Cybersecurity Law taking effect on June 1, which experts said will inspire other foreign tech firms to follow suit.
The announcement was made during a press conference on iCloud cooperation agreed between the Guizhou government and Apple Wednesday.
Under the project involving an investment of $1 billion, Guizhou-Cloud Big Data Industry Co, a local tech firm, will become the only partner of Apple in Chinese mainland to operate its iCloud service. The new iCloud data center, to be located in Guian New Area, will be operated by the Guizhou company, with Apple providing technology support, according to the Guizhou government's website.
"Under the project, data related to Chinese users will be stored in the data center in the mainland, which is a fine example of cooperation between a Chinese company and an international tech giant under the Cybersecurity Law," Ma Ningyu, director of Guizhou's provincial data bureau, said at the press conference.
The Cybersecurity Law states that operators of key information infrastructure should store in the mainland important business data and personal data which they collect from their operations in the country.
The new partnership will improve Chinese iCloud users' experience by improving the speed and reliability, said Lisa Jackson, a vice president of Apple.
She said at the press conference that Guizhou has become one of the most promising regions in terms of cloud computing and big data in the country.
Guizhou is China's first pilot zone for big data, and the province has built China's first big data engineering laboratory and also made a big data industrial map, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
"Apple's plan to build its data center in the mainland is a wise decision, and has set a fine example for other foreign Internet and tech firms to follow," said Xie Jiangyong, an associate professor at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
Xie said that during the drafting of the Cybersecurity Law, many Internet giants tried to hold back the legislation. But with the law's implementation and the attraction of the huge Chinese market, the companies backed down and chose to respect and obey the law.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is also planning to locate a global data center in Northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
However, Wednesday's agreement was just a preliminary stage of cooperation, and it faces many challenges in its implementation, such as how to store data for some Chinese who frequently commute between China and abroad and how to supervise the data transfer between China and foreign countries, Shen Yi, deputy director of the cyberspace management center of Fudan University, told the Global Times on Wednesday.
