Data security law: China orders state firms to migrate to government cloud services
- Notice comes just days before a national legislation comes into effect, with penalties of up to 10 million yuan for violations
- Market dominated by private players such as Alibaba, Huawei and Tencent
Data security is high on the government’s agenda and the move is expected to send turbulence through the country’s cloud service market, now dominated by private players.
In a notice posted online on Friday, the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Tianjin ordered state firms to not build new data centres, buy servers or purchase other storage hardware.
Firms owned by the municipal government were forbidden to renew or sign new leasing contracts with public cloud platforms owned by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, China Unicom, China Mobile and China Telecom, The Economic Observer reported, citing a document dated August 12.
Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Data stored in these platforms must be moved to digital infrastructure controlled by the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (Sasac) within two months of the expiration of existing leases, with the final deadline at the end of September next year.