Chinese leading Cloud Service Providers | Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu AI offer’s FREE Cloud Services to face the CORONAVIRUS pandemic.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that trigger illness ranging from the typical cold to far more serious diseases.
For example:
- Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS-CoV)
- Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS-CoV)
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a new strain that was found in late 2019 and hasn’t been earlier identified in humans.
Coronaviruses are zoonotic in nature, meaning they’re transmitted between people and animals. Detailed investigations determined that MERS-CoV from dromedary camels to people and SARS-CoV was transmitted of civet cats to humans. Several known coronaviruses are circulating in creatures that haven’t yet infected humans.
Common Symptoms of Coronaviruses:
- Respiratory symptoms
- Fever, cough
- Shortness of breath
- Breathing difficulties
- Pneumonia
- Severe acute respiratory syndrome
- Kidney failure
- Even death.
The outbreak of the coronavirus is believed to become a “wet market” of Wuhan which sold both live and dead animals such as birds and fish.
The animal cause of the outbreak hasn’t yet been revealed, though the first host is believed to be bats. Bats weren’t sold at the Wuhan market but might have infected live chickens or other animals sold there.
COVID-19 has led in China’s 3 major leading cloud providers offering free services to government agencies, companies, students, and researchers in their bids to stand strong against the pandemic.
The 3 China’s leading cloud providers are:
- Alibaba Cloud
- Tencent Cloud
- Baidu AI Cloud
Due to the pandemic, the researchers and business professionals are offered various services as these major cloud service platforms have opened aspects that are now free to users.
The services offered by these 3 major cloud providers vary, but all made data tools and analytics available for researchers as they may need more data processing capabilities than they had earlier.
In a study, Canalys estimates that the cloud infrastructure services market of China grew 66.9% in the Q4 2019.
China invested $3.3 billion, it also represented 10.8% of the global investment, hence, making it the second-largest market. The 3 cloud service providers played an important role:
- Alibaba Cloud remained the leading service provider for China in Q4 2019 with a total accounting for 46.4% of total spending.
- Tencent Cloud shares increased to 18%
- Baidu AI Cloud was in third place with an increase in 8.8% shares.
Offerings offered by the 3 cloud service providers.
- Alibaba offered credits of its Elastic Compute Service and various other products, making its AI-powered cloud services offered to researchers with an emphasis on gene sequencing, treatment, protein screening, and prevention plans.
- Tencent also opened up its platforms for similar reasons and also made its Cloud Office Portfolio video chat & meeting tools free for companies and students.
- Baidu’s contribution was also in the form of AI-powered support for researchers, though the company even made its online healthcare consultation tool-free, resulting in more than 15 million virtual health assessments which helped treat patients while keeping doctors protected from infection.
It might still be too soon to figure out what impact they have had on the managing of the COVID-19 outbreak, though it’s vital that you be aware that coronavirus infection rates in China plummeted close to exactly the same date other news outlets started reporting similar stories.
This is a clear case for the potential of the cloud. “The advantages of cloud computing had been demonstrated by the top cloud service providers in response to the rapidly increasing coronavirus crisis,” said Yih Khai Wong, senior analyst at Canalys.
Hence, the strength of cloud computing has been proved by Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu AI. It had also been a call to action for other cloud service providers, Wong said.
Microsoft and Google also have offered free services, though it is not clear if Amazon has followed suit with AWS. Other tech businesses in the US are offering services that are free as well, like Wi-Fi, unlimited data, and free on-line tech support to employees that are self-isolating at home.
COVID-19 has triggered chaos for the tech industry, with retail shops closing around the globe, major tech conferences like Apple WWDC, MWC, Microsoft Build, and Google I/O were turned into virtual events or even canceled, and markets all over the world facing significant losses when the worldwide economy slows down to a crawl.
China, with the assistance of free services offered by these 3 major cloud service providers has weathered the outbreak and are on the tail conclusion of it, though the rest of the world is still dealing with an increase in coronavirus cases and much more social limitations while the outbreak worsens.
By establishing a precedent for various other main tech companies to check out, Chinese cloud giants are making social responsibility a necessity for tech giants that have the energy to flatten the curve with a little corporate generosity. Here is hoping it gets to be the product for future catastrophes also.
