Alibaba Group, China’s top e-commerce firm, is expected to overtake Amazon by 2015 to become the world’s largest online retailer. Unsatisfied, the Hangzhou-based company is now opening a new front against its American rival with an ambitious plan to secure a foothold in the global cloud services market, which Gartner says surpassed $130 billion in revenue this year.

Alibaba’s cloud division, best known for the Aliyun mobile operating system, is considering launching new new data centers throughout North America and Southeast Asia in a move to capitalize on rapidly growing global demand for off-premise models. In an interview, Aliyun director Zhang Jing said that his company is also trying to cement its local foothold and become a one-stop cloud shop for large Chinese companies with an overseas presence. The expansion is scheduled to begin in March.

“After five years of development and three years of commercialization, Aliyun is able to provide sustainable services to customers, backed by its resourceful parent, Alibaba,” Zhang told the Chinese Daily.

Alibaba’s push into the foreign cloud market could spell trouble for AWS, the dominant player in the infrastructure-as-a-service space. Despite significant gains, Google and Microsoft have barely put a dent in AWS so far, but Alibaba is undeterred. Zhang boasted that his firm is the first and so far only cloud provider to have received a gold certification for cloud security from the British Standards Institute, a massive edge in view of Amazon’s alleged involvement in the NSA’s surveillance operations.

Transparency is also a growing priority for enterprises, which the IaaS giant is trying address with its newly introducing CloudTrail tool for logging APIs and configuration changes. The service was unveiled at last month’s re:Invent conference alongside slew of other offerings, most notably the Kinesis real time analytics platform.

Source: Euromonitor International