Apple announced last year that it would transfer its Chinese iCloud operations to a local firm to comply with the country’s new cybersecurity laws. It opened a new data center in China with a local Chinese data management firm. The new data center enables it to comply with China’s new regulations and also improve the speed of Apple’s cloud services in the region. Apple has now confirmed that the switchover will take place in February.
Chinese law makes it mandatory for foreign companies to partner with locally managed businesses to store data. Apple has partnered with the Guizhou-Cloud Big Data firm for this project.
Apple is now going to transfer Chinese iCloud data to the GCBD-managed data center in Guizhou next month. Customers in China won’t notice any major difference as all of this is going to happen behind the scenes so to speak.
The company assures its customers in China that their data will remain private and secure. “Apple has strong data privacy and security protections in place and no backdoors will be created into any of our systems,” Apple said.
Nevertheless, some remain concerned that moving the operations locally will potentially make it easier for the government to eavesdrop on Apple users in the country. The Chinese iCloud operations will be formally outsourced by Apple to Guizhou-Cloud Big Data on February 28th.
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