Alibaba offers up free cloud to help battle Coronavirus

While tech companies respond to the Coronavirus epidemic by cancelling their international conferences, Alibaba Cloud has different solution: cloud!

The fifth largest public cloud vendor is offering organisations impacted by the virus, or fighting the virus, US$1000 of credits to purchase “necessary cloud services” to ensure business continuity.

“During this ongoing health crisis, we are working together with several different enterprises whose business has been affected,” the company said in an EDM to customers. “We are offering them tailored cloud solutions to address the challenges they are facing, including the necessary telecommunication systems to connect remotely.”

Interested customers can fill out a form on Alibaba’s website to express their interest in the promotion.

Only eligible products will be available to purchase using the cloud credits, which includes: Elastic Compute Services, RDS, OSS, DCN, Anti-DDoS Premium, Web Application Firewall, Data Transfer Plans, Server Load Balancer and ApsaraVideo VOD.

While the effectiveness of public cloud in fighting a global health epidemic is yet to be seen, analyst firm Forrester Group claimed a fortnight ago that one impact of the Coronavirus will be renewed interest in remote access software and virtual desktop solutions.