Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer that vaulted past Apple and Samsung to become the market leader in China, is reportedly moving the data of users that are not from China away from its Beijing-based servers.
According to a Google+ post made by Xiaomi's vice president Hugo Barra, the company had already started to move the user data of non-Chinese customers to servers that are operated by Amazon.
Barra said that the process for the migration of servers and data will occur in three phases.
The first phase, which has already started, will have the company's engineering teams for e-commerce transfer the platforms and user data to Amazon servers in California and Singapore. The process is expected to be finished by the end of October and will be beneficial to international users located in Hong Kong, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines and Taiwan. Barra reported that speed boosts for the website by at least 30 percent are already being enjoyed by users in Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong and by as much as 200 percent for users in India.
The second phase will involve the migration of MIUI services and the corresponding data for the services to Amazon data centers in Oregon and Singapore. This phase involves the users' Mi Accounts, Mi Cloud and Cloud Messaging, and is expected to be finished by the end of the year.
The third phase, which will kick off next year, will have Xiaomi develop service infrastructure in Brazil and India, which are fast-growing markets where Amazon servers are not yet set up.
The information for Chinese users will remain in the company's Beijing servers.
According to Barra, the decision of Xiaomi to adopt a multi-site server architecture was made with the primary goal of improving the performance of the company's services for its users. The move should be able to trim latency and decrease failure rates for non-Chinese users, as the closer the users are to the servers, the faster the data will come.
In addition, the transfer of data will allow Xiaomi to maintain high standards of privacy for its users, as well as to comply with local regulations on data protection.
While Xiaomi could be migrating user data upon expectations of further global expansion, the company could also be further protecting user data by moving the data away from China.
The authorities of China have been known to monitor the data traffic passing through the country, according to industry experts. Just recently, coinciding with the launch of the iPhone 6 in the country, Chinese authorities reportedly launched an attack on Apple's iCloud through a man-in-the-middle hack, looking to extract all the data stored in the cloud-based storage service.
