A visitor reads a brochure of Inspur Group Co Ltd during an expo in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. [Photo by Yang Suping/For China Daily]

Inspur Cloud, a subsidiary of tech firm Inspur Group Co Ltd, said it has set up China's largest backbone system on the distributed cloud, amid growing demand for new cloud services due to the accelerated digital economy development.

Distributed cloud is a public cloud computing service that enable users to run public cloud infrastructure in multiple locations, to better meet the customized requirements of various users.

Xiao Xue, chairman and CEO of Inspur Cloud, said the firm has completed the largest distributed cloud migration in the country, which covered 169 distributed cloud nodes. Over 20,000 business applications and systems have been migrated onto the cloud, he said.

"With this move, Inspur Cloud has changed from data computing and application to the integration of data collection, calculation and application," Xiao said. "It will help meet the new data computing demands."

The digital economy, which includes cloud computing, is a key focus in the country's 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-25). During the period, China aims to further unlock the value of data and push forward the digital economy with the help of latest technologies.

Market consultancy IDC said in a report the overall market size of China's public cloud services may have reached $19.38 billion last year, up nearly 50 percent year-on-year, the highest growth rate worldwide.

"Global political and economic changes have made cloud computing a national strategic sector. To meet requirements of experience and innovation-oriented cloud services, the future digital infrastructure needs to integrate cloud, network and intelligence," said Wu Lianfeng, vice-president and chief research analyst of IDC China, a market research firm.

According to Xiao, a unified business distributed cloud architecture will be the company's next business strategy, which will eliminate the barriers between the public and private cloud.

To make it simple, users can enjoy cloud computing services in a single cloud regardless of whether the application and data are in the central cloud, local cloud or edge cloud, he said.

Till date, Inspur Cloud has offered its business to over 245 provincial and city governments and more than 1 million enterprises across the nation.