Xiaomi Is Moving All User Data Out Of China

Xiaomi has constantly been in the news, either for record breaking flash sales or for spying. Finnish security firm F-Secure confirmed that all Xiaomi phones established contact with servers based in China irrespective of the users choice, Hugo Barra quickly responded assuring everyone that it was due to cloud backup features which were on by default, also an update to fix the on by default feature was rolled out.

Yet, many users weren’t satisfied. According to leading media houses, The Indian Air Force sent out a warning to all its fighters and their families against using Xiaomi phones citing the above reason.

Hugo once again responded swiftly with Xiaomi’s plan to move all data out of China, here is what he had to say over data migration on Google+

Phase 1: E-commerce migration

Earlier this year, our e-commerce engineering teams started migrating our global e-commerce platforms and user data for all international users from our Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in California (USA) and Singapore.  We also began using Akamai’s global CDN infrastructure to speed up static page loads.

This migration process will be completed by the end of October and will benefit users in all of our international markets — Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan.  Users are already experiencing website speed boosts of at least 30% in markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and as much as 200% in India.

Phase 2: MIUI services migration

We have also recently started migrating our MIUI services and corresponding data for all international users from our Beijing data centers to Amazon AWS data centers in Oregon (USA) and Singapore. This migration includes Mi Account, Cloud Messaging and Mi Cloud services.  We are expecting to complete this migration by the end of 2014, with some parts being completed even sooner (e.g. Mi Account servers by the end of October).

With this migration, we are expecting to cut network request latency for users in India by up to 350ms, and users in Malaysia to experience 2-3x faster Mi Cloud photosync.

Phase 3: Going local

In 2015, we are planning to take on a new challenge to further improve the performance of our services for users in large and fast-growing markets such as India and Brazil.

In these markets, where Amazon AWS services aren’t yet available, we will be working with local data center providers to set up our service infrastructure.  Once that has been completed, users in these markets will be much closer to their data and enjoy even faster speeds by connecting to local servers.