Alibaba Global Operations Center Wins DRI International Award for Business Continuity Management Innovation

In September 2017, Alibaba won a top award at the DRI International Asia Annual Conference, where the Global Operations Center (GOC) team from Alibaba Infrastructure Business Group received the “Best BCM Innovation Practice of the Year” award.

Alibaba's massive ecosystem faces the challenge of maintaining stable, continuous operation while scaling rapidly. Over years, Alibaba has built a complete solution covering fault prevention, detection, localization, rapid recovery, and post‑mortem drills, continuously optimizing it to prevent foreseeable issues, quickly recover from unexpected ones, and avoid repeat incidents, ensuring smooth service for customers.

Industry‑leading, award‑winning, the collective effort of the technical team has resulted in a continuity solution that keeps service availability at 99.99% and earned unanimous recognition from DRI, culminating in the Best BCM Innovation Practice award.

The Global Operations Center (GOC) of the Infrastructure Business Group silently guarantees stable operation of Alibaba’s ecosystem, handling global emergency decision‑making and command, providing timely alerts, full‑lifecycle incident management, rapid failover, and escalation support for e‑commerce, finance, and Alibaba Cloud, significantly reducing disaster duration and improving consumer experience.

GOC continuously promotes business continuity across prevention, rapid recovery, and post‑mortem phases.

GOC advances disaster‑recovery and rapid‑recovery capabilities, ensuring each data center has same‑city or cross‑region DR plans, validated by daily drills. By collaborating closely with business units, it integrates fast‑escape switches into a unified platform. An intelligent baseline system built on deep‑learning models detects faults instantly, notifies developers for manual intervention, and tracks progress. After resolution, GOC conducts deep post‑mortems, defines improvements, and validates immunity through simulated failures, achieving five‑minute fault detection and ten‑minute recovery.

After long‑term technical accumulation, GOC now operates a full suite of continuity platforms—OPM, OER, ODE, OCM, and ODA—delivering an industry‑leading solution driven by automation and intelligence toward an “unattended production system” goal.

With China’s rapid economic growth, Chinese enterprises are expanding globally, and business continuity management will gain greater attention. DRI’s upcoming Asia summit in Beijing aims to share international best practices and explore China‑specific BCM methods.