Challenges and Solutions for Tech Companies Doing Business in China
China is a unique challenge for building infrastructure for SaaS or App based services. Unlike other (or most other) countries in the world, China has additional hurdles to overcome to offer services to Mainland China effectively.
From the legal standpoint, there is the ICP license is required for every domain name used in China. So it is a challenge for outside companies to get a license since they are outside of China. Many must partner with 3rd parties to obtain this license. Cloud providers like Tencent or AliCloud help users to gain use their license. So once you have your ICP taken care of you must now build cloud infrastructure.
One big issue with trying to work from outside China to service providers inside is what referred to as “The Great Firewall of China” is a state-run firewall that filters content and ports used for services the Chinese government has an issue. A recent example is their crackdown on the use of VPN (Virtual Private Networks) which are frequently used to circumvent the content blocking. However, for administrators are used to connect to cloud providers to manage services securely.