China's ZTE plans to expand cloud computing services in foreign countries despite the challenge of allaying security concerns. It seems that the company, which once would have worried that foreigners were worried about their data being sniffed by Chinese spooks, is less concerned about spying allegations losing customers. After all, it turns out that the Americans were spying on everyone anyway.

Zhu Jinyun, ZTE's general manager for cloud computing and IT products operations told Reuters that data privacy has become a hot topic. However he is confident that the company can configure solutions for foreigners. ZTE already provides cloud services to China's telecom carriers, such as China Telecom, major internet firms and oil and energy companies.

Zhu wants a 10 per cent contribution from the cloud and enterprise business to ZTE's overall revenues in 2013, up from around 7 to 8 per cent last year. To allay any concerns that customers have on security issues, ZTE said it has relevant third party certifications, is willing to provide source codes if necessary. It said that it has not encountered any security breaches so far.

"We have been in overseas markets for about 20 years and if there is a problem, we would have been discovered," Zhu said.