Picture credit: “The Crunchies 2008 Awards”, by “Nandor Fejer”, used under CC BY / Modified from original
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened up a new series of European data centres in the German city of Frankfurt.
The move comes to assuage European customers they can keep all their data and services on the continent instead of the US, with the German data centres – comprising an entire region – complementing their other European offering in Ireland. The Frankfurt launch brings the total number of AWS data centres to 11.
“To survive, businesses must be able to compete in today’s digital economy,” said Pontus Noren, co-founder of Cloudreach.
“Unrestricted use of the world’s number one cloud computing platform from AWS has become the essential part of any organisation’s ability to compete,” he added. “The German region for AWS will enable German businesses to do business in Germany without moving their data outside Germany.”
It can’t be said the move wasn’t coming. Back in March a Wall Street Journal article all but named Germany as the next data centre location for AWS. The new data centre will have two separate availability zones at launch, and is compliant with all applicable EU data protection requirements. Customers can also construct their cloudy architecture between the two EU regions.
“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said AWS SVP Andy Jassy in a statement. “By opening a second European region, and situating it in Germany, we’re enabling German customers to move more workloads to AWS, allowing European customers to architect across multiple EU regions, and better balancing our substantial European growth.”
AWS isn’t the only infrastructure provider looking to European expansion. IBM, through SoftLayer, launched a London data centre in July, and more recently announced expansion to France.
Earlier this week a report from Skyhigh Networks found that AWS remains the most popular enterprise cloud service, ahead of Microsoft Office365 and Salesforce.
Find out more about the AWS Frankfurt data centre here.
