Amazon Boosts Privacy Law Compliance with New Frankfurt Data Center
- By Matt Holden
- Oct 23, 2014
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is opening a new data center in Frankfurt, Germany, to allow businesses to protect themselves from European and German privacy laws.
The facility is AWS’s eleventh region and its second in Europe, the first being in Ireland. The intent is to inspire confidence among customers who want to ensure their data remains within Germany, which has more comprehensive privacy regulations than other countries.
The Frankfurt location will comprise of two separate ‘availability zones’, each of which has its own power source, cooling and physical security. Firms can build applications to operate in one zone, while those who want low latency and higher fault tolerance can run across multiple EU regions.
A number of AWS’ German customers say they will move their workloads to the cloud now that their data will remain in Germany.
“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, senior vice president, Amazon Web Services, in a report. “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.”
About the Author
Matt Holden is an Associate Content Editor for 1105 Media, Inc. He received his MFA and BA in journalism from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. He currently writes and edits for Occupational Health & Safety magazine, and Security Today.