Box Targets International Expansion With AWS Data Centres In Australia And Canada

Box will let customers in Australia and Canada store data in local Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres as part of a wider drive to snap up more international customers.

Until the introduction of ‘Box Zones’ earlier this year, all customer data was stored in the US. The idea is that by having data closer to home, businesses will experience a boost in performance and will be able to take advantage of local data protection laws.

The latter is essential if Box is to attract customers in regulated industries and those in countires, such as Germany, with strict privacy regulations. Germany, along with Ireland, Japan and Singapore, was one of the first locations announced for Box Zones earlier this year.

Read More: Box CIO Paul Chapman’s IT Life

Box Zones expansion

Box Zones will be expanded to cover IBM Cloud, which has more than 40 data centres worldwide, later this year. London, IBM has confirmed, will be one of the first sites to go live as part of that partnership.

Regardless of whether AWS or IBM’s infrastructure is used, customers will have to pay an additional fee.

The company has also expanded its Box Accelerator, which intelligently routes customer traffic between different countries for better speeds, to 60 locations in 20 countries, and now complies with ISO 27018 – an international standard for protecting personal information in the cloud.

“As business becomes more global and connected, our goal is to ensure that secure collaboration with co-workers, partners and customers across boundaries is as seamless and fast as possible,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.

“In fewer than three months, we’ve added two new locations to Box Zones and delivered a faster, more reliable experience to our customers with the new Box Accelerator. As regulations and compliance become more complex, we’re focused on making it simple for our customers to do epic work and accelerate growth across the globe.”

Levie confirmed last year the company was looking at data centres outside the US as it expands, but said it was more focussed on offering a seamless experience for customers, something which various storage zones might complicate. This was solved by splitting application from storage.

International expansion and attracting customers in more regulated industries such as finance and healthcare has been a priority for Box, which has 62,000 business customers. One of the most recent additions is Western Union, which will use the platform across 520,000 locations across the world.

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