Amazon Plans AWS Hong Kong Region To Target Local Enterprises

With net sales of $3.6 billion (£2.8bn) in Q1 2017, Amazon Web Services (AWS) could perhaps be forgiven for resting on its laurels, but there’s no such luck for its cloud competitors.

The company is continuing to expand its reach and is currently planning to open a new data centre region in Hong Kong in 2018 to supplement the six other regions currently in operation in Asia Pacific.

AWS already has bases in Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Beijing, Seoul, and Mumbai, with an additional Region in China expected to launch in the coming months.

World domination

The new region will be open to existing AWS customers, along with other businesses that need  to store sensitive data locally, such as public sector organisations and educational institutions.

“Hong Kong is a leading international financial center, well known for its service oriented economy,” writes Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS. “It is rated highly on innovation and for ease of doing business.

“As an evangelist, I get to visit many great cities in the world, and was lucky to have spent some time in Hong Kong back in 2014 and met a number of awesome customers there. Many of these customers have given us feedback that they wanted a local AWS Region.”

The Hong Kong region marks the next step in AWS’ plans for world domination. Last year it launched new infrastructure regions in London, Ohio and Canada and will also be expanding into France and Sweden within the next 12 months.

The platform is currently comprised of 43 Availability Zones across 16 geographic regions worldwide, enabling businesses around the world to take advantage of the speed and compliance benefits that come with having a local provider.

But AWS isn’t just focusing on data centres. It has also launched a cloud training programme called AWS re:Start in the UK, along with Amazon Connect, a cloud-based call centre service that uses artificial intelligence to manage calls.

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