Dropbox Opens German Office Ahead Of AWS Partnership

Dropbox has opened an office in Hamburg, Germany, calling the move a ‘natural next step’ as it prepares to offer its cloud services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centres in the country later this year.

The opening marks the fifth European office Dropbox has in Europe, following on from Dublin, London, Paris, and Amsterdam.

The office will serve the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), an area Dropbox claims to be most popular Dropbox region in the world per capita. Germany has also seen a tripling in the use of Dropbox Business over the past two years, the company claims, with Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich particular hotspots.

Growth

Europe is important for Dropbox, especially as the company sets up its long-term growth plan to compete with Google, Microsoft and Amazon and their respective storage offerings. Dropbox claims that around three quarters of its users are outside of the US and a significant portion of that usage is by European businesses and consumers.

The expansion also comes at the height of Europe’s data privacy conversation, as the Privacy Shield framework for data sovereignty and transfer is getting ironed out.

Dropbox announced earlier this year that from the third quarter of 2016, European business customer file contents will be held in Germany, in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The move looks to boost Dropbox’s enterprise appeal in Europe. With a host of business customers already signed up in Europe (TamTam, Channel 4, Boots, and Conde Nast to name a few), Dropbox will be anticipating the privacy workaround will only make it more of an appealing platform to Germany and the privacy conscious.

“We love helping people around the world work better together, and users in the DACH region (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) love working with Dropbox. One in three internet users in DACH are now on Dropbox, and they’ve created over 163 million connections to date by sharing documents and folders,” said Dropbox.

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