Amazon Boosts Privacy Law Compliance With New Frankfurt AWS Data Centres

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to open new data centres in Frankfurt, Germany, allowing businesses to benefit from protection from European and German privacy laws.

The new facility is AWS’s eleventh ‘region’ and its second in Europe, following the existing AWS data centre in Ireland. It hopes to inspire confidence among customers who want to ensure their data remains within Germany, which has more comprehensive privacy regulations than many other countries.

AWS German data centre

The new Frankfurt location will initially comprise two separate ‘availability zones’, each of which have data centres with independent, carbon-neutral power source, cooling and physical security.

Privacy-conscious firms can build applications to operate in just one zone, while those who want to benefit from low latency and higher fault tolerance can elect to run across multiple EU regions.

A number of AWS’ existing German customers say they will move more workloads to the cloud now that they can be guaranteed that data will remain in Germany.

“Our European business continues to grow dramatically,” said Andy Jassy, senior vice president, Amazon Web Services.  “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.”

Rival VMWare announced last week it was also going to open a new data centre in Germany to support the ongoing expansion its own vCloud Air platform. CEO Pat Gelsinger said the country was a natural choice as it was the continent’s second biggest market and improved vCloud’s compliance with EU and German data sovereignty requirements.

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