By opening this new data center, Amazon could attract more people that were leery of using a service based in the US

Oct 23, 2014 14:27 GMT  ·  By

Amazon has announced that it will be building a data center in Frankfurt, Germany. This move falls in line with those of other Internet-based companies that have been hit with a decrease in trust following the revelations regarding the NSA’s mass surveillance efforts due to their extensive data center presence in the United States.

The e-commerce giant offers more than a way for people to shop, it also offers Amazon Web Services, which rents computing power and storage space to customers, business and government agencies. Since many are now leery of joining in a service that’s based in the United States due to the spotlight put on the NSA’s ways of collecting data, Amazon thought it might be a good idea to set up shop in Germany too.

AWS has thousands of customers in Germany and all over Europe and they’re using the data centers in Ireland. Having another one closer by, in a more central position, seems to be a good idea.

“What we found with our German customers, maybe more so than other places in the world, is they have a lot of passion for the data to reside in-country. This allows current customers and maybe some prospective customers to move their workloads to AWS,” said Andy Jassy, senior vice president.

Europeans are more comfortable with data centers on their own territories

The new AWS EU region consists of two separate Availability Zones, the company said. These refer to datacenters in separate, distinct locations within a single region that are engineered to be operationally independent of other similar Zones, with independent power, cooling and physical security.

The new AWS data center in Frankfurt, in conjunction with the one in Ireland gives customers flexibility to architect across multiple AWS regions within the EU.

“Our European business continues to grow dramatically. 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,” said Jassy.

Academics in Germany have been quite happy to hear about Amazon’s plans. They believe that this marks an important occasion for the German business and technology community. Professor Doctor Helmut Krcmar, Vice Dean of the Computer Science Faculty, and Chair of Information Systems at the Technical University of Munich, said that they’d been working with a number of DAX listed companies in Germany and many had been holding off moving sensitive workload to the cloud until they had computing and service facilities on German soil.