Cloud giant
Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has announced it will launch a new ‘Canada’ region in 2016. AWS, which has headquarters in Seattle, Washington, United States, is the world’s leading cloud services provider. The company currently provides services in 12 geographical regions globally, Canada will be its thirteenth and services will come online later in the year. The news comes in the wake of the company’s recent general availability launch in the South Korea region.
The new region will center around Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and Amazon’s move brings it into a business environment with strict environmental policies. As a result, the new region will be predominantly powered by renewable hydro power leaving AWS’ Canada activity almost completely carbon-neutral. The area also has strict data protection rules and by moving into Canada Amazon opens itself to dealing with Canadian government departments whose data needs to be stored on Canadian soil.
The Canadian cloud market’s future value has been estimated at rising to US$2.5 billion in 2016 with the public cloud the fastest growing area. Amazon’s latest move is in the wake of Microsoft plans to enter the Canadian market in 2016, which were announced last year. Microsoft will build two Azure data centers in Toronto and Quebec. Both companies are targeting Canadian government departments and agencies.
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