Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has announced it will open an infrastructure region in Switzerland in the second half of 2022. The AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will comprise three Availability Zones and join existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and the UK. Currently, AWS provides 77 Availability Zones across 24 geographic regions globally, with announced plans for 12 more Availability Zones and four more AWS Regions in Switzerland, Indonesia, Japan and Spain. The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will enable even more developers, start-ups and enterprises, as well as government, education and non-profit organisations to run their applications and serve end-users from data centres located in Switzerland.
“For more than 14 years, AWS has supported organisations across almost every industry in Switzerland to speed up innovation, lower their IT costs and transform their operations,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, AWS. “AWS is excited to announce our upcoming region in Switzerland and help Swiss institutions, innovative start-ups and world-leading pharma companies deliver cloud-powered applications to fuel economic development across the country.”
AWS Regions consist of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ Business Continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in Switzerland, with the assurance that they retain control over the location of their data, while also providing even lower latency across the country. Organisations using this region will also be able to access advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services including analytics, Artificial Intelligence, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, mobile services, serverless technologies, storage and more to drive innovation.
Based in Zurich, Ringier is a multi-national media company in Switzerland operating over 100 media brands in 19 countries. Since adopting AWS, Ringier has increased user engagement by 24%, while tailoring content distribution, digital advertising and marketplace strategy to its customers’ needs. “A great reader experience is at the core of a successful media business model,” said Zhao Wang, Head of Data Technology for Ringier. “Using AWS services, especially managed services with analytics and Machine Learning, we can better understand our readers’ interests, improve content production and optimise content distribution for Blick, as well as many other renowned media brands – all tailored to our customers’ needs. The planned opening of an AWS Region in Switzerland is great news for us as it reflects AWS’s dedication to Switzerland.”