When Amazon announced the financial results for the third quarter ending September 30, 2014, it had the usual mixed bag of results, with good and bad news sprinkled throughout the report. The bad news is the company reported a net loss of $437 million, or $.95 per share in the third quarter, compared to only $41 million or nine cents a share for the same period last year. The good news is, net sales increased 20 percent to $20.58 billion for the quarter compared to $17.09 billion in 2013. Additionally, Amazon Web Services (AWS) continues to be one of the most positive segments of the company, with usage growth at almost 90 percent year-over-year for the third quarter. The same day the earnings report was released, the company also announced the launch of its new AWS EU (Frankfurt) region,
The addition of Frankfurt brings the total technology infrastructure regions globally for AWS to 11, and only the second in Europe, the first being in Dublin, Ireland.
As the largest economy in the EU, Germany was the next logical choice for Amazon to expand. The country is home to some of the largest corporations in the world across many different industries. Burda Media, SAP, Software AG and Talanx were some of the companies announcing they would be expanding their use of Amazon Web services to include the new Frankfurt region.
“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.”
Like all the other AWS infrastructure regions, the Frankfurt facility is designed, built and audited to meet compliance standards, including ISO 27001, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), PCI DSS Level 1 as well as all applicable EU Data Protection laws.
The regulatory compliances and security measures the company adheres by are under more scrutiny as Germany and the United States continue to address many of the issues Edward Snowden leaked to the world. However, it should be noted many entities in Germany already use AWS through the Dublin region, including the above mentioned companies, individual customers, research facilities, startups and many others.
“For Talanx, like many companies that hold sensitive customer data, data privacy is paramount,” says Achim Heidebrecht, Head of Group IT, Talanx AG. “Using AWS we are already seeing a 75 percent reduction in calculation time, and €8 million in annual savings, when running our Solvency II simulations while still complying with our very strict data policies. With the launch of the AWS region on German soil, we will now move even more of our sensitive and mission critical workloads to AWS.”
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
