Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to open what it calls an infrastructure region in Sweden in 2018. The new AWS EU (Stockholm) Region will be comprised of three Availability Zones at launch. Currently, AWS provides 42 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another five Availability Zones, in two AWS Regions in France and China, expected to go live this year.
Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS said. “The Nordic’s most successful startups, including iZettle, King, Mojang, and Supercell, as well as some of the most respected enterprises in the world, such as IKEA, Nokia, Scania, and Telenor, depend on AWS to run their businesses. An AWS Region in Stockholm enables Swedish and Nordic customers, with local latency or data sovereignty requirements, to move the rest of their applications to AWS and enjoy cost and agility advantages across their entire application portfolio.”
Sweden’s innovation and enterprise Minister, Mikael Damberg, said: “I am happy to welcome AWS to Sweden. Their decision to establish a new region in our country is a recognition of Sweden’s competitive position within the European Union (EU), with the highest levels of renewable energy in the power grid of any country in the EU, as well as a world-leading digital infrastructure and IT industry” he said. “The AWS investment in Sweden will strengthen our position in the global digital shift. For us, trade in a modern globalised economy is not only about goods, but also about services, sharing of knowledge, and the free flow of data.”
AWS has been steadily increasing its investment in the Nordics to serve its growing base of customers. In 2011, AWS opened a Point of Presence (PoP) in Stockholm to enable customers to serve content to their end users with low latency.
In 2014 and 2015 respectively, AWS opened offices in Stockholm and Espoo, Finland. Today, AWS has teams of account managers, solutions architects, business developers, partner managers, professional services consultants, technology evangelists, start-up community developers, and more, helping customers of all sizes as they move to AWS.
When launched, the AWS EU (Stockholm) Region will enable organisations to provide even lower latency to end-users across the Nordics. Additionally, local AWS customers with data sovereignty requirements will be able to store their data in Sweden with the assurance that their content will not move unless they move it.
Trustpilot, another Nordic startup, used AWS to expand its business globally. The company provides over 150,000 e-commerce businesses, across 24 countries, with TrustScores. A TrustScore is a consumer rating that is based on more than 27 million online reviews. “Trustpilot chose to go ‘all-in’ on AWS from day one to enable us to support our rapid growth,” said Rudy Martin, VP of Operations at Trustpilot, which serves over 1.6
In addition to established enterprises and rapidly growing start-ups, AWS also has a vibrant ecosystem in the Nordics, including partners that have built cloud practices and innovative technology solutions on AWS. AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partners in the Nordics helping customers to migrate to the cloud include Accenture, Capgemini, Crayon Group, CSC, Cybercom, Dashsoft,
