In late October, Amazon's cloud computing division announced plans to construct two German data centers in Frankfurt. The company has decided to build two separate facilities in the area to ensure redundancy in case one data center were to fail due to disaster or hardware malfunction. The Frankfurt data center complex is Amazon's second site in Europe and brings the company's portfolio to a total of 11 facilities overall.
Prior to the creation of the German data centers, enterprises in the country would have used Amazon's Ireland data center, or any of the company's nine other non-EU sites to build their cloud infrastructures. Amazon's decision to expand it's Web services presence comes at a time when many European governments – especially Germany – are increasingly concerned about data sovereignty when dealing with U.S. companies.
"We have thousands of German customers and a number of those customers have told us that they will like to move their workload and data to AWS, but can't do so until we have infrastructure here in Germany," said Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services.
A 2013 report released by Information Technology and Innovation Foundation revealed that $35 billion could be lost by American cloud providers by 2016 because of foreign businesses being fearful of the U.S.government snooping on their data. In an effort to keep loss at a minimum, Germany is becoming an increasingly popular data center destination. Apart from Amazon's October announcement, Microsoft revealed in September it was interested in creating a German data center for its cloud services. Oracle also shared plans for two German facilities in September. The company says it will be operating a Frankfurt data center and a Munich data center owned by Equinix to provide more local services to customers in the country.
