AWS opens a third London cloud zone

AWS has launched its third availability zone in London - its 50th worldwide - allowing customers to run their applications across multiple data centres in the UK.

AWS also took the opportunity to brag about some of the businesses already using its UK data centres, listing the BBC, BT, Deloitte and Travis Perkins as four of its customers, as well as a range of startups using its UK-based cloud services, including Currencycloud, which managed to decrease infrastructure costs by 30%.

In the public sector, AWS highlighted the Met Office as one of its success stories, with it using AWS cloud to run its iOS and Android apps, which have so far attracted more than half a million users.

"The AWS EU (London) region has achieved Public Services Network (PSN) assurance, which provides UK public sector customers with an assured infrastructure on which to build UK public sector services," Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at Amazon, said.

"In conjunction with AWS's Standardized Architecture for UK-OFFICIAL, PSN assurance enables UK public sector organisations to move their UK-OFFICIAL classified data to the EU (London) region in a controlled and risk-managed manner."

AWS opened its first UK data centres back in December 2016, with the launch of its first two availability zones to give UK enterprises more choice about where to store their data.

"[These UK data centres give] people more choice," AWS's UK & Ireland MD, Gavin Jackson told Cloud Pro at the launch of the UK's first data centres last year. "We have had a perception challenge before [over cloud]; this will give them the sense they are in complete control at all times and if they want to host their data in the UK they can, if they want to host it abroad they can."

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