Many people might think that Amazon is where you buy your books, your Hue lights and your CDs but behind the scenes it is becoming a major player in the datacentre business.
And now, according to the Financial Times, Amazon will build several datacentres in Frankfurt in a bid to allay customers’ fears that their data is housed in places where security and privacy are not as high a priority as in Germany.
The FT reports that the EU has much stricter data protection laws than other territories. And, of the EU countries, Germany has the best privacy control.
A senior VP of Amazon Web Services told the FT that many of its German customers would prefer to have their data held locally. Although a figure hasn’t been placed on the German infrastructure investment, it’s believed that such a project will require a multimillion dollar investment.
US providers like Google, Rackspace and others compete with Amazon but are based in the USA. Amazon is believed to generate revenues from its cloud business amounting to over $5 billion during 2014.
