AWS announced that it will add London as an EU cloud region in addition to its existing regions of Frankfurt and Dublin.
The company’s CTO Werner Vogels said in a bog post that AWS’s third EU region should be ready by the end of 2016 or early 2017 providing commercial cloud services from data centres in the UK.
He said: "This region will provide even lower latency and strong data sovereignty to local users."
Vogels said the planned UK region will provide customers with quick, low-latency access to websites, mobile applications, games, SaaS applications, big data analysis, IoT applications, and more.
He said: "More start-ups, small and medium businesses, large enterprises, universities, and government organisations all over the world are moving to the AWS Cloud faster than ever before.
"We are committed to meeting our customers’ increasing needs for capacity and for powerful AWS services that eliminate the heavy lifting of the underlying IT infrastructure."
Some UK firms already using AWS’s cloud platform include the BBC, UCAS and JustGiving.
Trade and Investment Minister Lord Maude said: "Having secure cloud services on UK soil will further grow our Digital Economy and it is further proof the UK is the most favoured location in Europe for inward investment with the skills, infrastructure and digital capability to support the world’s leading businesses."
HM Government CTO Liam Maxwell said: "It’s great to see that Amazon Web Services will be providing commercial cloud services from data centres in the UK. N
"Not only will this mean a significant investment in the UK economy, but means more healthy competition and innovation in the UK data centre market. This is good news for the UK government given the significant amount of data we hold that needs to be kept onshore."
AWS evangelist Jeff Barr has also unveiled this week that the company will be opening a region in South Korea in early 2016.
In addition to Korea, AWS is also going to open regions in China, India and Ohio next year.
CBR recently spoke to Brian Matsubara, AWS head of global alliance strategy. Read more here.
