Dropbox will use Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Frankfurt datacenter to host data from European users as answer to new EU-US Privacy Shield rules.
In order to serve its customers in European region, Dropbox has opened an office in Amsterdam to serve the Benelux region.
In order to get close to its business customers in Europe, Dropbox has already opened offices in key locations in Europe including Dublin, London and Paris in 2015.
The San Francisco cloud storage provider says that about 75% of its users are outside of the United States and that a significant portion of the usage comes from European businesses and customers.
The company says that the Benelux region is key for its business because around 49% of the internet population uses Dropbox in these countries.
Dropbox also announced that the new Amsterdam office will be led by Country Manager Chris Moojen.
Chris Moojen has prior experience working at Google as Sales Lead for Google for Work in the Benelux countries. He was also the European Lead for Innovation at Google.
Dropbox is also planning to open another office in Hamburg, Germany to serve the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) market. The Hamburg office will be led by Oliver Bluher.
Bluher has previously worked with SAP Germany’s cloud enterprise sales.
One of the main reasons for Dropbox having to start its data centers in Europe is because of the stringent rules of the European Union about data safety and data theft.
On 2nd February this year, the European Commission and the US agreed on a new framework for transatlantic data flows, replacing the old Safe Harbour framework, which was declared invalid on October 6 2015.
The new agreement sets out stronger obligations on companies in the U.S. to protect the personal data of Europeans, as well as stronger monitoring and enforcement by the U.S. Department of Commerce and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The new EU-US Privacy Shield has been added to protect the fundamental rights of Europeans when their personal data is transferred to U.S. companies.
Dropbox global VP of sales Thomas Hansen said in a blog: "As a first step, we committed in December to be able to host customer data within Europe in 2016. We can now confirm that this will be in Q3 of this year and the data will be hosted in Germany.
"The most expeditious way for us to do this is to use a trusted third-party provider so today we are also announcing that we will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host business customer file contents in Europe.
"The continued protection of individual privacy and the free flow of data are critical to the innovation that drives the economies on both sides of the Atlantic.
"We appreciate the hard work of the US and European negotiators to reach a deal regarding transatlantic data transfers and we look forward to hearing more about the "Privacy Shield" agreement in the coming weeks."
