Box Zones are designed to help businesses to centralise their content and address local data storage requirements.
The service will leverage both Amazon Web Services and IBM Cloud and allow content to be stored in Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Japan.
IBM Cloud will be available as part of the Box Zones technology and the company will also use this to support hybrid cloud deployments with its content manage solutions such as IBM Content Navigator with Box.
Zones act as a counter to concerns that businesses across Europe face. Continuing concerns regarding the location of their data and their ability to meet regulatory requirements have helped to hinder adoption of some cloud services.
The ability to use IBM’s Cloud Object Storage to do this has been made possible through the acquisition of Cleversafe, which IBM acquired last year. This technology has been combined with the IBM cloud to offer a consistent architecture and interface across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.
At Box World Tour, London, Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box said that the company had spent the past two years re-architecting its platform in order to separate the application layer from the data storage layer and make Box Zones a possibility.
Customers or potential customers of Box had requested this kind of capability in the past as a one off but Box has had to turn them down.
Levie said that because of the cloud businesses are much more connected, collaborative and global but there are issues.
Levie said: "Yet for many companies, local laws and regulations have forced them to make technology tradeoffs that limit their success and place a drag on employee productivity and collaboration. Box Zones will help power digital transformation for enterprise customers across Europe and Asia and accelerate our international presence."
The move from Box comes as part of a long roadmap that has seen the company implement other technologies to increase both its security and governance capabilities.
The company has already rolled out KeySafe and Box Governance as part of this plan. This shows that while cloud solutions may have gone a long way to overcome users fears regarding security, there is still a big market for security and governance meeting solutions.
Additional zones are expected to be created over the next two years and while Privacy Shield remains in limbo, capabilities such as Box Zones are likely to become more common.
The service will be available as an add-on to whatever Box offering the user is on and will be available next month from Amazon S3 and IBM Cloud in Europe later in the year.
