IBM has opened it’s first cloud data centre with SoftLayer in Frankfurt, Germany. Expanding the company’s global cloud footprint, the move compliments existing IBM facilities in Amsterdam, London and Paris.
The services, which have a unique network-within-a-network architecture, will provide 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, with only 7 milliseconds of latency from the Amsterdam facility and less than 330 milliseconds from other SoftLayer cloud data centres around the world.
The data centre will help meet Germany and Europe’s strict security and data privacy regulations: "Data privacy regulations in the European Union (EU) are among the most stringent in the world, and Germany has one of the strongest policies," said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company."
"While all our cloud data centers have SoftLayer’s same strict standards for security and privacy, the new Frankfurt facility will allow German companies and clients to benefit from in-country data storage, a requirement in many industries to comply with German data protection laws."
The growth of cloud adoption in Germany is on the rise spurred by the cost savings and flexibility gained by moving operations and workloads to the cloud. The number of German enterprises using the cloud grew by 32% between 2012 and 2013, and The Experton Group forecasts the value of the cloud market in Germany at €18 billion by 2017.
