Werner Vogels, Amazon Chief Technology Officer, stated in a special interview that the company is expanding cloud regions in Southeast Asia due to customer demand for secure data storage in their home nations.
TakeAway Points:
- According to Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, clients “have been demanding” for local data residency, from startups to government organisations.
- To ensure that they can serve their clients or residents as best they can, Vogels added, “And for them, it is crucial to have these kinds of technology on the ground in the country.”
- According to Feb. 26 Canalys research, Amazon Web Services was the largest cloud service provider globally in the fourth quarter, taking up 31% of all cloud spending.
Amazon Clients Demand Secure Data Storage
“The reason for this is that many of our customers have been asking for that. They really wanted something local such that they can meet, for example, local data storage requirements, or protection of personal identifiable information,” Vogels told CNBC’s JP Ong.
According to a Canalys analysis from February 26, Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business, accounted for 31% of global cloud spending in the fourth quarter, making it the largest cloud service provider globally.
The AWS region
A physical area where data centres are grouped is called an AWS region. There are at least three distinct availability zones in each AWS region. Each zone is connected by redundant, ultra-low-latency networks and has its own power, cooling, and physical security systems.
“And it’s not just startups that are looking for that. Big enterprises and government agencies as well. You can imagine government agencies want to go through a digital transformation as well,” Vogels said.
“And for them, it’s important to have these kinds of technologies on the ground, in [the] country to make sure that they can serve their customers best or their citizens best,” said Vogels.
Amazon is set to Launch AWS Region in Malaysia
In November of last year, Amazon announced that it will be opening a new AWS Region in Malaysia. It had already promised to invest 25.5 billion Malaysian ringgit ($6 billion) by 2037 to help the government realise its goal of making Malaysia a “high-income” digital economy by 2030.
“This new AWS Region will also enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Malaysia, help customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia,” the statement said.
This follows the opening of AWS cloud regions in Singapore in 2010 and Indonesia in December 2021. Additionally, AWS intends to open an infrastructure hub in Thailand.
Many locations in North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East are already served by AWS.
“And especially, of course, the security capabilities that AWS has that allow us to protect these customers. Security, will be, and is forever, our number one priority. [It] is our number one investment area,” said Vogels.
“And to be able to keep customers safe in our compute regions, [it] is of great attraction to companies here in the region and also governments.”
