Dropbox Lets Customers Use European AWS Data Centres

Dropbox announced it is providing European-based storage for users of its Dropbox Business service through a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Piggybacking on AWS cloud infrastructure, which is well established in Europe, Dropbox will allow its business users to choose where their data is stored within the continent.

In response to demand for Europe-based storage from customers, Dropbox said it will initially offer the service to business customers with more than 250 users, but has plans to rollout the option to all its Dropbox Business users.

“This is also where we have had the greatest demand from customers, and we fully expect to be able to offer this to more business customers in the future.,” said Philip Lacor, vice president of the EMEA region at Dropbox.

Europe’s Dropbox Business

Offering European-based storage has been part of Dropbox’s expansion plans for some time, with it telling TechWeekEurope back in February that it has plans to host European customer data with AWS in Germany.

Demand for such storage options may have been cited by Dropbox as the catalyst for such a move, but the removal of the Privacy Shield framework, which had allowed companies to store European data in data centres outside of the EU, may have gone some way in prompting Dropbox to work with AWS to boost its European presence.

Dropbox claimed the number of Dropbox Business customers quadrupled in the last two years, signalling that Europe is a big growth area for the cloud storage company.

“It’s an exciting time to work with European companies. The businesses we serve here are thriving—they’re inventing products, creating jobs, and building economies,” said Lacor.

However, Dropbox will have to be aware of its enterprise rival Box, which has already built up its European presence by allowing customers to store their data in European AWS and IBM data centres through the Box Zones feature.

“We’ve heard a lot of feedback over the past few years that there’s a desire to store files locally in region,” said Box chief executive Aaron Levie. “This has been a major concern for some of the world’s largest businesses [or those in regulated industries].”

With this in mind there could be a bitter battle on the horizon between Dropbox and Box as they chase down big business customers.

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