AWS Readies Sweden Move As Part Of Nordics Push

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is continuing on its path towards world domination with plans to open a new infrastructure region in Sweden in 2018.

The new AWS EU Region in Stockholm will be comprised of three Availability Zones and is a sign of the company’s increasing activity in the Nordics, following a series of investments over the last few years.

The Stockholm base will enable local organisations to provide reduced latency to end users across the region and those with data sovereignty requirements will be able to keep their content stored in Sweden.

Nordics expansion

“For over a decade, we’ve had a large number of Nordic customers building their businesses on AWS,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “The Nordic’s most successful startups, including iZettle, King, Mojang, and Supercell, as well as some of the most respected enterprises in the world, such as IKEA, Nokia, Scania, and Telenor, depend on AWS to run their businesses, enabling them to be more agile and responsive to their customers.

“An AWS Region in Stockholm enables Swedish and Nordic customers, with local latency or data sovereignty requirements, to move the rest of their applications to AWS and enjoy cost and agility advantages across their entire application portfolio.”

Mikael Damberg, Sweden’s innovation and enterprise Minister,  welcomes the news, describing it as “a recognition of Sweden’s competitive position within the European Union (EU)”.

AWS currently boasts 42 Availability Zones across 16 infrastructure regions worldwide, with another five Availability Zones across two Regions in France and China, expected to come online later this year.

The company has certainly kept itself busy in recent months, announcing the opening of two new regions in London and Canada towards the end of last year, followed by its more recent expansion into call centres with the launch of a cloud-based service called Amazon Connect.

The only real blotch on the record has been an outage to its S3 cloud service last month, impacting sites such as Adobe, Slack and Splitwise, which was later found to have been caused by human error.

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