[December 08, 2016] |
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Amazon Web Services Cloud Now Available to Customers from Data Centers in Canada
(NASDAQ:AMZN) - Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com (News - Alert) company,
today announced the launch of the AWS Canada (Central) Region. With this
launch, AWS now provides 40 Availability Zones across 15 technology
infrastructure regions globally, with another seven Availability Zones
and three regions in the UK, France, and China expected to come online
in the coming months. Tens of thousands of Canadian customers are using
other AWS Regions and starting today, developers, start-ups, and
enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit
organizations can leverage the AWS Cloud to run their applications and
store their data on infrastructure in Canada. Developers can sign-up and
get started today at: http://aws.amazon.com.
The AWS Canada (Central) Region offers two Availability Zones at launch.
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to
technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations
with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event
impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity
applications that require rapid failover. Each Availability Zone has
independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via
redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high
availability can architect their applications to run in multiple
Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance. AWS also
provides two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Toronto and Montreal
for customers looking to deliver websites, applications, and content
to Canadian end users with low latency. These locations are part of
AWS's existing network of 68 edge sites across North and South
America, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
The new AWS Canada (Central) Region continues the company's focus on
delivering cloud technologies to customers in an environmentally
friendly way. AWS data centers in Canada will draw from a regional
electricity grid that is 99 percent powered by hydropower. More
information on AWS sustainability efforts can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/sustainability.
"For many years, we've had an enthusiastic base of customers in Canada
choosing the AWS Cloud because it has more functionality than other
cloud platforms, an extensive APN Partner and customer ecosystem, as
well as unmatched maturity, security, and performance," said Andy Jassy,
CEO, AWS. "Our Canadian customers and APN Partners asked us to build AWS
infrastructure in Canada, so they can run their mission-critical
workloads and store sensitive data on AWS infrastructure located in
Canada. A local AWS Region will serve as the foundation for new cloud
initiatives in Canada that can transform business, customer experiences,
and enhance the local economy."
"The digital economy is now the economy itself. Virtually every sector
of the economy is propelled by digital technologies, which are being
enabled by cloud computing," said Navdeep Singh Bains, Minister of
Innovation, Science, and Economic Development in Canada. "The rapidly
growing demand for digital services is one reason for the significant
investment that Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) is making in Canada. On behalf of
the Government of Canada, I congratulate Amazon on the success of its
cloud business and welcome the expansion of Amazon Web Services in this
country."
"Significant projects like the one being realized by Amazon Web Services
represent the kind of large-scale investment that take Quebec a long way
toward its goals in the digital world. Indeed, this initiative will
stimulate the development of cloud computing in Quebec, a key area that
can be an engine for our province's information technology and
communication sector," declared Dominique Anglade, Minister of the
Economy, Science, and Innovation in Quebec, and Minister responsible for
the Digital Strategy.
All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and
regularly audited to meet rigorous compliance standards and provide high
levels of security for all AWS customers. These include ISO 27001, SOC 1
(Formerly SAS (News - Alert) 70), SOC 2 and SOC 3 Security & Availability, PCI-DSS
Level 1 and many more. With AWS, customers are in control of their data
and choose the AWS Region(s) where they want their data stored. Data
does not move between AWS Regions unless the customer chooses to do so,
and AWS provides a variety of options - both from AWS and APN Partners -
enabling customers to encrypt their data in motion or at rest if they
desire. More information on how customers using AWS can meet their
security, data privacy, and compliance requirements can be found at https://aws.amazon.com/security.
Customers and APN Partners Welcome the AWS Canada (Central) Region
For more than a decade, AWS has changed the way organizations acquire
technology infrastructure. AWS customers are not required to make any
up-front financial or long-term commitments, paying on demand for the IT
resources they use rather than incurring large capital expenses. This
enable them to scale quickly by adding or shedding resources at any
time, accelerate their time to market with innovative applications, and
free up limited engineering resources from the undifferentiated heavy
lifting of running backend infrastructure-often while significantly
improving operational performance, reliability, and security in the
process. This has led to more than two million1 active
customers using the AWS Cloud each month in over 190 countries around
the world.
Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company,
will leverage AWS Cloud infrastructure for a new Canada-based instance
for its core services, starting in mid-2017. "Partnering with AWS in
Canada will enable us to continue to deliver trusted solutions to our
customers in the region with high levels of reliability, performance,
and security," said Richard Eyram, Area Vice President, Salesforce
Canada.
National Bank of Canada, one of Canada's leading financial services
organizations with over CAD$219 billion in assets, chose the AWS Cloud
to help it collect and process a fast-growing volume of stock-market
financial data. "The application we were using wasn't effective. We were
only able to answer 10 percent of the questions we wanted to answer. We
also couldn't process historical data, which we needed to do in order to
get more context. The speed and performance of AWS is impressive and
data manipulation processes that once took days are now done in one
minute," said Pascal Bergeron, Director of Algorithmic Trading for the
bank's Global Equity Derivatives Group. "We have been able to better
serve our customers and have improved and optimized trading operations,
therefore generating more revenue for National Bank of Canada."
Porter Airlines is an award-winning regional airline headquartered in
Toronto that provides flights to over 23 destinations in Canada and the
United States. Porter needed the ability to respond instantly to
fluctuating load demands on their public site with a scalable and
low-cost solution. Porter needed the ability to store large datasets,
transform them, and make them available to other applications and end
users for analytics and actions. Porter looked to AWS and services like
Amazon Redshift to provide the scalable highly available infrastructure
required to meet these goals. "Amazon solved a lot of our problems
around scale. Specifically, with our data, AWS answered the questions we
used to have to figure out ourselves - like how do we scale our massive
data store, how do we access it quickly, how do we keep it secure - and
they gave us the solution needed," said Dan Donovan, CIO for Porter
Airlines. "So, we now have the time, freedom and confidence to
concentrate on how to make our passengers' experiences better. Using AWS
is one of the main ways we do this, and now that AWS has opened a local
region in Canada, we can move even more of our systems to the AWS Cloud
and put more focus on enhancing passenger experience."
Lululemon is a technical athletic apparel company that makes technical
athletic clothes for yoga, running, working out, and most other sweaty
pursuits. Based in Vancouver, they started out of a yoga studio and
quickly became a global retailer and community hub for encouraging
healthy lifestyles and habits. In order to rapidly build and deploy
their digital marketing properties for the 2016 holiday season,
Lululemon leveraged AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, and AWS
ElasticBeanstalk to streamline the management, deployment, and
continuous delivery of their application. "Leveraging AWS allows us to
spend more time focusing on what truly differentiates us in the market,
rather than on maintaining custom infrastructure solutions," said Sam
Keen, Director of Product Architecture. "AWS Services are highly
performant and easily choreographed, allowing us to measure deployments
in minutes or even seconds. We see competing cloud providers cloning AWS
services but we remain with AWS since they are far in the lead and
continue to accelerate the release of new services and regions, now with
an AWS Region in Canada, which only serves to continue to enhance the
value of their offerings."
D2L (formerly Desire2Learn), a learning technology leader, recently
chose AWS as its strategic cloud infrastructure service provider. "By
leveraging built-in AWS Cloud services such as Amazon Elastic Compute
Cloud (EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon CloudFront,
Amazon Elasticsearch, and the suite of AWS analytics and security
services, D2L is accelerating our innovation and global expansion in a
cost-effective way to serve millions of learners," said Nick Oddson, CTO
of D2L. "Serving our customers from AWS locations in the U.S., Europe,
Asia, and now Canada, learners everywhere can have an exceptional
learning experience on Brightspace, our award-winning LMS. With AWS's
reliability, security, and availability, D2L will continue to provide
our high level of service and a global, end-to-end security approach,
now on one trusted infrastructure," said Oddson.
Sequence Bio is a data-driven biotechnology company in Newfoundland and
Labrador. "Sequence Bio hopes to obtain approval to embark on a 100,000
person genome sequencing project in Newfoundland and Labrador that deals
with sensitive genomic and health information - having a new AWS Region
allows us to build and deploy our platform and keep data 100 percent in
Canada," said Dan Brake, Director of Technology Development, Sequence
Bio.
Postmedia is one of the largest news media companies in Canada with more
than 200 brands across multiple print, online, and mobile platforms. "As
one of the earliest adopters of cloud computing in Canada, we have
utilized AWS for years - and it has delivered on the promise of a
powerful, cost-effective, flexible and innovative cloud offering for
us," said Thomas Jankowski, EVP and Chief Digital Officer, Postmedia.
"We are excited that AWS is bringing even more capabilities to market in
Canada, just in time for our B2B platform build out of the Postmedia
Innovation Outpost at Communitech (Waterloo, ON (News - Alert))."
Investing in Canada's Cloud Future
The
AWS Partner Network (APN) includes tens of thousands of independent
software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world,
with APN Partner participation in Canada growing significantly over the
past 12 months. APN Partners build innovative solutions and services on
the AWS Cloud and the APN helps by providing those partners with
business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) support. APN SIs
such as Accenture (News - Alert), Deloitte, Scalar Decisions, TriNimbus, Slalom
Consulting, iTMethods, and Softchoice are helping enterprise and public
sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications on
AWS, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management
services for customers' AWS environments. AWS ISVs in Canada including
Salesforce.com, NuData Security, Acquia, Silanis, OpenText, Splunk,
Adobe, and NthGen Software will be able to serve their Canadian
customers from the AWS Canada (Central) Region. Customers can easily
find, trial, deploy, and buy software solutions for the AWS Cloud on the AWS
Marketplace.
AWS offers a full range of training
and certification programs to help Canadian professionals who are
interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices,
and architectures, advance their technical skills. Additionally, the AWS
Educate program promotes cloud learning in the classroom and has
been adopted by more than 500 institutions worldwide. The program helps
to provide an academic gateway for the next generation of IT and cloud
professionals. The AWS
Activate program provides Canadian-based startups with the resources
they need to quickly get started on AWS and scale their businesses. AWS
has teamed with accelerators, incubators, Seed/VC Funds, and
startup-enabling organizations such as FounderFuel, Real Ventures, the
Business Development Bank of Canada, iNovia Capital, OMERS Ventures, and
others that provide a range of services including training, AWS credits,
capital, in-person technical support, and other benefits.
About Amazon Web Services
For 10 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 90
fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, analytics,
mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and enterprise applications from 40
Availability Zones (AZs) across 15 geographic regions in the U.S.,
Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Korea,
Singapore, and India. AWS services are trusted by millions of active
customers around the world monthly -- including the fastest growing
startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies -- to
power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To
learn more about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than
competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational
excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping,
personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle
Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa
are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more
information, visit www.amazon.com/about.
1 As of October 31, 2016
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161208006034/en/
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