AWS launches in London
AWS follows Microsoft's three UK datacentres with new London region
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched its first UK datacentres in London as it targets public sector organisations.
AWS announced the UK datacentres in November last year, making it the public cloud giant's third European region, following Frankfurt and Ireland.
In a blog post Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS, boasted of a number of high-profile customers set to use the new region, including Trainline, Just Eat and OakNorth bank.
Barr also said that AWS will be targeting public sector organisations.
"The UK government recognises that local datacentres from hyper scale public cloud providers can deliver secure solutions for official workloads," he said.
"In order to meet the special security needs of public sector organisations in the UK with respect to official workloads, we have worked with our direct connect partners to make sure that obligations for connectivity to the Public Services Network and N3 (NHS wide-area network) can be met."
The opening comes a week after AWS opened a datacentre in Canada, and two weeks after the firm launched a dedicated public sector partner programme.
AWS isn't alone in its UK datacentre plans, with Microsoft launching three of its own in London, Cardiff and Durham in September, and Google announcing its London debut in September.
IBM also announced four new UK datacentres, set to arrive next year.
Chris Bunch, head of Europe at AWS and Azure partner Cloudreach, told CRN that on first view the capabilities of the new datacentre look promising.
"We've had emails flying around this morning in our technical community, initially people verifying how long the connectivity time is between London and Dublin, and the good news it looks fast, so it looks like we have some interesting inter-region options," he said.
"Previously inter-region you would have done Dublin to Frankfurt but Dublin to London looks like it's a little bit faster, we're looking at five or six milliseconds.
Taking the fight UK hosting providers
Bunch expects both AWS and Azure to target two highly regulated sectors in the UK - financial services and the public sector.
"More generally for the market we're expecting this to be a big, big accelerator for cloud adoption," he added.
"In financial services the reasons are twofold; one being latency - connectivity from a financial services base that is primarily in London to datacentres that are in London is good and the latency is going to be low, and the second is around legislative and legal requirements because some of those guys have some niche requirements about some of that data being in the UK."
AWS and Microsoft are also expected to take on rival UK hosting providers for public sector contracts, with the option of meeting data sovereignty requirements in the public cloud being possible in the UK for the first time.
"[Public sector bodies] have a lot of really interesting products that we're already talking about and scoping, with large UK central government organisations, and there were a lot of those people at Re:invent (AWS' conference in Las Vegas last month) which is a big indicator that this is going to take off, so we're expecting to see a lot of uptake in 2017.
Last week Lawrence Jones, CEO at UKFast, hit back at the likes of AWS, saying that basing datacentres in the UK will not help meet data requirements, because of confusion around whether the US government has access to data in an American company's datacentre if it is based abroad.
"It's certainly not going to help their whole data laws [story] because it doesn't matter where you store it - as American businesses, they have certain responsibilities to the American government on data," he said.
They can host it in Timbuktu or Iceland and the US government will still have access to that data. So it's really a hell of an investment if it's to give the impression your data is safe because it's in Britain. That means absolutely nothing."