AWS launches first Swiss Region: Great news for compliance and connectivity in Switzerland

AWS has announced the launch of the AWS Europe (Zurich) Region (API name: eu-central-2) and already Swiss cloud users are celebrating new highs in availability and new lows in latency and looking forward to the new possibilities created for regulatory compliance.

Many Swiss companies were among the earliest adopters of cloud services in Europe when AWS launched in 2006. Customers based in Basel, Berne, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano, Zurich and other cities in Switzerland are using AWS to run everything from development and test environments, big data analytics, mobile, web, and social applications to enterprise applications and mission critical workloads, also thanks to the AWS Financial & Insurance Services Addendum (FISA).

This cloud-friendly environment was part of the reasoning behind selecting Zurich as the location for PCG when we were founded back in 2012, and Switzerland’s largest city continues to be our HQ and the contact hub for several important clients.

AWS followed suit in adopting Zurich four years later when they opened their first Swiss office in April 2016, and they announced an Amazon CloudFront Edge Location and Direct Connect location in Zurich the following year. The establishment of the new Europe (Zurich) Region represents the latest huge step forward and resolves some significant issues that were holding back AWS customers in the country.

All of this contributes to a very favourable outlook for AWS cloud users and the past, present and future clients of PCG based in Switzerland and central Europe. This will be the eighth AWS European region, joining existing regions in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm, Milan, and the announced region in Spain. AWS customers are already using 77 Availability Zones across 24 regions worldwide. The announcement of AWS Europe (Zurich) Region brings the total number of global regions (operational and in the works) up to 28.
The new region provides many benefits for our customers, including:

• Improved performance for applications that use Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), or other services hosted in the region. 
• Increased resilience against outages or disruptions affecting other Regions. 
• More compliance options since data stored in the EU (including Switzerland) benefits from strong privacy protections under EU law. 

All in all, it’s a great time to be based in Switzerland — and not just thanks to the enhanced access to superior chocolate products.

You can watch the AWS announcement below: