Amazon's Chief Technology Officer, Werner Vogels, stated that the company is launching cloud regions in Southeast Asia in response to customers' preferences for secure storage of their data within their respective countries. "The reason for this is that many of our customers have been asking for that. They really wanted something local such that they can meet, for example, local data storage requirements or protection of personally identifiable information", Vogels said.
In the fourth quarter, Amazon Web Services (AWS) claimed the top spot as the world's leading cloud service provider, representing 31% of global cloud expenditure, as outlined in a report on February 26th. An AWS region denotes a geographical area housing clustered data centers. These regions consist of at least three distinct availability zones, each equipped with independent power, cooling, and physical security measures. Furthermore, these zones are interlinked via redundant, high-speed networks, ensuring minimal latency.
"And it's not just startups that are looking for that. Big enterprises and government agencies as well. You can imagine government agencies want to go through a digital transformation as well", Vogels said. "And for them, it's important to have these kinds of technologies on the ground, in [the] country to make sure that they can serve their customers best or their citizens best", said Vogels.
In November, Amazon announced its plans to inaugurate a fresh AWS Region in Malaysia within the current year. This initiative builds upon its prior commitment of investing 25.5 billion Malaysian ringgit ($6 billion) by 2037. These investments are aligned with the government's vision to propel Malaysia towards becoming a 'high-income' digital economy by 2030. "This new AWS Region will also enable customers with data residency preferences to store data securely in Malaysia, help customers to achieve even lower latency, and serve demand for cloud services across Southeast Asia", the statement said.
Following the establishment of a cloud region in Indonesia in December 2021 and in Singapore in 2010, AWS is now poised to introduce an infrastructure region in Thailand. AWS has already set up numerous regions spanning North America, South America, Europe, China, Asia Pacific, South Africa, and the Middle East. "And especially, of course, the security capabilities that AWS has, that allows us to protect these customers. Security will be, and is forever, our number one priority. [It] is our number one investment area", said Vogels. "And to be able to keep customers safe in our compute regions is of great attraction to companies here in the region and also governments".