European cloud provider OVHcloud is opening a ‘Local Zone’ in Amsterdam. This is a local data center that allows Dutch companies to store their data in a public cloud, while the provider is subject to the same laws and regulations as the owner of the data. Also, the nearby storage of data should lead to lower latency, enabling faster data retrieval.
OVHcloud emphasizes that the Local Zone fully complies with European digital sovereignty and data security regulations. By having data stored physically close by in a way that also complies with local laws and regulations, such solutions are of particular interest to organizations in the financial, banking, and government sectors. Earlier, OVHcloud opened such Local zones in Brussels, Madrid, and Milan.
The company offers this service partly because of its acquisition of Gridscale, a German company that specializes in hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) that integrate compute, storage, and networking into a software-defined system. This increases scalability and simplifies data management.
Response time of a few milliseconds
In particular, workloads that require low latency (i.e. the delay between requesting and delivering data) can benefit from storage close by in such a Local Zone. Think real-time analytics, e-commerce websites, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) for replay and streaming videos and cloud gaming.
The company claims a response time of only a few milliseconds for its Local Zones, enabling high-performance usage scenarios with minimal delays. Think faster, more reliable virtualization, integration with container environments, and high-performance computing.
OVHCloud already offers Compute, Block Storage and Networking as part of its Local Zone service, including local Public IP. Object Storage and Managed Rancher Service for multi-cloud Kubernetes management will be future additions.
Further expansion
There are further plans for rapid expansion. By 2026, French OVHcloud plans to expand its offerings to 150 locations. Prague, Marseille and Zurich are among the locations on this list. The Local Zones should additionally come to the US.
OVHcloud’s Local Zones in Amsterdam, Brussels, Madrid, and Milan are ISO/IEC 27001 certified, supplemented by the requirements of ISO/IEC 27017 specifically for the security of cloud services and ISO/IEC 27018 for the protection of personal data. According to OVHcloud, these certifications ensure that businesses are assured of data storage and usage to the highest security standards.
OVHcloud serves 1.6 million customers in more than 140 countries, using 450,000 servers in 43 data centers.
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