Business

Amazon Web Services today announced the opening of the AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region. With this launch, AWS now provides 60 Availability Zones across 20 infrastructure regions globally, with another 12 Availability Zones and four regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Italy, and South Africa all coming online by the first half of 2020. The AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region is AWS’s fifth in Europe, joining existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, and the UK.

Tens of thousands of customers across the Nordics – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden – already use AWS. Starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can leverage the new AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region to run their applications in Sweden, serve end-users across the Nordics with lower latency, and leverage advanced technologies such as analytics, database, mobile services, serverless, and more, to drive innovation.

“Since the early days of AWS, Nordic organizations have been using AWS’s cloud technologies to help reinvent entire industries, such as Supercell and Rovio in gaming, Scania and Volvo in automotive, and Nokia and Telenor in telecommunications,” said Andy Jassy, Chief Executive Officer, Amazon Web Services. “Tens of thousands of Nordic customers have been using AWS from regions around the world, but many have shared that they also wanted an AWS Region in the Nordics so they can easily operate their most latency-sensitive workloads for end-users in the Nordics while meeting any data sovereignty requirements. We’re excited to deliver our AWS Stockholm Region today to meet these customer requests.”

The AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region offers three Availability Zones at launch. AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which are technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and are connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance. Additionally, local AWS customers with data residency requirements can now store their content in Sweden with the assurance that their content will not move without consent, while customers building applications that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now have access to another secure AWS infrastructure region in the European Union (EU) that meets the highest levels of security, compliance, and data protection.

Customers and APN Partners welcome the new AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region

Millions of active customers are using AWS each month in over 190 countries around the world, including hundreds of thousands of customers in Europe, and tens of thousands of customers in the Nordics. Organizations across the Nordics are moving their mission-critical workloads to AWS to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed-up time-to-market, including enterprise customers such as Aktia Bank, Arriva, ASSA ABLOY, Bonnier, Basware, Cargotec, Den Norske Bank, F-Secure, Finnair, Fortum, Gelato, Husqvarna, Icelandair, IKEA, Modern Times Group, Nokia, Scania, Schibsted, SOK, Stockmann Oyj, Telenor Connexion, Telia, Tine SA, TopDanmark, Unibet, Visma, Volvo Group Connected Solutions, Wireless Car, Wärtsilä, and XXL. AWS is also an enabler for the Nordics’ most successful startups and gaming companies such as Bambora, Evolution Gaming, Hemnet, iZettle, KRY, LEO Innovation Lab, Lingit, Lunar Way, Mapillary, Mathem, Mojang, Paradox Interactive, Quinyx, Rovio, Supercell, Tidal, Trustpilot, Tink, and Vivino. Public sector customers, such as VR (Finnish Rail), the government-owned railway in Finland, and Ambita, owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry and Norway’s largest portal for property data, are also moving the majority of their on-premises applications to AWS to take advantage of the increased reliability and security to deliver a better service to citizens.

Volvo Group Connected Solutions, headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, is responsible for developing and delivering connected solutions within the Volvo Group – one of the world’s leading manufacturers of trucks, buses, construction equipment, and marine and industrial engines. The Volvo Group employs approximately 100,000 people, has production facilities in 18 countries, and sells its products in more than 190 nations. AWS is the preferred cloud provider for Volvo Group Connected Solutions, allowing them to connect more than 800,000 assets all over the world, including trucks, busses, and construction equipment. “AWS has transformed how we run as a business, helping us move to a micro service architecture and run infrastructure as code, which has increased automation across the organization,” said Stefan Berggren, VP of Technology at Volvo Group Connected Solutions. “Since moving the development of our applications to AWS, we have increased agility and speed and reduced the amount of time it takes to go from idea to experimentation from weeks to minutes. As you can imagine, latency is also vital when connecting vehicles and delivering a broad range of connected services to our customers. We look forward to using the new AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region because it will bring our services even closer to our customers.”

Fortum is a leading power and utilities provider, headquartered in Finland, with more than 2.5 million customers, 9,000 employees, and operates over 150 power plants across 10 countries. Together with thousands of customers, Fortum has built a one-megawatt Virtual Battery, the largest in the Nordics, which is fully operated on top of AWS. The Virtual Battery aggregates and controls usage of energy assets, like household water heaters and electric vehicles, helping Fortum to better balance energy usage across the grid. “With the elasticity and almost infinite storage capacity that AWS delivers, we are able to analyze more data than the entire Finnish smart metering infrastructure combined, resulting in better understanding how our customers use electricity,” said Per Edoff, Chief Digital Officer, Fortum. “Collecting this data on AWS gives us the ability to efficiently address electricity demand and production, helping us reduce costs, ultimately delivering these savings back to our customers in the form of lower energy bills. Additionally, we have been using the Amazon Elasticsearch Service to securely build a data lake. Using machine learning to get more insights from our data, we will be able to extract better understanding of energy usage, helping our customers to save money and helping us to improve our impact on the environment through more advanced scheduling of when we turn our power plants on and off. Now that the new AWS Europe (Stockholm) Region is open we expect to see this innovation accelerate.”