According to an announcement at Box World Tour Europe on Tuesday, Box Zones give enterprises the choice to store data regionally across Europe and Asia, which will address compliance concerns of data storage. Starting next month, companies will be able to pay for the new service that will let them store data in certain countries, while using the cloud storage provider’s content and management offerings as though they had stored that data in the firm’s US data centers.
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At the conference, Levie went on to announce that Box is launching “Box Zones” in May, allowing its 57,000 customers to store their data outside the US.
Levie claimed that local laws and data residency regulations have prevented many companies from “getting the most” out of the cloud, adding that Box Zones is about addressing these challenges and “unlocking adoption of the cloud on a global scale”.
“Organizations want to tap into all of the benefits of the cloud while retaining the security, performance, control and other attributes they might achieve with local data centre infrastructure”, said John Morris, general manager at IBM Cloud Object Storage.
The company has been actively working to solve this problem for more than two years, said Box chief executive Aaron Levie, and it has been a priority for at least five – a pretty big deal, given that Box itself was only founded in 2005. “Box Zones, and its corresponding architecture affords us the flexibility to leverage both our own data centers and select cloud partners to accelerate our footprint in new geographies”. Regular Box Features Stay in Place in Zones Box Zones will supply this regional content storage without affecting any of its collaboration features, Wacker said. The company only announced integrations only with the Amazon Web Service and the IBM at the moment. Storage closer to the customer can also speed up computing. With 46 global Cloud Data Centers, IBM helps companies manage and gain insight into their data, no matter where it resides.
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For more information on the IBM and Box partnership, visit: www.ibm.com/ibmandbox. It will be available to its first set of customers in May; Box has plans to expand it substantially in the next couple of years, Levie said. This is particularly pertinent for companies based in Europe now that Safe Harbour has been made invalid, removing the mechanism that allowed data from Europe-based companies to be stored in U.S. data centres.
