Canadian businesses can now avail Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud through data centers located locally – a step from Amazon that will boost confidence of its customers that their data and applications aren’t leaving the Canadian boundaries.
At launch, the AWS Canada (Central) Region offers two Availability Zones at launch. Amazon is also offering two Amazon CloudFront edge locations in Toronto and Montreal for customers looking to deliver websites, applications, and content to Canadian end users with low latency. Amazon says that its AWS data centers in Canada will draw power from a regional electricity grid that is 99 percent powered by hydropower.
Amazon assures that with AWS its customers have full control of the data and their applications and they can select the AWS Region(s) where they want their data stored. Further, the data does not move between AWS Regions unless the customer specifically choses that option and AWS provides a variety of options – both from AWS and APN Partners – enabling customers to encrypt their data in motion or at rest if they desire.
Amazon has also enrolled quite a few customers who will be use AWS Cloud through local data centers including Salesforce, which is the world’s top CRM company. Salesforce will leverage AWS Cloud infrastructure for a new Canada-based instance for its core services starting in mid-2017. National Bank of Canada, Porter Airlines, Lululemon, D2L (formerly Desire2Learn), Sequence Bio, Postmedia, are some of the other companies who will be the first to use locally available AWS Cloud.
Amazon divides AWS Regions into Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for business continuity applications that require rapid failover. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can architect their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even higher fault-tolerance.
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