Amazon Boosts Cloud Privacy, Speed Via New Direct Connect Locations

Amazon Web Services bulked up its AWS Direct Connect offerings with the addition of four new global locations, bringing the private cloud connectivity to Northern California, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.

The cloud giant launched AWS Direct Connect in August. The service lets customers connect directly to Amazon's cloud through a data center or co-location facility instead of through the Internet. The service initially launched in Equinix's Ashburn, Va., data center, which connects to Amazon's U.S East (Virginia) region and in September AWS Direct Connect launched in the Equinix San Jose facility to connect to AWS' U.S. West Region.

Amazon Wednesday added the four new AWS Direct Connect locations at CoreSite One Wilshire in Los Angeles, TelecityGroup Sovereign House in London, Equinix in Singapore and Equinix in Tokyo. These locations serve the U.S. West (Northern California), EU (Ireland), Asia-Pacific (Singapore) and Asia-Pacific (Tokyo) regions, according to AWS.

In a statement, Equinix's Chris Sharp, general manager of content and digital media, said, "With AWS Direct Connect inside Equinix data centers, customers can directly touch the cloud. Many customers can now take advantage of the cost savings of cloud computing. With our successful collaboration with Amazon, Equinix is becoming the de facto 'cloud hub,' facilitating direct connections between users and cloud providers."

Amazon has said AWS Direct Connect lets enterprises create a connection to an AWS region via a dedicated circuit. Doing so, the company said, enhances privacy, creates more predictable data transfer and performance and can increase bandwidth between the data center and AWS cloud, which typically leads to reduced bandwidth costs.

"First, by transferring data to and from AWS directly, you can reduce your bandwidth commitment to your Internet service provider. Second, all data transferred over your dedicated connection is charged at the reduced AWS Direct Connect data transfer rate rather than Internet data transfer rates," according to Amazon's Direct Connect Web site.

With Direct Connect, users have hardware in a Direct Connect data center and can get direct 1-Gbps or 10-Gbps single-mode Ethernet cross connections between that infrastructure and Amazon's cloud equipment. AWS Direct Connect works with all AWS services that are accessible over the Internet, including Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Amazon said it plans to add more AWS Direct Connect locations throughout the year.