AWS Plans Three-Zone Cloud Region In Switzerland For 2022

‘As a leading economy with a strong industry, an important financial sector, an excellent small- and medium-business segment and many innovative startups, Switzerland is well-positioned for the digitized economy,’ says Yvonne Bettkober, AWS’ general manager for Switzerland.

Amazon Web Services will open a new cloud infrastructure region in Switzerland with three availability zones or data center clusters in the back half of 2022.

The new AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will allow customers to run workloads and store data in Switzerland to comply with data sovereignty requirements while serving end users with even lower latency, AWS said.

Many Swiss companies were among the earliest adopters of cloud services in Europe when AWS launched in 2006, according to Alex Casalboni, an AWS developer advocate.

“Customers based in Basel, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Lugano, Zurich and other cities in Switzerland are using AWS to run everything from development and test environments, big data analytics and mobile, web and social applications to enterprise applications and mission-critical workloads,” Casalboni said in a blog post Monday.

AWS opened its first office in Switzerland in Zurich, a global banking and finance center, in 2016. In 2017, it established two Points of Presence (PoPs) in Zurich to provide Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, AWS WAF, Lambda@Edge and Amazon Direct Connect to the country, and it opened a second office in Geneva, also a global hub for banking and diplomacy, at the tail end of that year. AWS currently is building out its teams of account, technical account and partner managers, systems engineers, solutions architects and professional services in Switzerland, where Yvonne Bettkober serves as it general manager for the country.

“As a leading economy with a strong industry, an important financial sector, an excellent small- and medium-business segment and many innovative startups, Switzerland is well-positioned for the digitized economy,” Bettkober said in an AWS video Monday. “In addition, we have a very solid foundation built for top-notch research, a free market economy and good political conditions. But change is more than ever the important constant. Digitalization is not an easy path. We want to be that partner accompanying you on this journey.”

AWS currently has 24 cloud regions with 77 availability zones, including six European cloud regions in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Paris and Stockholm. It has announced plans for three additional regions with nine zones in Indonesia, Japan and Spain—launching in late 2022 or early 2023—in addition to the Switzerland region.

AWS has supported organizations across almost every industry in Switzerland—from its postal system and railways to leading pharmaceutical companies to startups—to “speed up innovation, lower IT costs and transform their operations,” according to Werner Vogels, AWS’ chief technology officer.

“The upcoming AWS Europe (Zurich) Region will give our customers the choice and flexibility for where to store and process their data,” he said.

More than 10,000 customers in Switzerland use AWS monthly, according to the cloud provider. They range from enterprises and midsize businesses including Dentsu Tracking, Enersis, Hilti, Novartis, Richemont, Ringier and TX Group; to public sector customers such as Computer Vision Lab at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, Swiss Federal Railways, Swiss Post and the Swiss Federal Office of Topography; to startups including Ava, Beekeeper and Coople.

Geneva-based Dentsu Tracking, which provides supply chain tracking and tracing technologies, uses AWS to help customers such as the European Union (EU), luxury watchmaker Breitling and the HEAD sports brand gain transparency into and get control of their supply chains.

“We are using AWS services for the operation of an EU-wide tracking and tracing system, which is used by public authorities in the EU to fight against illicit trade, thereby preventing theft, under-declaration and fiscal evasion,” Philippe Castella, a managing director at Dentsu Tracking, said in a statement. “With more than 32 billion products tracked and 5 billion supply chain events linked to 750,000 registered economic operators across 28 countries, this is by far the world‘s largest tracking and tracing regime of its kind. Using AWS serverless technologies, we have been able to get fast data management and content delivery in one interface. We can also rapidly develop new features and functionalities thanks to AWS helping to reduce the development and delivery time of new features by 50 percent.”

Zurich-based Ringier, a multinational media company with 100-plus media brands in 19 countries, has seen a 24 percent increase in reader engagement by using AWS to help tailor its content distribution, digital advertising and marketplace strategy, according to the companies.

“Using AWS services, especially managed services with analytics and machine learning, we can better understand our readers’ interests, improve content production and optimize content distribution for [Swiss tabloid newspaper] Blick as well as many other renowned media brands—all tailored to our customers’ needs,” Zhao Wang, Ringier’s head of data technology, said in a statement.

AWS Partner Network members working in Switzerland include 56k.Cloud, Amanox Solutions, copebit, COREXPERT by TeamWork, dbi services, ELCA Informatique SA, Innovation Process Technology AG, isobar technologies Switzerland, Netcloud, One Step Beyond Group, SmartWave, Swisscom, ti&m, Trivadis and Zühlke Technology Group.