Public Sector Customers Excited About the New AWS Region Announcements

To kick off the New Year, the AWS Worldwide Public Sector team is excited about the announcement of our new region in the Republic of Korea and the preannouncement of the Canada region last week.

The AWS Cloud operates 32 Availability Zones within 12 geographic Regions around the world, with 11 more Availability Zones and 5 more Regions coming online throughout the next year in Canada, China, India, Ohio, and the United Kingdom (see the AWS Global Infrastructure page for more info).

The region-based AWS model has proven to be a good standard for our government, education, and nonprofit customers around the globe. Due to the unique needs of these public sector organizations, we understand that it is important to exercise complete control over where your data is stored and where it is processed.

Now, Korean-based developers and organizations, as well as multinational organizations with end users in Korea, can securely store and process their data in AWS in Korea with single-digit millisecond latency across most of Korea.

Governments, multi-national corporations, and international organizations are at significant crossroads, trying to balance innovation and security. They want the elasticity, scalability, and total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud computing, but they also must meet significant security requirements to protect data and personal privacy.

With the launch of the AWS Region on Korean soil, public sector organizations will now have the opportunity to move sensitive and mission-critical workloads to AWS.

The Seoul Region consists of two Availability Zones (AZs) at launch. Each AZ includes one or more geographically distinct datacenters, each with redundant power, networking, and connectivity. Each AZ is designed to be resilient to any issues in another AZ, enabling customers to operate production applications and databases that are more highly available, fault tolerant, and scalable than would be possible from a single datacenter.

Additionally, this investment in the Asia Pacific area will enable increased innovation and collaboration in education, nonprofits, scientific computing, and open data efforts.

Public sector customers will find the new AWS Region has services and features like AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and AWS Trusted Advisor that can enable secure information technology operations, whether they are managing health records, building out new digital services for citizens, or looking for new ways to collaborate with colleagues. Beyond these security services, public sector customers should also enjoy the elasticity and affordability of our compute, networking, storage, analytics, and database web services. To learn more about AWS Cloud Security, visit here.

Investing in the future of cloud

AWS is also delivering its AWS Educate Program to help promote cloud learning in the classroom with eight local universities, including Sogang University, Yonsei University, and Seoul National University. Since its launch locally in May 2015, over 1,000 Korean students have participated in AWS-related classes and nonprofit e-learning programs, such as “Like a Lion.”

With the launch of the Seoul Region, it marks the fifth AWS region in the Asia Pacific area, bringing the global total of regions to 12 (with more to come in 2016!).

For more details about this announcement, please see the official posting here.