Wasabi Launches London Storage Region

Wasabi Technologies, Inc. opened a new storage region in London that will expand the availability and speed of services throughout the UK.

Building on momentum for Wasabi in Europe following a major distribution partnership with Exclusive Networks, the London site also accelerates the company’s expansion with plans to open additional storage regions in the next year.

Located in the Equinix Data Center in London, the new storage region marks Wasabi’s first in the UK, and second in Europe, following the opening of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1Q19. With this location, the company delivers high speed network access from multiple carriers, making it easy for UK customers to connect to its hot cloud storage. It also offers enough power and space for additional growth, as Wasabi scales to meet the increasing demand for storage across the UK while adhering to local data protection laws during the Brexit transition period.

According to IDC’s Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares, 2020 Report (Doc #US47350821, July 2021), the global public cloud IaaS market grew to $65.5 billion in 2020, with EMEA growing at 31%, as enterprises pivoted to support distributed workforces and digital interactions with customers while generating more data than ever before. Meanwhile, the advent of Brexit is set to lead to regulatory diversions and the introduction of country-specific data protection laws, which increase customer concerns around data security and potential compliance costs.

Andrew Smith, research manager, cloud infrastructure services, IDC said: “The public cloud IaaS market is a massive, high-growth IT infrastructure segment – topping $65.5 billion in 2020 worldwide. By expanding its regional infrastructure footprint, Wasabi is well positioned to bring its performant, cost-effective object storage services to UK enterprises; helping them expand their adoption of cloud storage, while also meeting their unique requirements for security and data sovereignty.“

Wasabi hot cloud storage has a solution that is 1/5th the cost of Amazon S3, with no fees for egress or API requests and no vendor lock-in. Businesses are able to store all of their data and access it the moment they need it. It’s also a product for the channel because every organization needs to store data and Wasabi is simple to understand, bundle with other products and sell to address the largest challenges facing organizations, including ransomware, and delivering support for immutable backups that offer high level of protection in cloud storage.

Denis Ferrand-Ajchenbaum, VP global vendor alliances and business development, Exclusive Networks SAS, commented: “Wasabi has been a tremendously valuable partner to us, delivering superior performance and pricing to the market. Instant and easy access to cloud storage without extra charges for egress or API requests alleviates much of the friction enterprises face and ultimately makes the cloud storage process simpler and much more intuitive.“

Richard Czech, VP EMEA, sales, Wasabi, commented: “The UK is in a transformative moment in light of Brexit, where the evolution of data security is leading to a rethink in regulation and country-specific data protection laws. Wasabi is equipped to remove the complexity and cost burden of compliance for UK organizations with a high-performance, easily accessible storage solution.”

The news of the London storage region follows a growth year for Wasabi, closing a $137 million funding round , followed by the opening of APAC HQs in Tokyo, Japan in October. The London location is its 8th storage region with plans to open several more storage regions in multiple countries  in the next 12 months. Pivotal to this momentum has been the exponential growth of Wasabi’s global partner network and substantial additions to its customer base.

David Friend, co-founder and CEO, Wasabi, added: “The UK is a key market for Wasabi, with so many large businesses, institutions and technology companies needing to store growing amounts of data and navigate the real-time adjustments necessitated by Brexit. Having a local storage region in this market enables us to serve the huge customer demand for our services, and to better secure UK customer data and reflect local data protection laws. With a strong footprint in Europe already and an existing storage region in Amsterdam, the UK was the obvious next location for us, and we have plans to open additional regions over the next 12 months.“