Amazon Web Services Adding New Region in Paris, France

Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the launch of the AWS EU (Paris) region.

With this launch, it now provides 49 Availability Zones across 18 technology infrastructure regions globally with another 12 Availability Zones and four regions in Bahrain, Hong Kong SAR, Sweden, and a second AWS GovCloud region in the US expected to come online by early 2019. The AWS EU (Paris) Region is AWS’s fourth in Europe, joining existing regions in Germany, Ireland, and the UK.

Tens of thousands of French customers already use AWS in other regions, and starting now, developers, start-ups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations, can leverage AWS to run applications and store data in France.

The AWS EU (Paris) region offers three Availability Zones. AWS regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which refer to technology infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to reduce the risk of a single event impacting availability, yet near enough for BC applications that require rapid failover.

Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, physical security, and is connected via redundant, low-latency networks. Customers focused on HA can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve greater fault tolerance.

Additionally, the new AWS EU (Paris) region gives customers with data sovereignty requirements the ability to store their data in France with the assurance that their content will not move unless they move it.

The new region adds to the existing infrastructure AWS already has in France, which includes three Edge Network Locations in Paris and one in Marseille, for customers looking to deliver websites, applications, and content to end users with low latency. These are part of AWS’s existing network of 107 Points of Presence (96 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) globally.

“For over a decade, AWS has been supporting French builders and entrepreneurs, in enterprises and start-ups, on their quest to reinvent and evolve their customer’s experiences,” said Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS. “We have tens of thousands of French customers using AWS from regions outside of France, but we’ve heard them loud and clear and are excited to deliver them an AWS Region in France, so they can easily operate their most latency-sensitive workloads or house any data that needs to reside on French soil.“

Politicians and officials, from French central and local government, welcomed the opening of the AWS EU (Paris) region.

“The establishment of the AWS region in France reinforces the attractiveness of our country for digital companies, strengthens the trust of French organizations in the cloud, and creates the right conditions for their digital transformation,” said Éric Bothorel, La République En Marche! representative in the French National Assembly and member of the Economic Affairs Commission, with a focus on digital affairs. “The digital revolution is bringing about major economic, social, and societal changes and represents a tremendous growth opportunity for the benefit of the French economy as a whole. The cloud is the essential tool to ensure the development of this new economy and the digital transformation of businesses. It is also an important generator of jobs and we are glad to see AWS is a key part of this.”

Valérie Pécresse, president of Ile-de-France, also welcomed the new AWS infrastructure region, said: “We are delighted that Amazon Web Services is investing heavily in the opening of its datacenters in Île-de-France. It is a recognition of the strength and attractiveness of Ile de France, which is establishing itself as the technical hub of Europe. The region has already become established in the eyes of large companies and start-ups that have set up their HQs in the metropolitan area. AWS’s choice to locate their datacenters here will help to attract even more companies and validates our ambition to be the first smart region of Europe.”

One of the reasons customers in France are moving to AWS is the company’s investment in security, compliance, and data protection. All AWS infrastructure regions around the world are designed, built, and regularly audited to meet compliance standards and to provide security for all AWS customers. These include ISO 27001, ISO 270, ISO 27018, SOC 1 (Formerly SAS 70), SOC 2 and SOC 3 Security & Availability, PCI  DSS Level 1. This means customers benefit from best practices of AWS policies, architecture, and operational processes built to satisfy the needs of the most security sensitive customers.

AWS is certified under the EU-US Privacy Shield and the AWS Data Processing Addendum (DPA) is GDPR-ready and available to all AWS customers to help them prepare for May 25, 2018, when the GDPR becomes enforceabe. AWS’ DPA terms allow customers to transfer personal data to countries outside the European Economic Area (EEA) in compliance with EU data protection laws. AWS also adheres to the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe (CISPE) Code of Conduct. It helps customers verify that AWS is using appropriate data protection standards to protect their data, consistent with the GDPR. In addition, AWS offers a range of services and features to help customers meet the requirements of the GDPR, including services for access controls, monitoring, logging, and encryption.

Customers and APN partners welcome AWS infrastructure region to France
In France, AWS works with tens of thousands of customers, including more than 80% of companies listed on the CAC 40, the French stock market index. Enterprises such as Canal+, Capgemini, Decathlon, Engie, LafargeHolcim, Le Figaro, Les Echos, Mondadori France, Nexity, Schneider Electric, Sociéte Génerale, Soitec, TF1, and Veolia, are now using AWS to speed their time-to-market, lower their costs, and support their businesses.

CAC 40 enterprise Schneider Electric, in energy management and automation and is using AWS to support its transition to becoming a digital business.

“For the past six years, we have been working with AWS as a key technology provider to support our digital transformation,” said Hervé Coureil, chief digital officer, Schneider Electric. “By migrating our old IT systems to the cloud, we can accelerate our time to market, lower our IT costs, and better support our global business operations. For example, we are building our enterprise big data platform on AWS to give us the ability to centralize data from dozens of critical operational systems. Using AWS enables us to accelerate key decision-making processes and gain meaningful insights from large datasets for our pricing, logistics, human resources, and risk management applications.”

Another CAC 40 enterprise using AWS to support innovation in its business is Société Générale, one of the largest banks in France and the world.

“Société Générale Group has been working with AWS to accelerate its digital transformation while complying with European and French financial services regulations. Using AWS, we developed SG Research, an application that makes Société Générale’s analyst reports available to corporate customers allowing them to make better investment decisions,” said Carlos Goncalves, head of global technology services, Société Générale. “We welcome the new AWS region in France as it will help to accelerate the deployment of our hybrid strategy by delivering lower latency between applications running in the cloud and our information systems running in French data centers.“

As well as large, security-conscious enterprise organizations, the public sector in France is also entrusting AWS with mission critical workloads to deliver security and privacy. Public sector organizations using AWS to transform the services they deliver to the citizens of France include Kartable, Les Restos du Coeur, OpenClassrooms, Radio France, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF).

SNCF, the French state-owned railway company, chose to build its mobile application on AWS to give traffic information to the 14 million travelers across its network in real time.

“Using AWS, we are able to absorb peaks of hundreds of thousands of users per second on our mobile application. In times of extreme weather, traffic events, holidays, or engineering work, many travelers will connect to the application at once, and AWS gives us the ability to scale to cater to all of our travelers,” said Agnes Chiroux, SNCF application project manager. “The new AWS region in France is an opportunity for us to speed-up innovation and ensure a good experience for our users. In the future, we expect to develop new predictive features for the SNCF application, using machine learning and big data services in the AWS region in France, to deliver reliable information to travelers. Using the new AWS Region will enable us to pursue our mission which is to keep travelers informed in real time and always suggest the fastest and easiest way to reach their destination.“

Non-profit organizations are also adopting AWS to innovate and better complete their mission of helping the underprivileged people of France. One example is Les Restos du Coeur, a French charity that provides assistance to the needy, delivering food packages, and participating in their social and economic integration back into French society. It is using AWS for its CRM system to track the assistance given to each of its beneficiaries and the impact this is having on their lives. AWS offers here security, which is essential for managing beneficiaries’ personal data.

“We are delighted to learn that Amazon Web Services has opened data centers in France as it now gives us the option to keep the personal data of our beneficiaries in the country as we expand our use of the cloud,” said Patrice Blanc, CEO, Restos du Coeur. “We started our journey to the cloud by building our CRM system on AWS, which is used by thousands of volunteers in more than 2,000 centers. This allows our teams to manage how we serve beneficiaries and their participation in activities to get them back into society, such as resume writing workshops, cooking classes, French lessons, computing courses, and more. Using AWS, we can now deliver personalized support to each of our beneficiaries and this insight is helping us to bring more people out of poverty, get them into work, and further our mission of helping the people of France.”

Some of the most successful start-ups – as well as established enterprises and public sector organizations – in France are using AWS to build and rapidly expand their businesses across the country, throughout Europe, and around the world. Companies such as 1001 Pharmacies, Botify, CaptainDash, ContentSquare, Drivy, FrontApp, Iconosquare, Invoxia, Ividata, La Ruche Qui dit Oui!, Linxo, ManoMano, Nestor, Peter, Photobox, Predicsis, Pretty Simple, Realytics, Silkke, Slimpay, Softbank Robotics, Teads, Yomoni, have embraced AWS as the infrastructure that is powering their businesses.

One well-known example is AlloResto by JustEat, in the French foodtech industry, which is using AWS to scale to cope with peaks in traffic as well as to innovate faster on behalf of its customers.

“We are pleased that the new AWS EU (Paris) Region has now opened as it will allow us to store data closer to our thousands of French customers, lower the latency of running our application, and improve the customer experience,” said Noel Ly, international platform manager, AlloResto by JustEat. “We are running a foodorder platform that connects clients with participating delivery and takeaway restaurant partners which means our business sees intense spikes of activity for a few hours of the day, at lunchtime and again at dinner. Our website needs to scale up easily, and thanks to AWS, we are able to do this, fulfilling over 10 million orders this year. Using AWS, we estimate we will reduce our IT costs by around 50% in the next two years, something that would have been impossible with our previous co-location environment and for a company like us, saving costs is vitally important to the business. With AWS our stability has never been better which allows us to deliver customers a reliable and responsive application, as well as gourmet food.”

Start-ups in the regulated financial services industry are also using AWS to increase agility while ensuring the security for their applications as they grow their businesses.

PayPlug is an online credit card payment solution, which enables e-merchants to enrich their customer experience by providing user-friendly mobile payment gateways.

“AWS has been key to the success of our business by providing us with a highly secure, compliant, and PCI DSS-certified infrastructure out of the box,” said Camille Tyan, CEO, PayPlug. “When we started PayPlug, a service provider told us that we were too small and that it would be far too complicated for us to get PCI DSS certification, but they changed their mind as soon as we told them our data is hosted on AWS, due to the high levels of security and compliance it provides. Since then, in November 2016, we became one of the first FinTech start-ups operating on AWS to obtain the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority (Autorité de Contrôle Prudentiel et de Résolution – ACPR) payment institution license. Now with AWS infrastructure in France, we look forward to further expanding the long list of financial services certifications and accreditations we have.”

French-based AWS Partner Network (APN) also welcomed the arrival of the AWS EU (Paris) region. The APN includes tens of thousands of ISVs and systems integrators (SIs) around the world with APN participation among French based entities growing over the past 12 months. APN Partners build solutions and services on AWS and the APN helps by providing them with business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support.

In France, APN SIs supporting customers as they move to AWS include Premier Consulting Partners such as Accenture, Capgemini, Claranet, CloudReach, DXC, and Edifixio as well as Advanced Consulting Partners such as ABC Systemes, Atos, CoreExpert, Cycloid, D2SI by Devoteam, Linkbynet, Oxalide, Ozones, Scaleo, and Sopra Steria. These partners are helping enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a range of monitoring, automation, and management services. APN ISVs including Axway, Commerce Guys, Efront, MicroStrategy, Sage, Software AG, Splunk, Talend, Tibco, and Zerolight are serving their French customers from AWS regions around the world, with many also making their software available from the AWS EU (Paris) region at launch. Customers can also find, trial, deploy, and buy software solutions for AWS on the AWS Marketplace.

Capgemini, a CAC40 company in consulting, technology services, and digital transformation, also welcomed the opening of the new AWS EU (Paris) region.

“We have been working with many regulated companies that want to store their data on French soil and, at the same time, take advantage of AWS, so we are excited about the benefits the new AWS Region in France will bring to our customers,” said Aiman Ezzat, group executive board member, Capgemini. “As well as French enterprise and public sector organizations, we also see this opening up an opportunity for our many international customers to expand their presence in France and to give their end users low-latency access to their applications in the country. We look forward to working with our customers on the migration of their workloads to this new AWS region.”