The new Amazon Web Services Europe (Milan) Region expands the cloud pioneer’s global footprint, enabling customers to run applications and store their content in data centres in Italy. The AWS Europe (Milan) Region is the sixth AWS Region in Europe.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company has announced the opening of the AWS Europe (Milan) Region. With this launch, AWS now spans 76 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world and has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan and Spain. The AWS Europe (Milan) Region is the sixth AWS Region in Europe alongside Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris and Stockholm. Developers, start-ups and enterprises, as well as government, education and non-profit organisations can run their applications and serve end-users from data centres located in Italy, as well as leverage advanced AWS technologies to drive innovation.
“AWS customers in Italy are among the most creative and innovative organisations that we support anywhere in the world and we are always inspired by the work they do with our technology,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “Cloud technology has been a key part of the transformation of industries across Italy – from automotive and utilities to manufacturing and retail and so much more. With the new AWS Milan Region we look forward to supporting even more customers as they grow their organisations and innovate for their users across virtually all industries.”
The AWS Europe (Milan) Region has three Availability Zones. AWS Regions are composed of Availability Zones, which each comprise of one or more data centres and are located in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting Business Continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications. Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networking. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault-tolerance.
AWS infrastructure regions meet the highest levels of security, compliance and data protection. With the new region, customers with data residency requirements to store their content in Italy can do so with the assurance that they retain complete ownership of their data and it will not move unless they choose to move it. Additionally, customers building applications that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have access to another secure AWS infrastructure region in the European Union (EU) that meets the highest levels of security, compliance and data protection.
AWS continues to invest in Italy
The AWS Europe (Milan) Region adds to AWS’s on-going investment in Italy. AWS first established a presence in the country in 2012 with the launch of an AWS Edge location in Milan. This was followed by an AWS office in the city in 2014 and another one in Rome in 2016, with significant and growing teams of account managers, business development managers, customer services representatives, partner managers, professional services consultants, solutions architects, technical account managers and many more to help customers of all sizes as they move to the cloud. Also in 2016, AWS acquired Asti-based company NICE Software, a leading provider of software and services for high performance and technical computing, located in Piedmont. In 2017, an Edge location was opened in Palermo and in 2019, an AWS Direct Connect endpoint launched in Milan, helping customers establish a dedicated network connection from their premises to AWS. Later in 2019, AWS launched two additional Edge locations in Milan and one in Rome. These investments are in addition to the thousands of permanent jobs and over €4 billion of investment from Amazon, since 2010.
Amazon.com CTO, Werner Vogels, said: “The global healthcare pandemic has been like nothing many of us in Europe have ever known. During this time, many organisations have been contemplating their role in the COVID-19 crisis and how they can best serve their communities. I can tell you it has been no different for us at Amazon Web Services (AWS). We are focused on where we can make the biggest difference to help the global communities in which we all live and work. This is why we are announcing that the AWS Europe (Milan) Region is now open. The opening of the AWS (Milan) Region demonstrates our on-going commitment to the people of Italy and the long-term potential we believe there is in the country.”
Innovation success stories
Vogels added: “In Italy, many organisations are leveraging AWS to tackle the challenges brought on by the pandemic, whether it is to empower scientific research, facilitate remote working and remote learning or providing new services to answer the emergency at hand. For example, in scientific research, Expert System, an Italian AWS Partner Network (APN) Independent Software Vendor (ISV), has built their Clinical Research Platform on AWS. This platform aggregates information from various trusted sources of scientific content and news releases, providing scientists working in biomedical research across the globe with an efficient, one-stop shop where they can discover the latest insights to drive their research. In addition to research, there are thousands of education companies and institutes that have rapidly set up secure, scalable remote learning solutions so millions of students continue to get the education they deserve. One example is bSmart Labs, an Italian digital education ISV that has used the Amazon Chime Software Development Kit (SDK) to quickly add video calling capabilities to their bSmart Classroom remote learning application, delivering real-time communication functionality to 560,000 bSmart Classroom teachers and students during this period.
“With the lockdown restrictions across Italy, the sharing of information from local public administrations and the ability to quickly answer citizens’ questions has become a vital public service. One of the best examples has been the work of Comune di Codogno, an Italian municipality in Lombardy. Using Amazon Connect, the municipality built a call centre in less than a week to route calls directly to municipality staff, helping to quickly answer citizens’ questions on COVID-19, at a time when speed is critical. Another example, critical to the contagion management efforts, has been providing people across Italy with facemasks. In this case, Italian textile manufacturer, Miroglio Group, has changed the production chain of one of their factories in Alba, northwest Italy, from producing textile for garments to producing washable, cotton and elastane masks. With their staff in confinement at home, Miroglio, was able to co-ordinate this change of production remotely thanks to the cloud. Another example of how Italians are fighting back is COD19.it, an application created by Gianvincenzo Zuccotti, Principal of Medicine of the Milan State University and developed by APN Partner Link Up. The application allows frontline staff to get in contact, via phone, with positive and suspected positive coronavirus patients who have been discharged from hospital. This allows medical staff to check the discharged patient’s health status, calling them twice a day and giving them on-going medical assistance, through constant remote monitoring and support, until they are certified as fully recovered.”
Amazon Italy is also committing to the national effort by donating €3.5 Million to Italian Civil Protection and non-profit organisations to support the fight against COVID-19, across all of the Italian territories and communities in which Amazon employees live and work.
