Launch of what is already the eighth Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure region in Europe. In an institutional act held in Madrid, both the President of the Government, Pedro Sanchezlike the president of Aragon, Javier Lambán, have shown the importance of this milestone for the technological and economic development of the country.
In this sense, both political leaders, accompanied by Migue Álava, general director of AWS for Spain and Portugal, have emphasized both the opportunities and the challenges of the country that arise from now on.
“The cloud is an ally to improve efficiency and also productivity”, has valued the President of the Government. «Data management is going to suppose nothing more and nothing less than 4% of our GDP. And it will employ 725,000 people in 2025“, Sánchez has summarized.
The President of the Government went on to explain that data storage already accounts for 3.5% of the world’s energy consumption, for which reason he has demanded from the companies in the sector that this transition towards digital and the cloud of which They are benefiting both companies and public administrations, it is done hand in hand with ecological transition policies, and that inclusiveness and territorial cohesion are favored.
On a day in which the general State budgets are also approved, Pedro Sánchez has indicated that the different ministries are going to allocate 16,000 million euros to digitization and R&D policies, which represents 23% more than what was allocated just a year ago. He also valued some of the goals that have been reached in recent months, such as the R&D laboratory that Intel is going to build in Barcelona, the first European factory that Cisco is going to install in Europe or the efforts that are being made to convince Samsung (among other manufacturers) to build a chip manufacturing plant in our country.
Finally, he announced the opportunity that is presented to Spain to become a true connectivity hub, since in the future, until 70% of the data that connects the United States with Europethey could do it crossing the Iberian geography.
The first AWS region in Spain
With the launch of the AWS Europe (Spain) Region, AWS now has 93 Availability Zones in 29 geographic Regions. In addition, it has plans to open another 18 Availability Zones across six AWS Regions: Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, and Thailand. The AWS Europe (Spain) Region has three Availability Zones, joining the seven AWS European Regions in Dublin, Stockholm, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Paris, and Zurich.
These zones are far enough from each other to support customer business continuity, but close enough to provide low latency for highly available applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected by redundant, ultra-low latency networks. Additionally, customers developing GDPR-compliant applications will have access to another secure AWS Region in the EU. AWS is also certified by the High Level National Security Scheme (ENS). This indicates that its infrastructure meets high security levels, which makes it suitable for state agencies and public organizations in Spain.
As Amazon has stated on multiple occasions, the new region is expected to have an impact on Spanish GDP of 1.8 billion euros in the next ten years.
