Box’s international expansion continues.
The cloud file-sharing company on Wednesday said it will extend Box Zones—a service that allows businesses to specify the geography in which its documents and other data are stored—into Canada and Australia by the end of the year. Box is using Amazon Web Services to deliver this option. (It uses IBM’s cloud in other regions.)
Box Zones was launched in April in Europe and Asia, aimed at companies concerned with storing their data, as well as that of their customers, in data centers located in the United States. That concern intensified last year after the overthrow of Safe Harbor, a decades-old agreement that covered data transferred across the Atlantic between the U.S. And Europe. A new policy, called Privacy Shield, went into effect on Aug. 1.
Alongside the regional expansion, Box (BOX) said it is updating the technology it uses to route and handle traffic on its cloud services. The revisions to Box Accelerator should boost data transfer speeds globally and improve upload times by a factor of two to six times, the company said.
In a blog about the new services, Box CEO Aaron Levie said more than half of the “activity” on Box’s cloud service now comes from outside the United States. The company has more than 62,000 customers, including multinationals such as AstraZeneca, General Electric, Procter & Gamble, and Schneider Electric.
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With the addition of Canada and Australia, Box now offers local data storage in seven countries. The other five are the United States, Germany, Ireland, Japan, and Singapore.