With the steady rise of AWS adoption in the UK, it should come as no surprise that AWS will be adding a new UK region by the end of 2016. Last week, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels announced the new AWS UK region amongst five other regions set to open in 2016: India, Ohio, South Korea, the UK and a second region in China.

The new regions are a welcome addition for UK businesses that are interested in migrating to the cloud, but are struggling with data sovereignty issues, increased regulatory restrictions, and a greater prominence of security threats. Businesses must balance the regulatory risk of cloud migration against escalating costs associated with local providers and/or hosting in-house.

With the new UK region, yet another hurdle to cloud adoption is removed, allowing companies to take advantage of the significant cost savings and improved performance of AWS while reducing the regulatory risk of data stored outside the UK.

AWS’ new region is even more important in light of the in/out EU referendum looming in 2017. Should the UK choose to leave the EU, data would be mandated to remain within the UK. This uncertainty has caused many businesses to delay AWS adoption plans for fear that the referendum would force them to go through the time and expense of two migration projects: onto AWS and off the platform shortly after. The new region allows businesses to safely host on AWS regardless of the results of the referendum.

The final barriers to cloud adoption are usually a variety of concerns over security, and security will no doubt continue to drive nearly every cloud conversation. However, with the failure of local hosting providers to offer transparency into security practices, the recent security breaches of these providers, and increased cloud education, these conversations have shifted from “Is the public cloud secure?” to “How do we take advantage of the data protections the public cloud offers?”. As a result, a greater volume of UK companies will be willing to trust critical workloads to the cloud.  AWS provides native capabilities for protecting their infrastructure from common security attacks such as DDoS, SQL Injections, Cross Site Scripting etc. whilst still maintaining data sovereignty.

AWS is working feverishly to remove barriers to large scale cloud adoption, and with the new UK region, businesses are primed to take advantage of the cost efficiency, compute power, and scale of the AWS platform. It is an exciting time to be in the UK and watch the IT transformation unfold.

To further these discussions around AWS, security, and regulatory compliance, Logicworks will be hosting monthly meetups in London. Join us for our next meetup, Thursday, December 3 at Conway Hall. We will discuss security best practices on AWS and how you can use AWS to secure your infrastructure while future-proofing your business against potential regulatory changes.

By Ryan Kroonenburg
Managing Director at Logicworks UK

Logicworks is an enterprise cloud automation and managed services provider with 22+ years of experience transforming enterprise IT. Contact us to learn more about our managed cloud solutions.