Box launches Box Zones, aims for EU, Asia expansion
Box on Tuesday launched Box Zones, an effort to store data locally across Europe and Asia via Amazon Web Services and IBM.
The company's Box Zones is designed to address local data storage requirements and enable customers to centralize content and store it in Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Tokyo.
In addition, Box Zones will allow the company to expand its international customer base. Chris Yeh, senior vice president of product at Box, said Box Zones is part of a larger build out designed to scale the company globally. "We had customers that operated outside the U.S. already, but they were storing data with us in the U.S. data centers," said Yeh. "We've been working on Box Zones for the past year to have more flexibility."
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Box Zones lines up with Box KeySafe and Box Governance to allow enterprises to deploy the service in multiple ways. In a nutshell, Box is arguing that it is not a storage company but a content platform with enterprise features to bolster collaboration.
According to Box, it has 57,000 businesses using its service and many of them are multinational and need to comply with local data laws.
Box Zones will also support the integrations already in place with Office 365 and Salesforce. The product will launch on Amazon's S3 service in May and then roll out to IBM Cloud later this year.
Yeh added that the Box Zones will add other cloud provider options in the future.