Amazon Web Services (AWS) will bring its cloud computing services to Asia in "the first half of 2010," according to a statement released late last week.
The expansion will see AWS make its services available " ... from multiple Availability Zones in Singapore in the first half of 2010, then in other Availability Zones within Asia over the second half of 2010."
SearchStorage ANZ has inquired as to whether AWS includes Australia or New Zealand among the "other zones" and will report the company's response as soon as it becomes available.
AWS touts lower latency as the big attraction of its move to Asia. Local data centers may also be attractive to users of the company's Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 currently offers data centers in the USA and Europe, a combination often perceived as making S3 a cheap disaster recovery option, especially since AWS recently announced it will allow customers to send in storage devices for an initial upload. Expanding S3's data center footprint into Asia would mean users could store data on three continents, an option few organisations could afford in their own facilities.