This morning, Amazon Web Services Inc. officially announced the opening of the new AWS Region in Milan, completing investments that began some time ago in Italy.
The AWS Europe (Milan) Region will comprise three Availability Zones and will be the sixth AWS Region in Europe, joining the existing regions in France, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Sweden (coming in late 2018).
The new Region will enable organizations to provide lower latency to end users in Italy. AWS customers in Italy will also be able to comply with any content storage requirements on the territory, with the confidence that they retain complete control over the location of their data, while customers building applications that comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will have access to another AWS infrastructure region protected in the European Union (EU) that meets the highest levels of security. Compliance and data protection.
In addition, Italian organizations from start-ups to businesses and the public sector will have infrastructures directly on the territory to be able to take advantage of advanced technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, serverless and other innovation engines.
“For thousands of years, Italians have been the architects of some of the most innovative and revolutionary technical and artistic endeavors. We believe that an AWS Region in Italy makes it even easier for Italian businesses and government organizations to reinvent and evolve customer and citizen experiences for many decades to come. ”
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services
As a result, AWS’s investment in Italy continues to be more intense. As the number of Italian customers has increased, so has AWS’s presence in the country. In 2012, AWS launched a Point of Presence (PoP) infrastructure in Milan, which now provides Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route 53, AWS Shield, and AWS WAF services in the country, and later in 2017 with a second PoP location in Palermo.
The growth of Cloud investments in Italy seems unstoppable; Transformation projects for critical infrastructures and the specialization of vertical and “core” service offerings have become the norm in many areas and business sectors: 82% of medium-large enterprises use at least one service in the Public Cloud, in 23% of cases extensively on core processes. Italian companies have now started the path towards the cloud and, indeed, have made it an integral part of their IT strategy, considering it a preferential solution for the implementation of new projects (in 25% of cases), if not an obligatory choice (6%).
“To date, only 8% of the companies surveyed say they have a team dedicated to the Cloud and 13% want to introduce it, but the fact that one in five companies is thinking of creating a department dedicated to cloud governance shows that when we talk about the Cloud we no longer refer to a strictly technological change, but to a real rethinking of the organization that allows us to take advantage of the opportunities made available”
Mariano Corso, Scientific Director of the Cloud Transformation Observatory
However, the lack of skills is still perceived as a brake on the success of Cloud initiatives, highlighting the need to introduce new dedicated professionals. The Cloud represents an extraordinary accelerator for digital transformation but it is not enough on its own, the change mainly concerns people and corporate culture.
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