It’s Your Data: The Importance of Data Sovereignty

The launch of Wasabi’s first German storage region in Frankfurt, Germany this week is evidence not only of the company’s global growth, but also a testament to the growing demand for cost-effective cloud services, including cloud object storage.

Digital transformation is accelerating across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), where demand for agile cloud services to support remote learning and hybrid workplaces continues to remain high. According to Equinix’s annual Global Interconnection Index, almost half (47%) of EMEA’s IT professionals have migrated critical applications to cloud service providers in an effort to gain a competitive advantage. The same report predicts that the metro regions of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, and Paris will comprise 75% of EMEA’s interconnection bandwidth capacity by 2024.

“We’re experiencing rapidly growing customer demand for cloud storage in Europe and globally across a wide range of sectors, including higher education, healthcare, public sector, media and entertainment, and video surveillance,” said David Friend, CEO at Wasabi. To meet this demand, Wasabi has embarked on a comprehensive global rollout with European storage regions now located in Amsterdam, London, Paris, and Frankfurt, with more being added globally in the coming months in APAC and North America. “By rapidly deploying local data centers across Europe,” said Friend, “we’re able to serve this huge customer demand, ensure lightning-quick exchanges, decrease latency, and provide the data sovereignty many of our customers require.”

The importance of data sovereignty

Depending on where your data is stored, that data is subject to the laws and regulations of the country where it is collected. With the rapid adoption and expansion of various data privacy regulations across the globe, and especially in Europe with its GDPR, data sovereignty will continue to be a growing factor when selecting a cloud storage provider. The new Wasabi storage location, which is based in the Equinix Frankfurt hub, not only allows Wasabi to address these data sovereignty concerns in Germany but also benefits from rigorous environmental and energy management standards. “As digital transformation accelerates the use of cloud storage across Europe, organizations increasingly want to store their data in the country in which they operate,” said Richard Czech, VP of EMEA Sales at Wasabi. “We will continue our hypergrowth in EMEA, focused solely on helping our customers get the most out of their data by providing a cost-effective, high-performance storage solution close to home.”

Wasabi adheres to strict data security and privacy regulations in each country and industry it serves. (Image last updated 3/4/22)

Wasabi is committed to meeting the storage demands of every user and empowering them to reach their operational peak with a cost-effective, high-performance storage service. At the end of the day, we pride ourselves on delivering hot cloud storage that is affordable, scalable, secure, and accessible in the moment data is needed. That is why Wasabi will continue to add storage regions where people need them. It’s your data, and it should be exactly where you need it to be.