Box teams with AWS and IBM to store content in-region
- Summary:
- Box opens up a multi-cloud strategy as it teams with both AWS and IBM to give customers the option to store content in the region of their choic
From next month, Box customers will be able to choose to have the cloud-based content collaboration service store their data in Germany, Ireland, Japan or Singapore instead of the US. The launch of the new Box Zones option, announced at the vendor's London conference today, answers a growing demand from enterprises to control where their data is stored, says CEO Aaron Levie.
This has been something incredibly important for some of our customers.
Germany in particular is an area where we think there's a lot more opportunity than we've been able to serve already.
While Box continues to serve its application from its US data centers, it has rearchitected its infrastructure to allow it to store content elsewhere. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is hosting the first non-US locations for Box Zones, while others in Europe and Asia will come onstream later from IBM. Initially, enterprises will be forced to choose a single location, with more granular choice introduced in future versions of the paid-for service, says Levie.
On day one, we're going to allow customers to choose a zone per enterprise, but eventually you'll be able to have multiple zones per enterprise.
There's a policy engine that maps storage to enterprises and groups of users. We are bringing file processing into region over the next couple of quarters.
IBM partnership
The decision to work with IBM Cloud in addition to AWS is part of a wider partnership between Box and IBM originally announced last June. IBM's recent $1.3 billion acquisition of Cleversafe brings object storage technology that forms a core part of the technology to support the roll-out of Box Zones into a subset of IBM's 46 global data centers.
Levie says the timescale and extent of the roll-out is yet to be determined, but as with the first locations, the primary factor will be customer demand.
We chose to focus on [locations] where there were the most regulatory challenges.
We have a fairly extensive roadmap for where we go next. We want to light up new locations at a pace where we feel we can deliver the reliability and performance customers expect. Twelve to 24 months are where you'd see a handful of other locations.
Although in the past Levie has warned against fragmenting the Internet into regional clouds, he says the economies of scale available from AWS and IBM now make this less of a threat to companies that want to operate globally while managing data locally. Instead, it creates a new opportunity for Box to cater for customers that want in-region storage either for regulatory or latency reasons.
Over the long run our job is to dramatically simplify how business gets done. We have to do that everywhere around the world, not just in the US.
The more complex the world gets for our customers, we do see our opportunity where it's our job to make that simpler for our customers.
For Box, rearchitecting so that it can store content at third-party infrastructure providers gives it a roadmap for growth that leverages commodity public clouds rather than having to build its own global storage infrastructure. Levie says:
We didn't want to have 50 or 100 data centers. The architecture we're going to employ we think is going to be the best of both worlds.
The decision three years ago to bet on there being enough third-party clouds to enable a partner strategy has now allowed Box to move to a multi-cloud stance, and Levie doesn't rule out adding other cloud partners in the future:
We architected Box Zones to be as flexible as possible. There are other clouds out there but right now the focus is on the IBM and Amazon front.
My take
Box's move to a layered infrastructure strategy is a further evolution of the multi-platform cloud trend I recently wrote about. The cloud is splitting into horizontal layers, emulating the similar split that took place in the PC hardware architecture, when Intel set the standard for the core processor, while many others thrived by building around that standard.
In that cloud world, Box sees itself as a player in the "functional PaaS layer," offering content management services where others offer identity management or payment processing. Meanwhile, IBM extends its claim to be one of the leading cloud infrastructure players. Although it's notable that while IBM took pride of place on stage as Box's partner in today's announcement, the Box Zones service in fact launches next month on AWS and there is as yet no date set for when IBM's data centers will come on stream as part of this offering.
All of this of course takes place against the backdrop of Europe's data regulators proposing its new data regulation and adding finishing touches to its Privacy Shield — all of which I shall leave to be covered separately. Suffice to say that Box is quite right to see a big opportunity for services that help enterprises navigate a path through an increasingly complex global data landscape.