Box’s Canadian partners will soon have a localized cloud storage option to offer their customers. The company unveiled plans to launch a Canadian Box Zone, which will go live later this year.
The exact launch date of the regional cloud file sync and share zone is still unknown, but the press release seemed to indicate it will be after the fall launch of the Australian Box Zone.
“As business becomes more global and connected, our goal is to ensure that secure collaboration with co-workers, partners and customers across boundaries is as seamless and fast as possible,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, in a statement.
Box Zones were designed with enterprise localization needs in mind. The vendor unveiled its initial Box Zones — Germany, Ireland, Singapore and Japan — in April during the Box World Tour Europe event. Zones are regional cloud storage areas that will help organizations comply with local data compliance regulations and internal corporate data storage policies.
For Box, it’s a good move. According to the vendor, almost half of the activity on its cloud service occurs outside of the United States. The Canadian zone will provide enterprises in the Great White North with yet another option for secure and compliant cloud storage. It also potentially means new opportunities for Box channel partners to seek out not just greenfield opportunities, but also to return to existing customers with new options.
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One such customer is Shopify, which maintains its headquarters in Ottawa.
“As a company headquartered in Canada, it’s great to see Box’s commitment to customers in every country. The added choice and control around where our data is stored combined with Box’s focus on global performance will continue to align us and have meaningful impacts on our business,” said Mike Gagnon, controller for Shopify, in a statement.
Box Zones are the result of a partnership between Box and IaaS providers IBM Cloud and Amazon Web Services. The Canadian zone will be hosted on AWS servers.