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The US has continued to grow its data centre footprint moving further ahead of China and Japan, according to the latest analyst note from Synergy Research.
Almost half (46%) of major cloud and internet data centre sites are now based in the US, according to the research, up from 44% when the last analysis was conducted back in October. China, previously accounting for one in 10 data centres worldwide, now drops to 6% of coverage.
Not surprisingly, the vendors with the largest data centre footprint are Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM, and Microsoft, with at least 40 data centre locations each. The analysts also argue Google, Oracle and Rackspace also have a ‘notably broad’ data centre presence, while other firms, such as Salesforce, Apple, and Baidu, have their data centre footprint concentrated primarily in the US and China respectively. The 17 major organisations analysed have more than 230 data centre sites between them.
John Dinsdale, chief analyst and research director at Synergy, questions the US dominance. “Given that explosive growth in cloud usage is a global phenomenon, it is remarkable that the US still accounts for almost half of the world’s major data centres, but that is a reflection of the US dominance of cloud and internet technologies,” he said. “Perhaps the biggest surprise is that the UK does not feature more prominently, but that situation will change this year with AWS, Microsoft and Google all opening major data centres in the country.”
Microsoft has committed to making Azure and Office 365 available from UK data centres by late 2016, just days after AWS announced its own plans. Increasingly, cloud providers are turning to the continent as well as the UK, meaning greater data sovereignty and less latency for European customers.
Speaking to this publication in February, iland EMEA marketing director Monica Brink explained: “That’s where we noticed a real difference between our European and North American customer database. There is a very keen focus on advanced security, things like vulnerability scanning, encryption, intrusion detection, and the cloud provider being able to prove they are meeting all of those regulations for the customer.”