The FINANCIAL — As part of its $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint, IBM opened its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Germany, according to IBM.
Located in Frankfurt, the new facility provides customers with a local cloud center to help them meet Germany and Europe’s strict security and data privacy regulations, improving application performance by lowering latency for local customers.
The Frankfurt facility is part of SoftLayer’s unique global network, differentiated by its network-within-a-network architecture, and offers 10Gbps connections to SoftLayer services, with only 7 milliseconds of latency from SoftLayer’s Amsterdam facility and less than 330 milliseconds of latency from other SoftLayer cloud data centers around the world.
It also complements existing European IBM Cloud facilities in Amsterdam, London, and Paris and broadens redundancy options and geographic diversity within EMEA and around the world by enabling backups that can be replicated and integrated in any other SoftLayer cloud data center, with free unmetered bandwidth between locations.
In Germany, cloud adoption is on the rise, spurred by the cost savings and flexibility gained by moving operations and workloads to the cloud. The number of German enterprises using the cloud grew by 32 percent between 2012 and 2013, and The Experton Group forecasts the value of the cloud market in Germany at €18 billion by 2017, according to IBM.
Germany consistently ranks within IBM Cloud’s top five best-performing EMEA countries in terms of total monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth. German customers using IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure include those in the gaming, digital marketing and advertising, and online and IT services businesses.
German customer Avira provides IT-security protection to computers, smartphones, servers, and networks, delivered as both software and cloud-based services. This year, the company introduced several new Internet security products, all built on IBM Cloud’s SoftLayer infrastructure, according to IBM.
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