Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 24 | Page 7

NEWS AWS announces plans to open data centres in Spain institutions, public administrations and government agencies across Spain, and with this AWS infrastructure region, we look forward to helping accelerate this transformation,” said Peter DeSantis, Vice President of Global Infrastructure and Customer Support, Amazon Web Services. “Opening an AWS Region in Spain will drive more technology jobs and businesses, boosting the local economy, while enabling organisations across all industries to lower costs, increase security and improve agility. We’re excited to have AWS contribute to the future growth of Spain.” Amazon Web Services has announced it will open an infrastructure region in Spain T he new AWS Europe (Spain) Region will consist of three Availability Zones at launch and will be AWS’s seventh region in Europe, joining existing regions in Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Paris, Stockholm and the upcoming Milan region launching in early 2020. The Spain Region is expected to open late 2022 or early 2023. Currently, AWS provides 69 Availability Zones across 22 infrastructure regions worldwide. With this announcement, AWS has now announced plans for 13 more Availability Zones and four more regions in Indonesia, Italy, South Africa and Spain. “Cloud computing is already powering innovation within businesses, educational AWS’s announcement was welcomed by Spain’s Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, who described it as ‘great news’ for the country. “This investment from AWS will allow Spain to fully adapt to the Digital Transformation and develop as an international centre of innovation and technology,” he said. ///////////////// Canary Wharf Group and Cisco announce first ever commercial deployment of OpenRoaming C anary Wharf Group, owner of one of the largest business centres in Europe, and Cisco, have announced the world’s first commercial trial deployment of OpenRoaming. Combining the convenience of mobile roaming with Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, OpenRoaming allows devices to connect automatically to Wi-Fi and seamlessly roam from one hotspot to another without the need for the user to log in. The joint initiative will also provide up to four times faster wireless speeds by deploying Cisco Wi-Fi 6 access points, along with sophisticated location-based analytics to allow its clients to build unique services for their customers. The City of London contributes more than 22% of the UK’s total Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Having overseen the largest urban regeneration project ever undertaken in Europe, in London Docklands, Canary www.intelligentcio.com Wharf Group is at the heart of the capital’s economy with 17 million square feet of high- quality commercial office and retail space. The estate has a working population of 120,000 people with an additional 40,000 visitors daily on weekdays and 130,000 visitors over the weekend. There are up to 4,250 homes in development, in a state- of-the-art ‘smart’ environment across the estate. Over the last six years, Canary Wharf Group has provided first-class infrastructure to over 200 startups based in its renowned technology hub, Level39. Wood Wharf, a 5 million square foot regeneration project on the estate, will provide the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 connectivity to its fast-growth businesses and residents when it opens its doors to tenants in 2020. The latest wireless standard delivers dramatically faster speeds, improved capacity, along with lower latency and longer battery life. INTELLIGENTCIO 7