Box Advances Global Cloud Enhancing Box Zones and Box Accelerator

Box, Inc. announced its Box Zones offering will support regional storage in Australia and Canada, as well as enhancements to its Box Accelerator technology that speeds global performance, delivering two to six times faster upload times.

The company also announced support for compliance with ISO 27018. Box Zones joins innovations like Shuttle, KeySafe and Governance to provide customers with a content platform perfectly attuned to the way people work today.

“As business becomes more global and connected, our goal is to ensure that secure collaboration with coworkers, partners and customers across boundaries is as seamless and fast as possible,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO, Box. “In fewer than three months, we’ve added two new locations to Box Zones and delivered a faster, more reliable experience to our customers with the new Box Accelerator. As regulations and compliance become more complex, we’re focused on making it simple for our customers to do epic work and accelerate growth across the globe.“

More than 62,000 businesses, including 59% of the Fortune 500, rely on Box for secure content management in the cloud, and nearly half of all activity in Box occurs outside of the US. Multinational businesses like AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G and Schneider Electric have teams that span the globe and require secure international collaboration to be successful.

“Shopify is committed to providing innovative and efficient ways for our merchants to manage their businesses around the globe,” said Mike Gagnon, controller, Shopify, Inc. “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.“

Box Zones brings choice to businesses in Canada and Australia
For the first time, Box Zones will bring in-region storage options to businesses in Canada and Australia. Originally launched in April of this year, it lets customers choose where their valuable corporate data is stored through partnerships with Amazon Web Services and IBM Cloud, enabling customers to centrally manage critical content and enhance productivity while also addressing local storage concerns. Today’s Box Zones locations will leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS). With this announcement, the company will offer local storage in seven countries: the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Japan, and Singapore.

“The variation in regional and country data privacy laws makes it critical for cloud service providers to support local storage. Customers want to know where their data is stored, and in many cases they want it stored close to them,” said Duncan Brown, research director, IDC. “Expanding Box Zones to customers in Australia and Canada makes sense. These countries have advanced data protection laws, and Box Zones allows these customers to choose where their data is stored, whether for compliance or operational reasons.“

Box Accelerator improves performance for customers across globe
Launched in 2012, Box Accelerator is a global data transfer network that routes firm’s customer traffic and activity intelligently, leveraging a real-time congestion map to make performance-based routing decisions and choose the fastest path from end-users to Box from anywhere in the world. With today’s enhancements, Box Accelerator has network endpoints in more than twenty countries and 60 global locations across the globe, providing customers with upload speeds that are two to six times faster than before, depending on location. For example, average upload speeds are five times faster in Japan, four times faster in Australia and three times faster in the UK.

Complies with ISO 27018
It complies with ISO 27018, the standard for protecting personally identifiable information (PII) in the cloud, set forth by the International Standards Organization. By complying with ISO 27018, the company adheres to a uniform set of guidelines that spans regions, so businesses can adopt Box with confidence that the service they receive adheres to global privacy standards, often resulting in streamlined contract processes and expedited global expansion for customers. This achievement adds to firm’s existing support for compliance with ISO 27001, which the company achieved in 2013.

Box Zones will be available in Australia this fall and in Canada later this year leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) and for an additional fee. Box Accelerator is automatically turned on for all paid customers using the core product today for no additional fee.