Box to open UK and Frankfurt Box Zones hosted in the IBM cloud

'Grand opening' scheduled for spring

Box is planning to open a new Box Zone in the UK, hosted in the IBM cloud with back-up offered in Frankfurt, Germany. The Zone will be opening in spring this year.

The initiative will enable customers to stipulate that their data remains resident in the UK in the latest expansion of Box's Box Zones offering. It comes just as organisations should be preparing for a drastic ratcheting up of the data protection environment with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) coming into force in May next year.

"We're seeing significant demand for Box Zones from customers in Europe who want greater flexibility over where their data is stored," said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box.

He continued: "As international regulations and demands continue to become more complex, our ability to help enterprises move to the cloud and simplify their content management strategy is incredibly valuable.

"With Box Zones we're able to serve a much larger international customer base, including reaching organisations in the most security-conscious industries."

The opening of the London location follows on from existing set-ups in Germany, Ireland, Japan, Singapore, Australia and Canada.

John Morris, general manager of cloud object storage at IBM, claimed that the move indicated a deepening of the "strong collaboration between IBM and Box in Europe" with "IBM Cloud powering the first implementation of Box Zones in the UK".

Morris continued: "Using Box Zones, businesses will soon have the ability to tap into IBM's global network of cloud data centres to store their data in-country with Box Zones - whether for performance, regulatory or security reasons."

In addition to Box Zones, Box has also recently introduced such services as Box KeySafe and Box Governance as extra services as organisations try to get to grips with increasingly tight data protection regulations - not just in the EU, but globally.

The Box Zones initiative with IBM is a continuation of the deal the two companies signed in June 2015, and also follows on from Box Relay, unveiled in September last year. Box Relay is an additional service that adds custom workflow features, combined with the ability to invite outsiders into specific workflows, such as contractors and partner organisations.

Box Relay will become generally available later this year and, along with Box KeySafe and Box Governance, is intended to embed Box more deeply into organisations - and to head-off intensifying competition in cloud storage from Dropbox, Google and Microsoft.

The announcement comes around a week after Box released its latest financial results that show revenues growing and losses decreasing - although it still has some way to go before it begins turning a respectable profit.

However, as customers numbers increase past 71,000, there will be confidence at the firm that ti is on the right track, and the opening of a dedicated London data centre for storage could be the catalyst to getting more UK-firms onboard.

Box CEO Levie has long argued that IT vendors need to work better together - and harder - in order to break down the silos between different vendors' services and to inter-operate better, especially if cloud computing is to genuinely take-off.