Regional based infrastructure will allow customers to run workloads and store data in New Zealand.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced plans to open an infrastructure region in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2024. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will consist of three Availability Zones (AZs) and join the existing 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic AWS Regions at launch.
The Region will be owned and operated by a local AWS entity in New Zealand. Globally, AWS has announced plans for 24 more Availability Zones and eight more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the new AWS Region in New Zealand. The new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will enable even more developers, startups, and enterprises as well as government, education, and nonprofit organizations to run their applications and serve end users from data centers located in New Zealand, ensuring that customers who want to keep their data in New Zealand are able to do so. AWS also released an economic impact study (EIS) that estimates it will create 1,000 new jobs through investment of NZ$7.5 billion (US$5.3 billion) in the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region with an estimated economic impact on New Zealand’s GDP of NZ$10.8 billion (US$7.7 billion) over the next 15 years. For more information, visit aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure.
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to help support customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications that use multiple Availability Zones.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security, and is connected through redundant, ultra-low latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region will enable local customers with data residency preferences to securely store data in Aotearoa, while providing even lower latency across the country.
Customers from startups to enterprises to government organizations and nonprofits will be able to use advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud to drive innovation. AWS offers the broadest and deepest portfolio of services including analytics, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage, and more. Customers in New Zealand already benefit from Amazon’s ongoing investment in its global backbone through the Hawaiki Submarine Cable, a 9,300 mile (15,000 kilometer) transpacific cable system in operation since 2018 that provides a low-latency and high-bandwidth connection from Australia to New Zealand and the United States.
According to the newly released EIS, AWS plans to invest NZ$7.5 billion (US$5.3 billion) in New Zealand over the next 15 years through the new AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region, which includes capital expenditures on the construction of data centers, operational expenses such as ongoing utilities and facility costs, and purchases of goods and services from regional businesses. The EIS estimates that spending on construction and operation of AWS infrastructure in New Zealand is expected to increase New Zealand’s GDP by approximately NZ$10.8 billion (US$7.7 billion) over the next 15 years. The EIS also establishes that the new AWS Region should bring direct and indirect economic benefits like new employment and sales for the data center supply chain and related sectors. In total, an estimated 1,000 new full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs will be created in New Zealand from this investment.
Customers and AWS Partners welcome the news of the AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region
Current New Zealand organizations choosing AWS to run their workloads to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time to market, includeAir NZ, ANZ Bank, Bank of New Zealand (BNZ), Contact Energy, Education Perfect, Halter, New Zealand Department of Conservation, Lancom, New Zealand Ministry of Health, New Zealand Ministry of Justice, Orion Health, Sharsies, The Clinician, TVNZ, UneeQ, University of Auckland, Vodafone, Xero, and many more.
ANZ is one of New Zealand’s largest bank, holding a banking relationship with nearly one in two New Zealanders and employing approximately 8,000 people. “It’s fantastic to see AWS investing and developing their capabilities in New Zealand,” said Michael Bullock, CIO of ANZ New Zealand and Pacific. “Our tech sector is world class, and this sort of investment is a great step toward providing New Zealand with greater technical resilience and opportunities for innovation. This investment demonstrates AWS’s continuing commitment to its customers and to the New Zealand economy as a whole while providing access to world-class cloud computing infrastructure that will meet our customers’ data sovereignty preferences and desire for innovation.”
Air New Zealand is New Zealand’s national carrier with a global network of passenger and cargo services, flying more than 17 million passengers every year and 3,400 flights per week before the pandemic. “Air New Zealand strives to connect New Zealanders to each other and New Zealand to the world, and we aim to be the world’s leading digital airline by providing a seamless digital experience from the moment customers start planning their trip until after they return home,” said Greg Foran, CEO of Air New Zealand. “We have been using a wide range of AWS services since 2016 to differentiate the airline globally, grow, and evolve our business. These include storage, compute, databases, and application development to run more than 70 of the airline’s digital services applications. We have collaborated with AWS on many innovations to embed digital at the heart of everything we do, including building a secure digital booking system that easily scales to meet fluctuating demand. Looking ahead, we need strong, resilient cloud architecture to provide customers a more personalized and innovative digital experience. The new AWS infrastructure will help us deliver on our vision, provide customers even faster access to all our services, and underpin our delivery of a best-in-class digital experience to Kiwis for many years to come.”
Te Tāhū o te Ture Ministry of Justice works to help make sure New Zealand is a safe and just society. “As an essential service, the courts have continued to work throughout the various COVID lockdowns, and the constraints of what is still a largely paper-based system have put into sharp focus the importance of technology to enable the remote delivery of services to ensure ongoing access to justice. Investment in new technology would make it easier for citizens to access and engage with the courts and tribunals, while at the same time ensuring the Ministry can maximize the use of all our resources since court-related data must be hosted within New Zealand in line with judicial policy,” said Tina Wakefield, Deputy Secretary Corporate and Digital Services at Ministry of Justice. “By investing in a Region in New Zealand, AWS is opening up fresh possibilities for public service agencies like ours by offering a new cloud computing option aligned with our preferences for on-shore data hosting. Using locally hosted technologies, we can further align with the New Zealand government’s cloud-first strategy and progress toward new ways of working that improve the experience of justice services for court participants, with the aim of improving access to justice for all New Zealanders.”
Education Perfect is a digital platform that provides curriculum-aligned lessons for blended learning in the classroom, and for home schooling and tutoring, for school years 5–12. “At Education Perfect, we aim to humanize technology for lifelong learners by helping educators use data to save time, inform decision making, create personalized learning experiences and pathways for students, and improve student outcomes,” said Alex Burke, CEO of Education Perfect. “As a cloud-native business, Education Perfect has been all-in on AWS from day one, leveraging a multitude of secure and resilient services including advanced data management and machine learning tools. AWS has helped us scale and grow into more than 60 countries, which enabled us to be a borderless organization providing access to our tools anytime, anywhere in the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, AWS helped us scale our service to manage a 300% increase in traffic to our platform. An AWS Region in New Zealand will provide greater availability, speed, and reliability, which means faster and more seamless access to our platform. As a born-and-bred Kiwi business, having our technology partners make significant local investments helps us build trust with government and education stakeholders, knowing that we’re collaborating with an organization that values security, economic success, and the digital transformation of our country.”
Halter, a New Zealand agri-tech startup, built its business on AWS from its beginning in 2016 and worked with the AWS Activate program, which provides early stage startups with cloud computing credits, business mentorship, and technical support to launch and build new businesses. Halter makes solar-powered smart collars for dairy cows that pair with an app that allows users to remotely manage cows’ health, feed, and behavior. “Farming is a 24/7 operation where things happen every hour of the day. We built on AWS because it’s easily accessible for Kiwi businesses and for its rock-solid, cutting-edge cloud technology that matches our customers’ need for uninterrupted service,” said Craig Piggott, CEO, Halter. “Halter was born on AWS, which allowed us to focus our engineering talent on our core business instead of infrastructure management. Beyond the technology, AWS supports our team’s growth with access to startup communities and valuable domain expertise in areas like agri-tech.”
The Clinician is a digital health company with a cloud-native health platform, ZEDOC, that automates collection and analysis of healthcare data and delivers multimedia educational materials to patients. Medical staff use the real-time data, such as eConsent, history, patient measures, and blood pressure and oxygen levels, to quickly flag symptoms such as depression from hypertension or an intolerance to medication.
“ZEDOC uses AWS’s analytics and machine learning services to intelligently analyze hundreds of thousands of patient interactions every month, providing critical new insights for enhancing remote patient engagement and ensuring equitable access for all communities,” said Tamaryn Hankinson, co-founder of The Clinician. “AWS has enabled us to easily scale for public sector deployments in places like Singapore with strict health data privacy standards. An AWS Region in New Zealand will enable the expansion of our digital health services across the private and public health sector locally, ensuring we respect the data sovereignty needs of all communities.”
New Zealand-based partners are part of the AWS Partner Network (APN) which includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN provides business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs help enterprise and public sector customers migrate to AWS, deploy mission-critical applications, and provide a full range of monitoring, automation, and management services for customers’ environments on AWS. Examples of AWS New Zealand Partners include Consegna, Datacom, Deloitte, Spark, and many others. AWS ISVs in New Zealand including Ambit, Aportio, Inteso, Orion Health, Raygun, Soul Machines, UneeQ, Xero, and others are already using AWS to deliver their software to customers around the world and plan to serve their New Zealand customers from the AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region at launch. For the full list of APN members, visit aws.amazon.com/partners.
Datacom, one of the region’s largest homegrown technology companies, is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. “Datacom has been collaborating with AWS since 2015, leveraging the AWS Cloud to strengthen our customers’ reliability and scalability without compromising security and compliance,” said Justin Gray, Managing Director for Datacom. “We help a range of large government agency and mid-market and enterprise customers to transform their organization’s systems, improving their performance and increasing efficiencies and security. AWS’s significant investment in New Zealand accelerates our country’s innovation ecosystem and digitization efforts and will provide organizations across New Zealand with more choice and faster access to world-class cloud computing services.”
Consegna is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner based out of New Zealand that helps customers move on-premises workloads to the cloud. “Like AWS, Consegna takes pride in being customer-obsessed, and we have worked closely with AWS to help our customers accelerate their digital transformation since our inception in 2016. Consegna recently migrated 500 virtual servers across 14 lines of business within nine weeks for Quotable Value, saving 50% on their current infrastructure costs,” said John Taylor, CEO for Consegna. “Leveraging the AWS global infrastructure has enabled us to assist customers in Australia and New Zealand, and it’s helped us drive mass migrations as far afield as California in the U.S. by replicating our delivery methodologies and frameworks across Availability Zones and AWS Regions that are consistently global. Having an AWS Region in New Zealand marks how important our country has become in the global IT stage.”
Spark is New Zealand’s largest telecommunications and digital services company providing services to a wide range of leading New Zealand organizations through the Spark Business Group – which unites Spark’s services with its specialist businesses CCL, Leaven, Qrious and Digital Island. “We have worked with AWS for the past five years, leveraging AWS’s extensive portfolio of cloud services across our business to support our digital transformation and to extend our hybrid cloud offerings to our customers, helping them to digitally transform and grow,” said Jolie Hodson, CEO, Spark. “AWS’s continuous focus on innovation and investment in critical infrastructure is an important enabler of the support we provide to New Zealand businesses as they modernize and innovate using advanced cloud capabilities like machine learning and the Internet of Things.”
AWS’s Continued Investment in New Zealand
The upcoming AWS Asia Pacific (Auckland) Region expands on AWS’s ongoing investment in New Zealand since setting up the first local AWS entity (AWS New Zealand) in Auckland in 2014. AWS has also launched two Amazon CloudFront edge locations and AWS Outposts in Auckland. Amazon CloudFront is a highly secure and programmable content delivery network (CDN) that accelerates the delivery of data, videos, applications, and APIs to users worldwide with low latency and high transfer speeds. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data center, colocation space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. This year, AWS expanded its presence further, opening new offices for AWS New Zealand in Auckland and Wellington to support a growing team of more than 100 employees, including solutions architects, account managers, sales representatives, professional services consultants, and experts to help customers migrate workloads to the cloud.
AWS continues to invest in the upskilling of local developers, students, and the next generation of IT leaders in New Zealand through programs like AWS re/Start, AWS Academy, and AWS Educate. These AWS Education Programs help learners of all backgrounds and experiences prepare for careers in the cloud. From college courses through to full-time training programs and self-paced learning content, AWS Education Programs offer access to the skills to begin a cloud career. AWS also collaborates with educational providers like Code Avengers to provide community code camps for underrepresented youth communities, and with diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancies like The Dream Collective to deliver programs like SheDares to educate young people about opportunities for future careers in technology.
To continue fostering entrepreneurship in New Zealand, AWS offers startups and small businesses support through the AWS Activate program. This provides access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts and web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS service credits—all at no charge. AWS also works with the venture capital community, startup accelerators, and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud. In New Zealand, this includes accelerator organizations such as Startmate, Icehouse Flux, CreativeHQ, and Kõkiri to support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies.
Amazon is committed to running its business in an environmentally friendly way and has committed to reach net zero carbon across all business operations by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement goals, as part of The Climate Pledge. A key component of this commitment is powering Amazon’s global infrastructure with 100% renewable energy, and the company is now on a path to achieve this milestone by 2025, five years ahead of the initial 2030 target. Amazon also became the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in 2020, reaching 65% renewable energy across its business. A recent Asia-Pacific (APAC) report by 451 Research found that on average, organizations moving their business applications from on-premises data centers to cloud infrastructure in APAC can expect to reduce their energy use—and associated carbon footprint—by 78%. Organizations that move compute workloads to the AWS Cloud can benefit from the net effect of Amazon’s sustainability efforts to reduce their carbon footprint.
