AWS to open data centres in Israel
The new AWS Infrastructure Region will arrive in the first half of 2023, enabling customers to run workloads and store data in Israel while serving end-users with even lower latency.
Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced it would open an infrastructure region in Israel in the first half of 2023. The AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region will enable even more developers, startups, enterprises, and government, education, and non-profits to run their applications and serve end-users from data centres located in Israel. Additionally, the government of Israel announced that it had selected AWS as its primary cloud provider as part of the “Nimbus” contract for government ministries and subsidiaries. The Nimbus framework will provide cloud services to Israeli government ministries, including local municipalities, government-owned companies, and public sector organisations, to help to accelerate digital transformation. It will be instrumental in driving innovation and enabling new digital services for the citisens of Israel.
“The new AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region will empower more public and private institutions, innovative startups, and global companies to deliver built-for-the-cloud applications that help fuel economic development across the country. It is the latest in our list of AWS Regions across Europe and the Middle East, which includes existing regions in Bahrain, Ireland, Italy, France, Germany, Sweden, and the UK as well as regions under development in Spain, Switzerland, and United Arab Emirates,” said Peter DeSantis, Senior Vice President of Global Infrastructure, AWS. “The new region is a continuation of our investment to support enterprises of all kinds, help startups scale and grow, enable technical skills development, and create cloud literacy. Cloud technology is at the heart of the Israeli government’s digital transformation program, and their approach highlights the importance of setting a strong course for cloud adoption and leading by example to re-invent citisen services.”
AWS Regions comprise Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications leverage multiple Availability Zones. Globally, AWS has 81 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch an additional 21 Availability Zones and seven AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates.
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 and across multiple regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance. The addition of the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region will enable local customers with data residency requirements to store their data in Israel with the assurance that they retain control over the location of their data. Organisations using this region will also be able to access advanced technologies from the world’s leading cloud with the broadest and deepest suite of cloud services to drive innovation, including analytics, compute, database, Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, mobile services, storage, and more.
Customers and AWS Partners in AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region
Customers in Israel will continue to join the millions of active customers using AWS every month in over 190 countries around the world. Organisations choose AWS to run their mission-critical workloads to drive cost savings, accelerate innovation, and speed time-to-market. Customers in Israel have built their businesses on top of AWS, including Amdocs, AppsFlyer, Ayalon Insurance, Bank Leumi, Bizzabo, CyberArk, Fiverr, Gamoshi, Gett, Gong, Government of Israel, Harel Insurance, Hashavshevet, Innovid, ironSource, Jfrog, Kaltura, Lumigo, Migdal, monday.com, Netafim, NICE, Operative, Perion, Rami Levy, Sentinel One, SimilarWeb, Tnuva, Wix, Yad2, and many more. AWS enables them to scale rapidly and expand their geographic reach in minutes. In the Israeli public sector, organisations use AWS to transform the services they deliver to citisens, including the Center for Educational Technology, The Ministry of Health, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, and Weizmann Institute.
Bank Leumi is one of the leading banks in Israel and has approximately 200 branches across the country and dedicated teams leveraging AWS to build an advanced banking services marketplace. “Having secure, scalable, and resilient infrastructure is paramount to providing the best banking experiences for our customers,” said Jaime Schcolnik, Chief Information Officer at Bank Leumi. “Using AWS as our primary cloud provider has enabled us to innovate rapidly and develop a new open banking platform with reduced cost and minimal development time compared to other technologies. The new AWS Region in Israel will further support our investment in modernising our banking infrastructure.”
Migdal Insurance, a leading Israeli insurance company with over $80 billion in managed assets and two million customers, relies on AWS to comply with frequently changing security and privacy requirements, including the International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS17). “AWS’s advanced security services like AWS CloudTrail, Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Config, combined with their enterprise experience, gives us the agility and flexibility to innovate quickly while remaining compliant with frequently changing security and privacy requirements,” said Tami O.Koll, Deputy CEO, Head of Technology, Migdal. “We’re constantly looking for ways to innovate and provide a superior service that helps us remain laser-focused on our customers. The new AWS Region in Israel will provide low latency access and help us enhance our customer and agent experience through advanced analytics and AI and machine learning services.”
CyberArk is the global leader in Identity Security. Centered on privileged access management, CyberArk provides the most comprehensive security offering for any identity – human or machine – across business applications, distributed workforces, hybrid cloud workloads and throughout the DevOps lifecycle. “Building our portfolio of Identity Security-based SaaS offerings on AWS helps accelerate our ability to provide more choice for customers interested in subscription-based SaaS options that improve security and maximise risk reduction,” said Udi Mokady, CyberArk chairman and CEO. “Most recently, AWS infrastructure agility enabled us the flexibility to quickly build and launch Cloud Entitlements Manager, which provides our customers with an important solution to monitor entitlements across cloud environments and remove excessive permissions across an organisation’s cloud footprint. AWS bringing a region to Israel with the same high levels of data protection, user privacy, and regulatory compliance as their other regions around the world is great news for us and to all tech companies in Israel.”
Fiverr, the company that is changing how the world works together, connects businesses of all sizes with skilled freelancers offering digital services in more than 500 categories. Fiverr uses multiple AWS Cloud services to host its platform and scale its progression. “Scaling our platform and enabling rapid development of new products is essential to our continued growth,” said Gil Sheinfeld, Fiverr CTO. “Using AWS managed services allows us to focus on innovation and improve our productivity while we grow rapidly. The planned opening of an AWS Region in Israel is great news for us as it reflects AWS’s dedication to Israel.”
The monday.com Work OS is an open platform that democratises the power of software so organisations can easily build work management tools and software applications to fit any need. monday.com serves more than 110,000 customers across more than 200 industries in 190 countries. “Since adopting AWS, we’ve been able to further our mission of democratising power software for everyone by allowing us to scale and help our customers meet rapidly evolving challenges,” said David Virtser, Head of Infrastructure at monday.com. “AWS helped us enhance both our product and technology stack by breaking our initial monolith into microservers and adopting containers, orchestration, and continuous delivery – enabling us to greatly increase our pace of innovation. The expansion of AWS data centers in Israel is exciting news as we continue to look for new ways to meet our customers’ growing needs, including the prioritization of data privacy and GDPR implications.”
Hashavshevet (Wizsoft), founded in 1985, is the developer of a leading ERP system that provides predictive data analytics software for businesses. More than 40,000 businesses use the Hashavshevet solution as the main platform to run their business. “We have decided to launch our SaaS ERP solution, H-ERP, on AWS for the benefit of our small and medium-sized businesses. By migrating to AWS, we have gained the advantage of advanced security services and improved operational reliability by leveraging an AWS Well-Architected design, automatic storage management, managed databases, and data analytics tools. In addition, the migration has enabled us to avoid the unnecessary expense of purchasing and maintaining servers to instead focus on the continuous development of a comprehensive, scalable SaaS solution for our customers,” said Prof. Assaf Avrahami, CEO of Hashavshevet. “We are excited about the opening of the AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region as it will provide customers who are required to keep their data inside the country with the ability to leverage our SaaS offering, which will be deployed in Israel on AWS.”
Rami Levy Group’s multiple businesses include more than 50 branches nationwide, an online store, and subsidiaries Rami-Levy Communication, Cofix, good pharm, and Rami Levy Customers’ Club. Locally, Rami-Levy is considered one of the most influential businesses for lowering the cost of living in Israel. Rami-Levy migrated its online shop to AWS during the pandemic, leveraging EC2 auto-scaling to automatically and seamlessly accommodate 100% growth of online orders and ensure availability across the country. “Rami Levy Group is focused on the customer,” said Ron Efraty, Chairman of the Board at Cofix and CEO of Rami Levy Communication. “Using AWS services enabled us to maintain the same great shopping experience for our customers, especially in times when people could not visit our physical stores. Following our successful transition to AWS, we are now looking into AWS machine learning services such as Amazon Personalise to aggregate multiple data sources from all our customers’ touchpoints to personalise their shopping experience. Protecting customer data is our top priority and one of the reasons we chose AWS. In addition, the planned opening of an AWS Region in Israel allows us to meet regulation for sensitive customer data.”
Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center – Ichilov Hospital is a teaching and research centre affiliated with the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University and one of Israel’s largest hospitals. The I-Medata Innovation Center uses AWS Control Tower to facilitate the fast, consistent, and secure creation of AWS accounts while protecting sensitive medical data. The centre also relies on Amazon SageMaker to enable its scientists to build, train, and deploy advanced machine learning models for early detection of deterioration in COVID-19 patients. Dr. Ahuva Weiss-Meilik, Head of I-Medata AI Center at Tel-Aviv Sourasky MedicalCenter, said, “AWS has changed the way we work at the research centre. We have the full protection of sensitive medical data while continuing to enable the productivity of researchers. Developing our application on AWS has increased the speed of our research and reduced the time required to add new research from months to just a few days. The new AWS Region in Israel will help us process data in the cloud in compliance with the highest levels of local regulatory requirements for the processing of private health information.”
“We congratulate AWS on their winning bid in the first tender of Project Nimbus, a multi-year flagship project led by the Israeli Government Procurement Administration to provide a comprehensive framework for the provision of cloud services to the Government of Israel,” said Yali Rothenberg, Accountant General of Israel.
Israel-based AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners also welcome the planned AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) region’s news. The APN includes tens of thousands of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) worldwide. AWS Partners build innovative solutions and services on AWS, and the APN helps by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. APN SIs, consulting partners, and ISVs working in Israel 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 Israel Partners include Alcide, AllCloud, AppsFlyer, Automat-IT, BigPanda, Bringg, Checkmarx, CloudBuzz, Matrix CloudZone, Comm-IT, Continuity Software, CloudRide, DoIT International, Guardicore, Kaltura, MidLink, Namogoo, Nice, Orca Security, Perimeter81, Quali, Radware, Sapiens, TeraSky, and Trax Retail.
Investing in Israel’s Future
The new AWS Israel (Tel Aviv) Region continues AWS’s commitment to Israel. As the number of customers in Israel has grown, so has the size of AWS’s presence in the country. In 2014, AWS opened its first office in Israel to service the local market, and in the same year, Amazon established a research and development (R&D) centre in the country. Since then, Amazon’s R&D presence in Israel has expanded and now includes Prime Air, Alexa Shopping, and Amazon Lab126. Amazon R&D efforts also include the development of AWS-designed compute, storage, networking, security, and machine learning hardware through Annapurna Labs, which Amazon acquired in 2015. Annapurna Labs develops innovative, high-performance, AWS-designed hardware, including AWS-designed Graviton2 Arm-based processors (which provide up to 40% better price-performance on general compute than current-generation x86 processors), AWS Inferentia (which offers the lowest cost machine learning inference in the cloud), AWS Trainium chips (which will provide the most powerful and lowest cost machine learning training in the cloud), and the AWS Nitro System (which removes networking, storage, and security functions off the main server to provide a better performance, security, and development speed).
Additional infrastructure investments in Israel include Amazon CloudFront edge locations. 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. In 2020, AWS also launched AWS Outposts and AWS Direct Connect in Israel. AWS Outposts is a fully managed service that offers the same AWS infrastructure, AWS services, APIs, and tools to virtually any data centre, co-location space, or on-premises facility for a truly consistent hybrid experience. AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from customers’ on-premises infrastructure to AWS infrastructure. Using AWS Direct Connect, customers can establish private connectivity between AWS and their data centre, office, or colocation environment, which can reduce their network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than internet-based connections.
For Israeli students and educators, the AWS Educate and AWS Academy programs are providing free resources to accelerate cloud-related learning and preparing today’s students in Israel for the jobs of the future. Israeli universities and business schools already participating in the AWS Educate program include Ben Gurion University of the Negev, IDC Interdisciplinary Center, MTA – The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Tel-Aviv University, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and University of Haifa. AWS also offers a full range of training and certification programs to help those interested in the latest cloud computing technologies, best practices, and architectures to advance their technical skills and further support Israeli organisations in their digital transformation.
To help grow the next generation of Israeli enterprises, AWS began supporting startups in Israel in 2013 through its AWS Activate program. This program gives startups access to guidance and one-on-one time with AWS experts as well as web-based training, self-paced labs, customer support, third-party offers, and up to $100,000 in AWS service credits – all at no charge. This is in addition to the work that AWS already does with the venture capital community, startup accelerators, and incubators to help startups grow in the cloud. In Israel, AWS works with accelerator organisations such as 8200 EISP, F2 Venture Capital – thejunction, and TechStars and venture capital firms like Aleph, Pitango, TLV Partners, and Viola Ventures to support the rapid growth of their portfolio companies.
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About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload. It now has more than 200 fully featured services for computing, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Israel, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.
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