Tableau has opened its first European datacentre in Dublin, as data protection becomes a growing concern for customers.
The data visualisation firm said it has created the site in response to EU customers’ increased focus on data security, which is driving them to store their data closer to home.
It comes after the Safe Harbour agreement between the EU and US, which guaranteed EU citizens’ data identical privacy rights when transferred abroad, was ruled invalid last year.
James Eiloart, VP of Tableau’s European operations, said: “With the opening of our European datacentre, we are responding to a desire from customers to choose where they host their data.”
He told Cloud Pro: “Data protection and security are extremely important to our customers and to Tableau. We are committed to helping our customers around the world see and understand their data and as such, we want to think globally to offer more choice for our customers about where they wish to store their data.”
The Safe Harbour agreement is currently being reworked and it could be approved in a new shape by 31 January, but doubts over the future of the agreement has led companies such as Box to find ways to host customer data outside of the US.
The new site is Tableau’s third datacentre, alongside two in America, and the co-located facility will support users of its cloud analytics tool, Tableau Online, which currently has 3,000 customers.
While 50 per cent of these users are outside the US, any new or existing user can choose to store their data in the Dublin site, and can select their data location as North America or Europe when setting up their Tableau Online account.
The site is ISO27001-certified and is twinned with a disaster recovery location in Munich, where data protection requirements are strict.
Tableau toured nine other sites before picking Dublin, which offers a low corporation tax rate of 12.5 per cent, and which already hosts a Tableau office.
Eiloart told Cloud Pro: “Ireland has a long history of a business friendly climate and has a thriving tech scene. We recently opened an office in Dublin and are thrilled to now open our very first European data centre there.
“We have technical team members in Dublin already, so it made a lot of sense to put the primary pod there.”
07/07/2015: Tableau to open EU datacentre by end of 2015
Tableau is to open its first European datacentre this year to support adoption of its cloud analytics tool, Tableau Online.
The data visualisation firm plans to open a new site by the end of 2015, but has not yet decided which country will host the facility, Cloud Pro understands, with the company currently weighing up several possible locations that it has not disclosed.
Its new site would support users of the cloud tool, among 5,000 customers using Tableau software across EMEA, with the UK representing its second-highest number of customer accounts in region, the company said.
The facility would also support the company's global expansion plans as it tries to push more customers towards the cloud.
The announcement coincides with news of the forthcoming Tableau 9.1, the latest version of Tableau's software, also set for an autumn release, that will let users connect to data whether it's on-premise or in the cloud.
One customer, NHS Scotland, rolled out Tableau to 200 users in April this year, with the potential to have 8,000 users in total, and picked the on-premise software over Tableau Online because of information governance concerns.
Michael Muirhead, information programme manager at NHS Scotland's Information Services Division, told Cloud Pro: “At one point we thought the cloud was going to be really good because it's cheap and it has mass processing power. But we fell foul of our information governance. Ultimately there wasn't enough confidence security could be guaranteed.”
But his colleague, Jamie Gray, added that the healthcare body would be encouraged by the option of a datacentre that keeps information outside the US.
“They [have to] satisfy some other agreements, so not only having a European datacentre but the way the messages are passed,” he said. “It doesn't go via America even on the network. [That] would make it easier for us as a public organisation to think about moving to the cloud.”
His comments come at a time when data location remains a hot issue among cloud users following NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations of US spying, according to the co-founder of collaboration firm Huddle.
Speaking to Cloud Pro yesterday, Alastair Mitchell said: “In Europe particularly, they really care about where their data’s stored. It’s an absolutely huge concern.”
Huddle stores European users' data on Rackspace servers based in the UK, and it appears Tableau is following suit by introducing its own European facility.
The datacentre would be Tableau's first in the EU, and its third site overall, with two other datacentres in use, at least one of which supports its SaaS infrastructure, providing controls and safeguards over customer data through being SAS-70 compliant.
The visualisation firm also uses Internap's colocation services, after experiencing redundancy problems and redundancy and growth limitations with its two existing facilities.
“[They] were prone to power and cooling outages, and these intermittent infrastructure failures resulted in downtime for developers,” wrote Internap. “The instability of the infrastructure also restricted the company’s ability to grow and increase capacity as business expanded.”
Tableau now uses 29 racks in Internap's Seattle datacentre, and plans to have 58 racks in use by the end of 2015, the colocation provider claimed.
