PagerDuty expands European datacentre presence with help from AWS

PagerDuty is drawing on its longstanding technology partnership with public cloud giant Amazon Web Services (AWS) to give European users access to a locally hosted version of its digital operations management software.

The company claims its software is used by 60% of the Fortune 100 to enable their IT operations teams to detect and manage their response to IT outages or to prevent downtime incidents occurring in the first place.

Currently, its digital operations management software platform is hosted in several US-based AWS datacentre regions, but the company has now outlined plans to expand its server farm footprint, with Amazon’s help, to Europe as well.

“European customers using PagerDuty’s European data hosting will be able to achieve the same high levels of reliability they have come to expect of PagerDuty’s leading enterprise-class platform and reduce any potential data latency issues,” the company said in a statement.

Steve Barrett, vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at PagerDuty, told Computer Weekly the firm’s new European hosting option will be made available to customers in the second half of 2021.

“We are not in a position to share exact hosting locations, but we can confirm our primary and failover facilities are in different parts of the AWS European region,” he said.

In terms of how the move will benefit customers, Barrett added: “It will help customers for whom data location is an important consideration – including those in highly regulated sectors.

“They will benefit from increased choice, the same high levels of resilience they have come to expect of all PagerDuty services – as well as the potential for lower latency – all of which are critical for always-on organisations needing to predict, identity and resolve issues in real time.”

Sean Scott, chief product officer at PagerDuty, said the opening of its European region should be interpreted as a show of its commitment to addressing its customers’ data protection concerns.

“We take data protection very seriously and work with all our customers in the EU and throughout the world to address their needs and concerns while also complying with local policy such as the GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation],” said Scott.

“PagerDuty has set the bar consistently high when it comes to service reliability, redundancy and availability with service-level agreements, no maintenance windows and three nines availability. This will be no different for EU users who can continue to deliver their customers a perfect experience every time.” 

Roy Illsley, chief analyst for cloud and datacentre at IT market watcher Omdia, said enterprises are placing increased importance on being able to access resilient, locally hosted cloud services.

“PagerDuty’s European datacentre expansion plan will enable it to meet these needs and deliver a better customer experience,” he said.

“Omdia has seen an increase in demand for cloud-based services as organisations recognise that to meet the new velocity of business change, its technology must be both agile and flexible.”