Amazon Web Services (AWS) is expanding its localized cloud infrastructure deployment footprint into India and Taiwan to provide its customers in financial services and health care more optionality around data storage and processing.

AWS local zone deployments draw the provider's services closer to a certain geography. According to AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, applications hosted in the cloud provider's local zones see single-digit millisecond latency access to AWS services.

"Local Zones also give AWS customers additional choices regarding data residency, giving them the ability to store and process sensitive data (often financial or personal in nature) in-country," Barr said.

The cloud provider noted potential high value use cases including online gaming, hybrid cloud migrations, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), video streaming, and machine learning inferences at edge locations.

The new local zones in Delhi, India, and Taipei, Taiwan, will also serve digital health care and fintech industries in major ways, Barr noted.

Health care software company AdvaHealth Solutions supports medical imaging applications for areas like radiology, oncology, and ophthalmology through its cloud-native image archive. Barr explained that the local zone expansion into Delhi and Taipei is crucial to AdvaHealth's work because of the promise of low latency, which will improve the point-of-care experience for patients and health care providers in Asia.

Financial infrastructure provider M2P Fintech and its API infrastructure platform focused on banking, lending, and payments supports more than 600 other fintechs, 100 banks, and 100 financial institutions in APAC and MENA with their own branded products like ride-sharing, food delivery, and credit cards. Local zones remove M2P's burden of needing to set up its own data centers while meeting local data processing and storage requirements, Barr said.

Another financial use case he mentioned is the primary credit card issuer in Argentina, NaranjaX, which is undergoing a digital transformation in the hopes of offering better financial solutions to commercial customers. The financial services company expects that using AWS local zones will give its commercial customers a strategic advantage.

Since launching in 2019, AWS added 15 new regions and is now working to follow through with its 33-zone expansion plan. The cloud provider's current local zones include 16 U.S. metro areas including Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, and New York City.