Amazon Web Services (AWS) has opened a series of data centers in Frankfurt, Germany following several tech giants and responding to increasing demand for data to be kept within a country’s borders.

AWS is following in the steps of fellow tech companies Oracle and VMware which have both opened facilities in the country within the last month, seemingly offering shelter from the prying eyes of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s GCHQ.

The AWS Frankfurt region supports Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and related services including Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing among a host of other services.

AWS said its customers can choose where their data is processed and stored and that its customers can further improve the fault tolerance of their applications using two infrastructure regions located exclusively in Europe.

AWS SVP Andy Jassy told Bloomberg that the company found its German customers are keen for their data to reside in-country.

“This allows current customers and maybe some prospective customers to move their workloads to AWS,” Jassy said.

AWS has one other European data center located in Dublin, Ireland. But does this move call into question the security of the facility?

Fellow giant Microsoft has been locked in an ongoing court battle with the US Government over customer emails held in its Dublin data center. Microsoft has publicly refused to comply with US government to seize customer emails in the Irish facility as it isn’t within US borders.

In a bid to secure local data, Microsoft Germany has said it is likely to offer a cloud platform hosted by a German partner.