Because of the European economic crisis, Allianz Global Investors of America, the US investment-management arm of Munich-based multinational Allianz, has reduced its data center expansion plans from adding four new data centers in Europe and Asia to only one.

The company’s CIO Daniel Stroot told the Wall Street Journal that the company had initially planned to establish two data centers in Europe and two in Asia in addition to the two it currently has in the US. “The crisis in Europe has continued to force us to look at being more efficient,” the Journal qoted him as saying. “Now we’re thinking maybe we only need three [data centers] globally.”

The current plan is to establish one new data center in Frankfurt. It will serve as a failover for Allianz’s existing infrastructure inside a module at IO’s Phoenix data center.

In addition to Phoenix, Allianz is leasing space and buying power at IO’s recently completed Edison, New Jersey, data center. The facility is a converted former New York Times printing plant.

Both IO facilities house the investment-management firm’s private-cloud infrastructure, which it plans to extend to Frankfurt once the new data center is built out.

The current infrastructure at two IO facilities is a result of a recent consolidation, where Allianz switched to public cloud for some applications and shut down five data centers it had previously operated.

Public cloud enabled Allianz to move time-sensitive applications – orders and fulfillment – out of its own data centers, Stroot said. The company no longer needs to build its own data centers in locations chosen because of proximity to customers.