Tableau Launches First European Data Center for Location-Conscious

Tableau Software, based in Seattle, has launched a data center in Dublin, Ireland, its first in Europe, in response to growing interest from customers in choosing physical location of their data.

The annulment of Safe Harbor laws by the European Court of Justice last year has created a lot of uncertainty about legality of hosting European citizens’ data in data centers located overseas, and hosting their data within Europe’s borders is one sure-fire way to ensure compliance.

“With the opening of our European data center, we are responding to a desire from customers to choose where they host their data,” James Eiloart, Tableau’s VP of operations in Europe, said in a statement. “From data solutions and deployment options to data discovery paths, we are now enabling customers to choose where they want their cloud analytics data stored.”

Existing customers can move data to the Dublin data center, and new ones can select it as the location for their files from the get-go.

Read more: Safe Harbor Ruling Leaves Data Center Operators in Ambiguity

Tableau did not specify which data center in Dublin it is using or whether it is leasing data center capacity (the more likely scenario) or operating its own facility.

The company, whose software offers companies advanced analytics capabilities to generate business intelligence, currently has more than 35,000 customers in more than 150 countries, it said. About 3,000 of them use its software as a cloud service, and half of those users are not in the US.