When the founders of Shutl, a British courier service that makes deliveries in 90 minutes in busy London, decided to set up a business that ran exclusively on cloud computing, they needed to get creative.
Data privacy laws in Europe forbade the transfer of information about individuals outside the 27-country European Union. That had prevented many companies on the Continent from moving to the cloud, where data may be stored on remote servers in Asia, the United States or elsewhere at a lower cost than what a company would pay for its own servers.
Yet despite the tricky legal landscape, Shutl, now a two-year-old start-up, has become one of Europe’s most avid users of cloud technology. The company carries out more than 1,000 deliveries a day over a cloud network operated by Amazon, the U.S. Web retailer.
Amazon.com, one of the world’s largest sellers of cloud services, helped clinch deals with Shutl and other European businesses, like the French railroad company S.N.C.F. and Bankinter, a Spanish bank, by effectively moving the cloud to Europe by setting up a data center in Dublin. Tom Allason, the Shutl founder and chief executive, said that the company planned to expand from London to all of Britain and Ireland. “Cloud computing helped make Shutl possible,” he said.
