Box is releasing three new Box Zones — Switzerland, Singapore, and Israel — expanding the Box Zones footprint to ten regions worldwide. This release also extends in-region compute operations for France and Canada, so that core processing activities such as uploads, downloads, encryptions, previews, and representations execute inside the customer’s chosen Zone.[1]
Before this release, Box Zones helped enterprises in these geographies address residency requirements in neighbouring regions, but did not store and process content locally in Switzerland, Singapore, or Israel. With the addition of these three Zones, Box Zones now helps enable these organisations to meet country-specific data residency obligations while continuing to collaborate globally on a single Box deployment — without setting up separate Box instances.
This release includes:
- Three new Zones — Switzerland, Singapore, and Israel join the existing seven Box Zones, bringing the total available regions to ten.
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In-region compute for France and Canada
- In-region upload and download — file bytes stream directly between the client and Zone-specific endpoints; uploads and downloads bypass other Zones.
- In-region encryption — files are encrypted and decrypted entirely inside the chosen Zone; encryption keys are managed in-Zone, without leaving the customer’s region.
- In-region representations, conversion and zipping — previews, thumbnails, file compression and the majority of format conversions [2] are produced and stored in the Zone where the source file lives.
- Automatic content migration — when an administrator assigns a user to a new Zone, Box migrates that user’s owned content in the background without disrupting access.
Administrators can assign users to the new Zones through the Admin Console, Multizones SSO, or the Storage Policy Assignments API. Content continues to follow the file owner: if a user creates a file inside another person’s folder, that file lives in the folder owner’s Zone, not the creator’s.
End users see no change in how they work with Box. The web application, desktop, mobile apps, Box Drive, and collaboration features behave exactly as before; residency is handled entirely behind the scenes.
Box Zones is available as an add-on for Enterprise Plus and Enterprise Advanced. To add Switzerland, Singapore, Israel, or any other Zone to your deployment, contact your Box account team.
To learn more about assigning Zones, see Assigning Zones through the Admin Console and Using Multizones SSO.
[1] Other processing activities currently occur in the U.S.
[2] All conversions are in-Zone except Sharepoint, InDesign and AutoCAD.