Photo: SES

SES has been certified as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Direct Connect Partner, which the satellite operator said is an advantage to enterprises and government users working in remote locations. In order to receive this, AWS validated SES’s ability to connect its customers directly to AWS services over its network of multi-orbit satellites. 

SES announced its status on June 17, and said it is the first satellite operator to receive this certification. 

AWS Direct Connect allows customers to establish a dedicated network connection between their office, data center, or other facility and AWS at speeds from 50 Mbps up to 100 Gbps. SES will use its Cloud Direct service to connect its customers to AWS data centers over its network of Medium-Earth Orbit (MEO) and Geostationary (GEO) satellites. The Cloud Direct service will also be available on SES’s next-generation MEO constellation, O3b mPOWER.

“Achieving AWS Direct Connect Partner status is another milestone in our cloud-first strategy to provide customers with direct access to multiple cloud providers so they have flexibility to run workloads in different clouds based on region, function, use case or other business factors,” said JP Hemingway, CEO of SES Networks. “Our multi-orbit network provides a combination of global coverage and high-performance, low-latency connections that can get customers’ data into AWS from nearly anywhere.”