Salesforce.com Inc. has revealed plans to open a data center in France as part of an expansion plan that will see the launch of three European facilties by the end of 2015. The move comes as the growing number of enterprise workloads shifting to the public cloud forces CIOs to be more mindful of the legal dimension of information management, a complex topic that becomes much easier to address when everything is kept within an organization’s home jurisdiction.

The new location will enable French subscribers of Salesforce’s popular customer relationship management service do precisely that and cut their carbon footprint in the process, according to the company. The facility will rely exclusively on renewable  sources, a decision that marks one of the biggest milestones yet in the cloud titan’s 2013 pledge to transition its entire infrastructure operations to sustainable power.

Salesforce is trusting the details to Interxion Holding N.V., the winner of last year’s Green Enterprise IT Award for Facility Retrofit from the Uptime Institute. The Dutch company is also among the largest carrier-neutral colocation services in Europe. with more than 30 data centers across 11 countries. The new facility is set to come online sometime in 2015, after the expected launch of Salesforce’s U.K data center later this year before the software-as-a-service giant’s scheduled expansion to Germany.

The three data centers are Salesforce’s response to rapidly increasing demand from European customers, which constituted the fastest growing portion of its client base in 2013 with 38 percent more license purchases than the previous year, according to Salesforce. The push into France holds particular strategic significance for the firm, which recently established a local headquarters as part of a plan to increase investments in the country announced earlier this year.

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