San Francisco, Jun 2 (IANS): Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of ecommerce giant Amazon, has announced the general availability of a new service that makes it easier and cost-effective for customers to add location functionality to their applications, without compromising on user privacy or data security.

Location data is vital for companies to support a range of use cases (asset tracking, route planning, and location-based marketing experiences) that rely on the explosion of connected devices in the world.

With 'Amazon Location Service', customers can embed location functionality in their applications using data from location-based service (LBS) providers Esri and HERE Technologies, AWS said in a statement on Tuesday.

""With built-in support for tracking and geofencing and a number of use cases that are as low as 1/10th the cost of the most common LBS providers, Amazon Location Service is pretty compelling for any company that wants to bring location functionality to their application using a fully managed AWS service," explained Bill Vass, VP of Technology, AWS.

The customers pay only for the number of user requests, assets tracked, or devices managed with the new AWS location service.

'Amazon Location Service' eliminates the complexity of adding location functionality to an application by providing a single, managed service that lets customers control what access providers have to a customer's confidential data.

'Amazon Location Service' comes fully integrated with Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and Amazon EventBridge, so customers can easily view monitoring, management, and log data, and can trigger actions based on events, the company said.