TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Cloud software firm Salesforce ( CRM ) said on Tuesday its Hyperforce cloud platform was now available in Israel, which will allow sensitive government and companies' data to stay local.

The platform, two years in the making, will initially run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure and possibly later on Google Cloud Platform, company officials said.

Itai Margalit, head of sales at Salesforce ( CRM ) in Israel, said having a cloud platform would benefit government entities and those firms "that are regulated and need to comply with privacy laws ... and cannot go out of the boundaries of Israel."

The cloud platform in Israel is the 17th globally for Salesforce ( CRM ). Until now, data from its thousands of companies in Israel were storing data at its Frankfurt facility.

"The Israeli government approved our Frankfurt data center, for government use," Udi Shvekey, the lead architect for Hyperforce, said on the sidelines of a press conference in Tel Aviv.

Salesforce ( CRM ), which has three sites in Israel and 750 employees after acquiring a half dozen Israeli startups, said all its customers would be soon migrated to the local cloud platform.

Salesforce ( CRM ) has also been heavily investing in artificial intelligence (AI) for months and integrating the technology into the workflows of its large suite of products to drive revenue and margins.

Margalit said its Israel R&D center was one of the three strategic sites for Salesforce ( CRM ) along with the United States and India.

"Here we are doing a lot of development on the cutting edge technologies with AI," he said.