Google Upgrades Cloud Platform To Deliver Faster, More Secure Services

Google has taken several incremental steps to boost the responsiveness and security of its enterprise cloud services offering.

On Monday, the company said it has added load-balancing technology in a dozen new cities in the U.S and Europe, to help reduce network latency for customers close to those areas.

Google’s new points of presence for its cloud services include Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Paris and Stockholm. The locations bring to 70 the total number of sites spread over 33 countries that Google is using to deliver cloud services in to enterprise customers.

The expansion gives Google a way to distribute Google Cloud Platform workloads closer to the locations from where users are actually accessing it, Google’s cloud networking product management lead Morgan Dollard said in a blog post.

Bigger and better

With the expansion, “[enterprise workloads] running on Google Cloud Platform are closer in proximity to your users who are making service requests from all over the globe,” Dollard said. Distributing workloads in such fashion allows Google to reduce the time it needs to deliver cloud application services to customers regardless of where they are located.

Google has also expanded its portfolio of so-called Carrier Interconnect service providers in a bid to give cloud customers more options for securely linking their networks with Google’s infrastructure.

Organizations that need to constantly pull or push data between Google’s cloud storage and their own data centers or those that require fast request-response cycles can use these Carrier Interconnect providers to establish a secure connection between their network infrastructures and Google.

With Monday’s announcement, Google has added 11 new such providers including CloudStar, Megaport, EU Networks and InterCloud.

Google also announced a beta version of a Google Compute Engine virtual private network service that lets organizations integrate their network with their data in the Google Cloud via an IPsec encrypted connection.

“Alternatively, you can use it to connect two different Google Comp Engine VPN gateways,” Dollard wrote in his blog. The new service supports site-to-site VPN and allows enterprises to have multiple encrypted tunnels to a single VPN gateway.

Static routes that allow enterprises to manage traffic between Compute Engine virtual machines and their infrastructure are also supported by the new beta VPN service.

The service enhancements help Google meet two important technology goals, according to Dollard wrote. The first is to better leverage Google’s global network footprint to deliver faster, more responsive service for cloud customers.

“The second goal relates to enabling enterprises to run mission-critical workloads by connecting their on-premises infrastructure to Google’s network with enterprise-grade encryption,” he wrote.

Google has made multiple technology and service updates in recent months to boost the enterprise capabilities of its cloud service offerings. Still, the company ranks well behind Amazon, and to a lesser extent behind Microsoft, in cloud service market share, partly as a result of what analysts believe is a lack of differentiation from other providers.

Analysts note that Google has tended to rely largely on its ability to cut prices and deliver low-cost services as it tries to grow market share.

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Originally published on eWeek.