Bringing Your Data Home: Why Cloud Giants Are Building UK Data Centres
IN DEPTH: Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are all investing in UK data centres. Why? And who are the other players?
Google has long had a strong presence in England, which was strengthened towards the end of 2016 when the UK became one of eight new cloud regions following a re-branding of its cloud portfolio to the ‘Google Cloud’ umbrella.
In a further boost for British companies, the European Union’s data protection authorities recently confirmed that Google’s cloud platform meets the requirements for the transfer of data from the EU to the rest of the world.
Google described the news as an “important milestone” for the company and its customers as it will “help to facilitate our customers’ data protection risk assessments”.
Brexit also doesn’t seem to have impacted Google’s commitment to the UK, as it will continue with plans to invest £1 billion in a new Kings Cross headquarters and to create 3,000 jobs by 2020.
Oracle
It might not get as much attention as the other four, but Oracle is also working hard to make waves in the world of cloud, despite coming comparatively late to the infrastructure market.
The company announced a deluge of new cloud services and updates at Oracle OpenWorld 2016, prompting executive chairman and CTO Larry Ellison to boldly declare “Amazon’s lead is over” and that it will face “serious competition going forward”.
At the beginning of this year Oracle announced it is expanding its cloud reach across Europe and the US and named London as one of three new infrastructure Regions to be created over the next six months, with three data centres in London expected to come online by mid-2017.
Alongside this it has also expanded its Cloud Accelerator Programme into Bristol in an effort to effort to unearth new innovations in cloud technology through the mentoring or emerging startups.
Data centre developments
Looking across the industry in general, the UK is booming. For example, London is one of four major European data centre markets currently seeing “unprecedented” colocation activity, recording 49 Megawatts (MW) of take-up in 2016 and smashing its previous high of 29MW in 2010.
Further examples include UKFast investing in a £2.3 million upgrade to its Manchester data centre complex in an effort to curb London’s dominance and Equinix’s recent acquisition of IO UK’s data centre operating business in Slough.
In addition, Newcastle can now lay claim to hosting the UK’s largest purpose built data centre after operator Stellium decided to bring more server-based services to the North.
So it’s not just London calling on the data centre front but one thing’s for sure; to paraphrase Baddiel and Skinner, data is well and truly coming home.
