Google Responds To Cloud Competition With Australia GCP Data Centres

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has opened a new data centre region in Sydney, Australia as it continues to expand and keep pace with the likes of Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The Sydney base is Google’s first GCP region in Australia and the fourth in Asia Pacific, joining Taiwan, Tokyo and Singapore, which was opened earlier in June.

As well as giving GCP a local presence in Australia, it will also enable local businesses to reap the benefits of storing data and running applications close to home, as well as meeting regional data compliance standards.

Cloud growth

Google says Australia and New Zealand-based GCP customers will see latency reductions of around 80-95 percent when running applications in Sydney, compared to using other regions such as Singapore or Taiwan.

This means businesses in all of the major Australasian cities will be able to move faster and better serve their customers.

“Google Cloud customers benefit from our commitment to large-scale infrastructure investments,” writes GCP product manager Dave Stiver. “With the addition of each new region, developers have more choice on how to run applications closest to their customers.

“Google’s networking backbone, meanwhile, transforms compute and storage infrastructure into a global-scale computer, giving developers around the world access to the same cloud infrastructure that Google engineers use every day.”

GCP has introduced several new features since the turn of the year, including a key management service to increase encryption and a cloud container builder which comes with 120 free build-minutes per day.

The platform has also announced some high-profile partners recently in the form of Rackspace for managed services support and SAP for applications and database services.

In Europe, Google has promised that it will be ready for the changes set to be brought in by Global Data Protection Regulations in May 2018 and is looking to expand its cloud footprint across the continent.

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