In a bid to extend its service offerings to customers in India and the Asia-Pacific region, Google Cloud on Thursday announced that Delhi-NCR will soon become the second cloud region setup in the country. While the announcement has been made, it is not clear as of yet, how much Google has invested in the same.
Delhi-NCR follows in the footsteps of Mumbai, which became the first Google cloud region in India back in 2017. It is equipped with three separate “availability zones”, something which has also been included in the new setup in the North Indian region, which becomes the company’s 10th such endeavor in the Asia-Pacific, and its 26th globally.
If you’re wondering what a cloud region is, it basically refers to an aggregation of public cloud resources in a physical geographical location. The firm says that the new facility will allow users in the country to avail the benefits of low latency and high performance, while dealing with their cloud-based data and workload. What lies underneath the apparent “customer focus” however, happen to be Google’s efforts at competing with rivals and fellow tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, who are also taking similar measures in the country.
The launch was announced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai himself, who claimed that Google Cloud was indispensable to a number of firms by providing them with “reliable technology” to solve “complex problems.”
He added, “That includes companies such as HDFC Bank, who’re using Google Cloud for scale and operational resilience, and ShareChat, which is harnessing Google Cloud to better serve their customers across 15 different Indian languages. We see so much opportunity ahead as the world reimagines how we live and work.”
Google Cloud has dealings in a number of industries, from retail, healthcare and life sciences, CPG, financial services, gaming, media and entertainment, communication service providers, manufacturing and industrial, supply chain and logistics, and even the public sector.
Thomas Kurian, the CEO at Google Cloud, too, was full of optimism about the future of the service in India, including better “business continuity planning” for its long list of customers, as well as better IT infrastructure. He also said, “Google Cloud is firmly committed to supporting India’s business and economic recovery. A central piece of this is providing cloud infrastructure and technologies to support the digitisation of organizations of all sizes and at scale…A second region in India brings significant benefits to our customers,” while adding that the Indian market is one of the fastest growing. He believes that the new cloud region will provide for quicker and easier leveraging of the on-demand network at Google Cloud, with less expenses and more reliability.
Disaster recovery options are also available, while at the same time, users have the option of more easily storing their data locally.
Meanwhile Managing Director at Google Cloud Indian, Bikram Singh Bedi said that a number of government departments, public sector banks, and state enterprises have also become their clients. He added, “It’s an engagement that we’ve recently started but we are seeing very strong traction… one of the reasons for setting up a second region in the NCR-region, was the fact that it’s much more accessible to public sector workloads and better latencies for the public sector.”
