Google opens second cloud region in India to fuel digitisation

• The Delhi data centre becomes the tenth cloud region in Asia Pacific and 26th globally.
• AWS has one cloud region in Mumbai and another planned in Hyderabad in 2022.
• Oracle has two cloud regions in Mumbai and Hyderabad while Microsoft has three.
• Goggle has invested $30b (trailing Capex) in the past three years into the cloud business.

Google Cloud has opened its second cloud region in India in  Delhi to give a shot in the arm to digital transformation.

The cloud giant now has three zones in Mumbai and three zones in Delhi, thereby allowing customers to deploy applications that meet all the data residency requirements as well as allow organisations to have high availability and disaster recovery within India.

Delhi becomes the tenth cloud region in the Asia Pacific.

Global hyperscalers are expanding their footprint in India to ride on the digital transformation wave accelerated due to Covid.

Google competes with global giants such as Microsoft, AWS and Oracle in the data infrastructure space.

AWS has 25 cloud regions with 81 availability zones globally and has one cloud region in Mumbai with three availability zones, launched in 2016, and another region planned in Hyderabad by 2022.

Microsoft has three regions –Pune, Chennai, and Mumbai, launched in 2015.

Oracle launched its second cloud region in Hyderabad last year after its first such region was unveiled in Mumbai in 2019. Globally, Oracle has 30 cloud regions.

Google did not give the investment figures but said that they have already invested $30 billion (trailing Capex) in the past three years into the cloud business.

Google Cloud continues to drive sizable growth, with Google Cloud Platform remaining one of the fastest-growing businesses across Alphabet.

With this, Google now has 26 cloud regions globally, with 79 zones and 146 network edge locations.

New Google cloud regions soon

Google Cloud will continue expanding to the following regions soon – Doha (Qatar), Toronto (Canada), Melbourne (Australia), Paris (France), Milan (Italy), Santiago (Chile), Madrid (Spain) and Turin (Italy).

Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Alphabet, said that India’s digitisation will be at the centre of this effort.

“Before the pandemic, India has been undergoing a rapid digital transformation but Covid has now spread out those trends. Last year, we launched Google for India digitisation fund of Rs75,000 crore and our goal is to connect Indians with a lot of opportunities that the internet creates and empower more businesses through technology,” he said.

Last month, Google Cloud embarked on a new 5G partnership with Reliance Jio to offer faster internet.

New growth opportunities

“The Delhi data centre will help businesses of all sizes solve complex challenges while using reliable and secure cloud technology, even closer to home,” Pichai said.

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said that they have seen enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India and expects new growth opportunities coming from existing customers and new customers.

“India is one of our fastest-growing markets and the need for a second cloud region stems from the enormous growth in demand for capacity building, disaster recovery solutions, and low latency,” he said.

The Delhi data centre will offer Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.

 “As we emerge from the pandemic, we are turning our focus to helping Indian businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitisation and economic recovery “, said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India.

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