Google Cloud adds 2nd cloud region in country

The need for a second cloud region in India stems from the enormous growth in demand for capacity building, disaster recovery solutions and low latency, Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer, Google Cloud, told reporters. “India is one of our fastest-growing markets.”

The Delhi-NCR region has joined the existing 25 Google Cloud regions across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific connected via Google’s network.

As the second cloud region, customers are expected to benefit from improved business continuity planning, while maintaining data sovereignty.

Global cloud computing companies are increasingly expanding their footprint in India to ride on the digital transformation wave accelerated due to the pandemic. Last year, Amazon Web Services said it will invest $2.77 billion to set up a second cloud infrastructure region in Hyderabad by mid-2022 to serve its growing customer base in the country.

“With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner and BigQuery,” Google Cloud said in a statement.

The Delhi-NCR cloud region is aimed at helping companies in regulated industries that have high requirements for disaster recovery solutions.

“Customers will have the ability to establish private connections via interconnect to utilize the Delhi-NCR region with existing partners,” the company said.

“As we slowly emerge from the crisis of the past 18 months, we are turning our focus to helping Indian businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery…The Google Cloud region in Delhi-NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India.

HDFC Bank, a customer of Google Cloud, said it is investing in technology platforms to both run and build the bank.

“Towards this, the Google Cloud region in Delhi-NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new-generation applications on the cloud,” said Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, chief information officer, HDFC Bank.

Similarly, mobile advertising company InMobi Group said that with the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi-NCR region, it sees an opportunity to continue closing the gap between users and products.

“We can’t wait to continue giving our users truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well and are relevant to them by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region,” said Mohit Saxena, co-founder, InMobi.