Google opens its second cloud region in India

Google Cloud has opened a new cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), its second in India after the launch of its Mumbai region in 2017.

The company said the new region would better support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia pacific.

"We have seen enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India so expanding our footprint in a new cloud region gives us the ability to offer more capacity for growth over many years," Thomas Kurian, CEO at Google Cloud, said at a news conference this week, as reported by Reuters. "It's a large commitment from us in capital and infrastructure investment and it's designed to allow us to capture the opportunity that we see around growth."

Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director of Google Cloud India, said in a blog post that the region will open with three “availability zones” to protect against service disruptions.

“With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data,” added Bedi.

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via a high-performance network throughout the globe.

The other Google Cloud region in India is located in Mumbai, around 883 miles towards the south-west of Delhi, which the tech giant opened in 2017. At the time of its launch, the company claimed that hosting applications in the new region could improve latency from 20-90% for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the closest region, Singapore.

Last month, Google Cloud revealed it was partnering with Reliance Jio to provide 5G technology for enterprise customers and consumers across India. This would involve the creation of a complete end-to-end cloud offering for a fully automated lifecycle of Jio’s 5G network and services.

Furthermore, Google and Jio also announced they were jointly developing a new smartphone, the JioPhone Next, which will launch on 10 September 2021. This will use a bespoke version of Android and will have access to the Play Store.