London has been named as GCP’s latest region, with customers able to run applications and store data in the UK capital from today.
The London region joins Google’s existing European region in Belgium, with plans already in motion to open further regions in Frankfurt, the Netherlands and Finland.
The new region could prove invaluable to customers in the UK and Western Europe if Google’s recent performance testing is anything to go by; cities such as London, Dublin, Edinburgh and Amsterdam could potentially see 40%-80% reductions in round-trip time latency when serving customers from London compared with the Belgium region.
Customer choice has been put at the centre of the London region, with customers able to choose to run applications and store data in a specific region, in multiple regions or globally.
Going for the multi-regional option, customers can distribute applications and storage across two or more cloud regions on a given continent – be it Europe, Asia or the Americas.
Opting for global will enable customers to distribute applications and store data globally across GCP’s entire global network, offering optimal performance and redundancy.
Alternatively, customers can just stick to one region, such as London.
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The new region has been opened in response to increased demand for GCP services, with the platform boasting more than a billion end users and handling upwards of 100 billion app engine requests per day. G Suite for Google Cloud has an impressive three million paying businesses, while 70 million teachers and students leverage the toolset for work and studies.
However, efforts to aggressively expand GCP regions has not been without it’s barriers, none more so in Europe than with the impending GDPR, slated for May 25, 2018. Alongside the launch of the new London region, the tech giant also announced a commitment to GDPR compliance across GCP.
Although the opening of the London region will bring customers latency gains and more choice for data and applications, the new region is also indicative of Google’s ongoing commitment to London and the UK – all the more important in the wake of Brexit.
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“Google’s decision to choose London for its latest Google Cloud Region is another vote of confidence in our world-leading digital economy and proof Britain is open for business,” said Karen Bradley, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
“It’s great, but not surprising, to hear they’ve picked the UK because of the huge demand for this type of service from the nation’s firms. Earlier this week the Digital Evolution Index named us among the most innovative digital countries in the world and there has been a record £5.6bn investment in tech in London in the past six months.”
