The Melbourne region marks the second Google Cloud region in Australia and the 11th in Asia Pacific. It comes after Google Cloud first arrived in Sydney in 2017. Since then, Google Cloud has delivered a total of AU$3.2 billion in annual gross benefits to business and consumers in Australia, the company said citing research by AlphaBeta. The company added that Google Cloud enables Australian businesses to benefit from reduced processing time and IT infrastructure costs, which is equivalent to a total benefit of AU$275 million annually. Across the Melbourne location’s three zones, Google Cloud users will have access to Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. “The trend we’re seeing over the last 18 months or two years is digital transformation started accelerating for our customers last year and it continues to this year … and we’re helping to build a strong and better digital future for Australians and that’s what we’re working to do,” Google Cloud Australia customer engineering director Matt Zwolenski said. Zwolenksi adding setting up this second region in Australia would assist customers with disaster recovery and business continuity. “Up until this point, many organisations have built computer facilities within one city. They may build them across one side of Melbourne to the other or one side of Sydney to the other, and that was really built by policies that was set 20 to 30 years ago … today, we see the increase in global warming and the risk of fire, floods, and other threats to cities,” he said. “We’ve now overwhelmingly heard this idea that we need to span regions, so Sydney to Melbourne, to run our most critical applications services. If something was to happen in Sydney, we could run IT services in Melbourne, or if something happens in Melbourne, we could run it in Sydney.” Local customers already making use of the new cloud region include Australia Post, Bendigo and Adelaide Bank, and Optus. In addition, the search engine giant added come August, a point of presence will be launched in Auckland, New Zealand. This will build on existing points of presence in Canberra, Brisbane, and Perth that were launched earlier this year. “What that means is if you’re a customer say in Perth, you don’t need to run a cable across from Perth to Sydney or to Melbourne to connect to cloud regions; you can simply connect into our Perth point of presence,” Zwolenksi said. On whether there are plans for Google Cloud to launch a cloud region in New Zealand, Zwolenksi told ZDNet that with regions available in Sydney and Melbourne, “they have not found the need to do anything more than what we’re delivering”.  Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions globally. Last year, the company had signalled plans it would launch a new cloud region in Melbourne, as well as in Delhi, India; Doha, Qatar; and Toronto, Canada. Its Delhi cloud region launched earlier this month. Like its Melbourne one, the Delhi region is the second cloud region in India and has three availability zones and offers a service portfolio that includes Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, and Cloud Spanner. 

Google Cloud introduces designated Enterprise APIsGoogle Cloud unveils Datashare for financial servicesGoogle Cloud lands Univision digital transformation pactGoogle migrates from Oracle financial software to SAP