Google Cloud boosts India presence, launches 2nd Cloud region in Delhi NCR

Google Cloud India announced the launch of its new cloud region in Delhi NCR to further serve customers and the public sector in India and across Asia-Pacific. Designed to enable both Indian and global companies alike to build highly accessible applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is the second Google Cloud region in India and 10th in the Asia Pacific.

“Our commitment to India is for India, by India,” said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. “Because of this, we are not only seeing success in America, Europe but also Asia-pacific and we are seeing growth in the number of leading companies around the world,” he said.

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. These include Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.

“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 digitisation and economic recovery,” said Bikram Singh Bedi, managing director, Google Cloud India. “We’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world.”

Kurian said Google Cloud has significantly expanded the team in India. “Bikram (Bedi) and his team look at the market and the customer services, but we've also significantly expanded our engineering in Bengaluru and Hyderabad and development centers,” said Kurian.

Analysts said the move is part of Google’s strategy for ramping up its capabilities and competing with global rivals, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Alibaba, to dominate cloud computing services.

Moreover, the Delhi NCR region unblocks revenue for multi-region and disaster recovery use cases for customers. It creates a differentiated value proposition for companies in regulated industries with far disaster recovery solutions. Customers will have the ability to establish private connections via Interconnect to utilize the Delhi NCR region with existing partners.

“The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working”, said Bedi.

Delhi NCR region has joined the existing 25 Google Cloud regions connected via Google’s high-performance network. It would help customers better serve their users throughout the globe. Google said they will benefit from improved business continuity planning with the distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery while maintaining data sovereignty.

HDFC Bank is harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As it progresses to be future-ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that can give it scale, efficiency, and resiliency.

“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, CIO, HDFC Bank.

Google said the Cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change.

Mohit Saxena, co-founder and Group CTO of mobile advertising network InMobi, said that with the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR region, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products.  Its company Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalized content to over 120 million active users.

“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 Saxena.

Neeraj Singh, co-founder, and chief technology officer at investment platform Groww, said, the Google Cloud provides great technology that enables the firm to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users. “The new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products, and services,” said Singh.

Kurian of Google Cloud said when organisations move data to the cloud, they need the best cybersecurity tools to protect their data, applications, and users.

“We offer a broad range of cybersecurity protection,” said Kurian. “There are two important things in what we are doing - we protect users' applications and data in the Google Cloud. So we have tools like encryption, confidential computing, network security etc.”

Google has a lot of experience in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The firm has made specific solutions for particular industries. These include customers such as Indiamart,  Dr. Reddy's laboratory and financial services firm Max life is a customer. They are using machine learning to improve the transformation of an organization's processes and make them more efficient.

Google Cloud has also worked with vehicle maker TVS, which has built a digital ecosystem for several different automotive retailers and garages. These tools help them provide better knowledge and understanding as well as analytics and intelligence to all the people in their digital ecosystem.  The firm is also helping organizations to collaborate on documents and drives and put them in a unified platform called Google Workspace.

“It is not just designed for office workers but also first-line workers. Many hospitals use this technology to deliver better patient care,” said Kurian.

Kurian said the Google Cloud is investing in education, training and bringing its innovative culture as Google to India.

“We are super encouraged with the entrepreneurship and creativity despite the last year being so challenging for everybody, we've seen the resilience of India,” said Kurian. “It is a great privilege for us to support larger organizations, government agencies but also, the person who is starting a company in India, hoping that they can use the same technology that powers Google's products.”