Google confirmed that it will be opening 12 new data centres as part of an effort to boost its market share in cloud services.
According to Google, the company will open data centers in Oregon and Japan in the coming months and that 10 other centres will be opened between 12 and 18 months from now, – by either building or leasing them.
The expansion will boost the speed of Google’s Cloud Platform services in certain regions.
Varun Sakalkar, Product Manager, said:
“As always, each region has multiple availability zones, so that we can offer high-availability computing to our customers in each locale.
“These are the first two of more than 10 additional GCP regions we’ll be adding to our network through 2017. This follows the opening last year of a US east coast region in South Carolina for all major GCP services.
“We’re opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness. With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform, and get the benefits of Google-level scale and industry leading price/performance.”
Cloud computing is a $20 billion-a-year – expected to grow 35 percent over the next year. Google is currently third in the sector, behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
In addition to the new data centres, Google is reportedly developing ‘tools that can broaden its corporate user base to include less technically savvy customers’.
Google’s new cloud chief Diane Greene told employees at a sales meeting last month that the company needs to sell harder and be less complacent.