Google eyes public sector growth with 2nd India Cloud region

As digital transformation picks up speed amid the pandemic in India, Google on Thursday launched its second Cloud region in the country -- in Delhi-NCR and close to the government quarters -- to further serve businesses of all sizes especially the public sector.

The tech giant said that it has made the new Cloud region compliant with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in the country and has started the process to get it certified as well, like its first Cloud region in Mumbai that was launched in 2017.

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Internet creates and empower more businesses through technology and Google Cloud embarked on a new 5G partnership with Reliance Jio last month which aims to help people access a better, faster Internet.

"We are proud to launch our Delhi-NCR Cloud region. This is our second Cloud region in India. It will help businesses of all sizes solve complex challenges while using reliable and secure cloud technology even closer to home," Pichai said in his keynote during a virtual launch event.

"That includes companies such as HDFC Bank which is using Google Cloud for scale and operational resilience, and ShareChat (vernacular social media platform) which is harnessing Google Cloud to better serve their customers across 15 different Indian languages," Pichai informed.

Google Cloud in February achieved a full Cloud Service Provider (CSP) empanelment after completing an audit from the MeitY.

The empanelment has enabled the Indian public sector to deploy their workloads on Google Cloud, including government agencies at the Central and state level, and PSUs across sectors like power, transportation, oil & gas and public finance, etc.

According to Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, India is one of the most dynamic and entrepreneurial countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

"We have seen a sharp increase in online banking and digital payment adoption, rising to historic highs across the country. Google Cloud is firmly committed to supporting India's business and economic recovery, a central piece of this is providing cloud infrastructure and technologies to support the digitisation of organisations of all sizes, and at scale," Kurian emphasised.

The Delhi-NCR region is the second Google Cloud region in India and 10th in Asia Pacific.

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.

The current customer list of Google Cloud has an interesting mix of businesses of all sizes, like Dr Reddy's, Wipro, Reliance Jio, LIC, Dailyhunt, HCL, Glance, Vistara, ICICI Prudential, ShareChat, Hero and others.

Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, Google said.

"We've been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working", said Bikram Singh Bedi, Managing Director, Google Cloud India.

The Delhi-NCR region has joined the existing 25 Google Cloud regions connected via Google's high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users throughout the globe.

"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 cloud," said Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.

According to Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi, 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.

"Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised 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," he added.

Pichai said that he looks forward to seeing how the country's businesses and institutions will use the power of cloud to build the future of India and beyond.

"We see so much opportunity ahead. As the world reimagines how we live and work," he noted.