After a 100 percent growth of paid customers in the region in from 2016 to 2017, Google Cloud Platform launched regional center in Singapore. Called “asia-southeast1”, this is the first Cloud Platform region in Southeast Asia.
According to the search giant, this initiative means improved latency speeds for developers in Southeast Asia. In fact, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers in Singapore, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok have seen 51 to 98 percent reductions in round-trip time latency, in comparison to its services delivered from Taiwan or Tokyo. The improved issuance speed across the region is thanks to the opening of Singapore's Google Cloud Platform, as previously the closes Google cloud center was in Taiwan.
Thanks to the Google Platform regional center in Singapore, customers in the region have access to Google's core services, such as Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, App Engine Standard Environment, Container Engine, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud DNS, Cloud VPN, Cloud Router, and Cloud IAM products.
GCP customers are also able to combine any of these services deployed in Singapore with other GCP services around the world such as DLP, Spanner and BigQuery.
This initiative is also aimed at getting more startups in Southeast Asia on board. “With startups, we always find that the demand comes from their developers - there's no big procurement department or what have you,” said Tariq M. Shaukat, Google Cloud president for customers. This explains why the company offers such a strong tech support to its customers: to educated them about the service and help them tailor it to their needs.
Shaukat said the company aims at increasing the scale of such collaboration: “We find that startups value the ability to sit down with a solution architect and just map out what they want to do - they value it as much as, if not more than, more traditional companies because in many cases they're trying to do things that are harder, more innovative, different.”
“Google is dead serious about the cloud,” said Diane Greene, the Chief of Google Cloud, at the launch event. Therefore, the company is setting up new regions quite swiftly.
Singapore is not the only new Google Cloud Platform center. GCP, which connects more than 1 billion individuals users on a global scale, has also expanded to other APAC regions, including Sydney and Mumbai.
Google is expanding its products across the world as a response to the tough competition amongst tech giants. According to Google representatives, some of the tactics for keeping up with competition include grabbing market share and the ability to leverage G Suite - Drive, Docs, Gmail, etc.
“The things we care about are the number of customers working on our platform, and how many of their workloads are with us versus with one of our competitors,” Shaukat said. “We're probably the most public in talking about how much of the world will end up being multi-cloud. So we don't see this as a zero-sum game by any stretch, we see it as something where there will be multiple winners.”
Addressing one of the key concerns large customers have about the cloud concerning how sensitive data is handled, Google presented a new data loss prevention API for GCP. API identifies personally information such as email addresses and allows customers to choose to have the information classified or redacted.
Customers are also able to grant access to applications based on certain risk factors thanks to new feature the search giant introduced for GCP, which is the Identity-Aware Proxy.
Some of the large clients Google Cloud Platform has include HSBC, Deloitte, Netflix, Avaya, Adidas, Verizon and the New York Times, among others.
Its customers, which include BBM Messenger, Carousell and Go-Jek, have expressed their excitement with the launch of GCP in the region. In a statement, Ajey, CTO, Go-Jek, said: “We are extremely pleased with the performance of GCP, and we are excited about the opportunities opening in Indonesia and other markets, and making use of the Singapore Cloud Region. The outcomes we've achieved in scaling, stability and other areas have proven how fantastic it is to have Google and GCP among our key service partners.”