Google Cloud has launched its second Australian cloud infrastructure region in Melbourne to improve latency and availability for customers.
The Melbourne region joins the existing Australian region in Sydney, which the hyperscale public cloud provider launched in 2017.
It brings the total number of Google Cloud regions to 27 worldwide, of which 11 are based in the Asia Pacific.
Both Australian cloud regions have three availability zones, which A/NZ technology and architecture director Matt Zwolenski said would create a “really highly available level of service” for customers.’
“One of the big factors that was driving this [region] is the idea of building disaster recovery and business continuity across Australia,” he said.
Google Cloud is the only hyperscale cloud provider to currently offer three availability zones in Sydney and Melbourne, though this will change when AWS’ second region comes online next year.
Zwolenki said that with climate change and the increasing risk of fire, floods and other threats to cities, there is a need to “span regions… to run our most critical applications services”.
“This region gives us the ability to give our customers that capability of running highly available services across multiple cities,” he said.
Customers located outside Melbourne or Sydney will be able to connect to the regions using recently launched network interconnects, or “points of presence”, in Brisbane, Canberra and Perth.
“Having those points of presence… in addition to what we already have in Melbourne and Sydney… gives us the ability to connect customers across A/NZ into the Google network,” Zwolenki said.
Commenting on the launch, Australia Post chief information officer Munro Farmer said the second Australian region would allow for “continuity, low latency and high availability”.
“For us, this is about not just building new capabilities, but also helping to migrate our existing applications across to the cloud,” he said.
“This is a great move and a great commitment from Google, and we're really excited to see where it will go next.”
Bendigo and Adelaide Bank chief information officer Andrew Cresp added that multi-region capability was “critically important” for the financial services sector
Google has also announced the appointment of Alister Dias as vice president of Google Cloud in A/NZ.
Dias, who was most recently VMware's A/NZ vice president of networking and security, has more than 30 years’ experience in leadership, technical and sales roles.
In February, Google Cloud services were assessed to carry protected Australian government data under the federal information security registered assessors program (IRAP).
