Google Cloud Opens New Canadian Cloud Region In Toronto

‘Google Cloud has extraordinary strengths in services around data and analytics, but these services demand equally extraordinary performance and availability,’ says Andrew Caprara, chief operating officer at Toronto-based Softchoice, a Google Cloud Premier Partner. ‘The creation of a local region in Toronto provides that secure, low-latency option to even more of our Canadian customers.’

Google Cloud has launched a new cloud region in Toronto, Canada—its 28th globally.

The new region, which has three availability zones, is the second in Canada for the Mountain View, Calif.-based No. 3 cloud computing provider, which previously opened a cloud region in Montreal in 2018.

Google Cloud has been investing in Canada for more than a decade, according to Jim Lambe, managing director of Google Cloud Canada.

“In combination with our Montreal region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty,” Lambe said in a blog post Tuesday. “The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner and BigQuery. To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions.”

Those new solutions include Assured Workloads for Canada, which now is in preview. Assured Workloads allows users to secure and configure their sensitive workloads in line with their specific regulatory or policy requirements.

Google Cloud has “extraordinary” strengths in services around data and analytics, but those services demand equally extraordinary performance and availability, said Andrew Caprara, chief operating officer at Toronto-based Softchoice, a technology services and solution provider and Google Cloud Premier Partner.

“The creation of a local region in Toronto provides that secure, low-latency option to even more of our Canadian customers,” Caprara said via email to CRN. “The regional cloud ecosystem also addresses geopolitical regulations and industry compliance issues that may be hindering organizations—especially in the financial and public sectors—from embracing the cloud to its full potential.”

Google Cloud’s investments in bringing it capabilities at scale to Canada allows Canadian companies to adopt multi-cloud strategies, according to Caprara.

“One of the things that Google is successfully embracing is their place in a true multi-cloud strategy: They don’t need to be a company’s only cloud,” he said. “Their expansion in the Canadian region gives customers more options to adopt Google as part of a broader and thoughtful cloud strategy that may already include AWS and Azure.”

Amazon Web Services has one cloud region in Canada that launched in 2016 in the metropolitan Montreal area and added a third availability zone last year. Microsoft Azure has a three-zone cloud region in Toronto and another region in Quebec City, both of which also opened in 2016.

Google Cloud, meanwhile, recently received Protected B accreditation from the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which Lambe said was crucial for customers in health-care, education and regulated industries adopting cloud services. Google Cloud also is currently hosting its inaugural Google Cloud Accelerator Canada program, a 10-week virtual accelerator program for 12 Canadian startups.

Google Cloud has seven other cloud regions under development in Columbus, Ohio; Doha, Qatar; Paris; Milan and Turin, Italy; Santiago, Chile; and Madrid, Spain.