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Google Cloud Platform expands to London

Google may be playing catch up with AWS internationally, but it's making up for lost time.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

With 43 zones, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the globe's largest public cloud, but Google is working hard to match AWS. On July 13, Google opened its latest region, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) London (europe-west2).

This is Google tenth region and joins its existing European region in Belgium. The London GCP center will have three zones. It will offer compute, big data, storage, and networking service.

Google expects its new region to greatly improve network performance for British Isles and Western Europe clients. In cities such as London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and Amsterdam, Google's performance testing shows 40-percent to 82-percent reductions in round-trip time latency when serving customers from London compared with the Belgium region.

For UK and EU customers who are wary of American privacy regulations, Google promises to obey EU data protection requirements. Indeed, Google recently announced a commitment to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The GDPR, which takes effect on May 25, 2018, harmonizes the EU's data-privacy laws. It also gives users the right to be forgotten, the right to find out how your data is being used, and the right to access your information in a commonly used machine readable format.

London is only the latest of Googles new GCP data centers. In recent weeks, Google has opened new GCP centers in Australia and Singapore.

The new London data center is only part of Google's European plans. Google plans to expand to Frankfurt, the Netherlands, and Finland soon.

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