Italy: Google Cloud expands to Milan region

Milan: Google Cloud announced this week its expansion into Italy with a new region in Milan, and offered news of another to come in the city of Turin. Google Cloud is working with local telco partner Telecom Italia (TIM) to expand its global hyperscale infrastructure in Italy. With Milan now active, Google counts 34 global regions and 103 zones, covering users in more than 200 countries and territories globally.

Google Cloud regions are independent geographical areas comprising specific zones, or deployment areas of Google Cloud resources, within a specific physical area. Google encourages Cloud customers to deploy apps in multiple zones across a region, to mitigate potential outages.

“The new Milan region launches with three cloud zones and our standard services including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, and Cloud Identity. In addition, our customers will benefit from critical features such as data residency controls, default encryption, organizational policies, and VPC Service Controls,” said Google in a blog post attributed to Fabio Fregi, country manager, Italy, Google Cloud.

Fregi said that the move will help Italian companies of all sizes with their digital transformation efforts.

“This new region is a strong step towards building regional capacity that meets the needs of the Italian digital economy, from availability and data residency, to digital sovereignty and sustainability,” he added.

Elio Schiavo, chief enterprise and innovative solutions officer, TIM, explained that the announcement represents a new green initiative from TIM.

“We are inaugurating a strategic infrastructure that will combine the huge economic benefits expected in Lombardy and Piedmont with important advantages for the environment: our network of data centers, designed and built according to eco-sustainability criteria, will allow significant CO2 savings,” said Schiavo.

Google Cloud and TIM also partnered to launch Google Cloud Pro in Italy last year, a free localized developer training program.

In May Google Cloud expanded U.S. operations with a new region in Columbus, Ohio. The tenth North American region will be joined by another one in Dallas, Texas later this year. Beyond Italy, Google Cloud opened a region in Santiago, Chile, announced plans to expand its German footprint, and indicated plans to open regions in Tel Aviv, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Building out global infrastructure is helping Google Cloud follow hyperscale mega-rivals Microsoft and AWS into the private 5G market. The company has recently worked with a bunch of specialist vendor and channel partners, starting with Betacom, Boingo Wireless, Celona, Crown Castle and Kajeet. It said it is offering “turn-key” private 5G with the option to run network management, control, and user plane functions in the cloud-cloud and the edge-cloud on site.

It said its recent headline deals with operators will offer enterprises a way to roam beyond their on-premise private 5G setups, and also afford remote control over sundry edge functions. Interestingly, press statements from its two new vendor partners suggested, at a glance, Celona has been pegged for deployments in smart buildings and real estate, and Kajeet is being directed towards school placements, both with CBRS spectrum provision in the US.