Look who drives Google's cloud services business globally

SAN FRANCISCO: Emerging markets like India and a vibrant startup ecosystem across cities like Tel Aviv in Israel, coupled with higher demand from countries like the US and the UK, are driving adoption of Google's cloud services globally.

"UK, Europe, especially in the UK, these have been big for us. Japan as a leading economy, we are seeing a lot of growth. Places like Tel Aviv have a vibrant startup economy and we are seeing demand there.

"Emerging market, individual developers (are adopting Google's cloud)," Google Director - Product Management, Greg DeMichillie told reporters here.

He added that Google's cloud services have seen a higher adoption as it offers economy, security, future-proof infrastructure and access to innovation.

In the global cloud infrastructure services market, Google competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Azure and IBM.

DeMichillie said globally, customers like Lloyds Banking group, Spotify (digital music service) and HTC (handset maker) were using its cloud platform.

"We have 70 edge locations in 33 countries. This is the broadest reaching network of any cloud provider," he said.


There are reports stating that Apple, a rival in the mobile operating system market, has started using Google's cloud for its iCloud. DeMichillie declined to comment on the reports.

DeMichillie said Google's data centres use half the energy of typical data centres.

"Currently, Google uses 35% renewable energy for its data centres. We are working towards 100% in the coming years," he said.

Talking about security, DeMichillie said Google has a team of over 500 top security experts on staff.

"We were among the first to start reward programme for reporting vulnerabilities. Also, the remote locations have restricted access with Mission: Impossible like tech to secure data. We build everything: hardware, custom software stack as full-stack ownership greatly reduces attack surface," he said.


DeMichillie said Google's cloud platform offers data analytics and high value, compute-intensive results as well as faster development and deployment of application. He said many of its customers now are the new age Internet-based companies.

"In 1957, it took about 75 years on an average for a company to join S&P 500. This was reduced to 25 years by 2003 and 10 years in 2013. Companies have to innovate at a faster pace and the platform has to ensure that they can do so fast and in a cost-effective manner," he added.