The Cloud is Opening Doors of Opportunity for You
America’s tech giants are rapidly expanding their data centre capacities to keep the world connected. That’s great news for your business.
The popularity of Cloud-based storage and services has grown exponentially in the last several years, fuelled by the rise of mobile devices, which rely on Cloud-based architectures to run apps, and by the introduction of enterprise services which use remote storage and processing to deliver software more efficiently.
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Vendors are matching or one-upping each other with new data centres and Cloud computing regions. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google continue to compete fiercely in the area of Cloud services for consumers, developers, and enterprises. In their drive to lead the race and position themselves as “the Cloud provider you can trust”, they are bringing all the benefits of the Cloud to new customers, who can now use data centres in their own countries.
To meet the rising demand for Cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to open a data centre in Paris next year, adding to its existing European facilities in Frankfurt and Dublin. Another is planned for the UK. Tech giant Google also aims to expand the Google Cloud Platform to 12 more regions between now and the end of 2017.
In order to do that, Google must open new data centres in each of the regions it is targeting, which is why it is adding new Cloud data centres in Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, Sao Paolo, Finland and Frankfurt, along with another U.S. facility in Northern Virginia; all slated to come on line next year. Meanwhile Microsoft has opened two data centre facilities in Germany.
Meeting the demands for regulation and latency
Housing hundreds of servers and storage equipment, these public Cloud facilities enable companies to perform computing tasks and store data, either by supplementing or replacing their own infrastructure.
Two factors are driving this spike in the building of data centres. Housing data centre operations closer to customers speeds up performance, removing the delay in operations that happens as a result of distance. The second contributing factor is the data sovereignty laws in many countries, which require that citizens’ data be housed locally.
Locating a multimillion-dollar local Cloud infrastructure in different countries across the world makes sense for these tech giants, who are keen to gain the trust of their constituents by meeting their data residency needs.
While Google lagged behind AWS and Microsoft in the Cloud infrastructure market, its data centre network will soon be extensive enough to compete. Google’s data centres contain servers that support Google’s Gmail, Search, Maps, and other Google Cloud Platform services.
Opening in these new regions will help Cloud customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness. It means that even more applications will soon be able to run on these platforms, while customers stand to benefit from Google-level scale, as well as better pricing and performance.
Better internet means better business
The Cloud marketplace is expanding rapidly, especially in countries like India, where the internet has started to take off in a big way. With more Internet capacity for everyone, sharp spikes in growth are expected as data centres are created, with more e-commerce and business opportunities for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer.
As one example, Google data centre expansion in Oregon in the US resulted in an up to 80% improvement in latency for its customers.
TAKE NOTE
Take advantage of high demand and low supply situations. Early adopters tend to be more lenient when it comes ironing out start-up problems, and they’ll cut you some slack because they need the service.
With early adopters in place, a company can start thinking about how to expand their customer base through more traditional means of marketing.
Resources:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-Cloud-coming-to-france/
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