Google Cloud expands European presence with opening of Madrid region

The public cloud giant said the Madrid region had been created with the specific intention of meeting the growing technology needs of Spanish businesses, in support of the country’s efforts to boost the economy in the wake of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.

The region itself will be made up of several cloud zones, spanning multiple datacentres, for resiliency purposes, and will provide users with locally hosted access to Google’s core set of cloud services, including its compute and storage services, as well as its managed Kubernetes, data warehousing and data analytics tools too.

“The new Madrid region offers Google Cloud’s unique global infrastructure locally, creating new opportunities for digital transformation across every industry and making it easier for organisations at any stage of their cloud journey to securely deliver faster, more reliable customer experiences,” said Google in a blog post, announcing the news.

The opening of the Madrid region brings the total number of regions the company operates across the world to 34, with the infrastructure underpinning it built-in collaboration with Spanish telco giant Telefónica.

Luis Jimenez, sub-director of Spain’s National Cryptologic Centre, said the region’s opening would bring benefits for cloud users operating in the public sector, which are encouraged to use locally hosted offerings when building out their cloud strategies.

Having an in-country region will, therefore, lower the barriers to cloud adoption that many private and public sector organisations face.

“It is especially important for the alignment with the security levels that public sector organisations demand and as required in the National Security Scheme. They must take advantage of a cloud that is offered locally with the highest security guarantees,” he said.

“The new Google Cloud region in Madrid will allow us to achieve our goals and meet the expectations of our customers by offering them a premium user experience without neglecting data security and residency”

Carmen Lopez Herranz, BBVA

“The collaboration with [the] hyperscalers is key. It is also essential to continue advancing with best practices adoption, training, security configurations and supervision.”

News of the Madrid opening comes five years after Google declared its UK cloud region open for business – marking the internet search giant’s 10th region.

Prior to its opening, UK-based Google Cloud users had to rely on the firm’s Belgium region to host their workloads and data, with the company talking up the improvements UK users would see as a result in terms of application performance and responsiveness.

Carmen Lopez Herranz, chief technology officer at Spanish multinational financial services company BBVA, cited similar performance improvements as one of the reasons its customers would benefit from the opening of the Madrid region.

“Offering our customers low-latency services while keeping workloads and data management safe is vital for us,” she said. “The availability of the new Google Cloud region in Madrid represents a great step forward that will allow us to achieve our goals and meet the expectations of our customers by offering them a premium user experience without neglecting data security and residency.”