This week Google Canada celebrated the opening of its Toronto cloud region, its second in Canada and its 28th worldwide.
The first Canadian cloud region opened in 2018 in Montreal.
As announced in March of last year, the new region launches with three availability zones and offers a core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.
“There was a number of businesses, a number of institutions that we have as our anchor tenants that have really pushed push the boundaries of what we’re doing here,” said Jim Lambe, managing director, Google Cloud Canada, in an interview. “And so the additional a) capacity, and then b) what we call sovereign capacity in Canada has been critical for us.”
The new region has three key benefits, he noted. “Number one, it just makes it easier for organizations now to get access to our technology,” he said. “Second, it’s around fault resiliency and disaster recovery. Then I think the third major component is its disaster recovery with data sovereignty included.”
The two Canadian regions, 500 km apart, provide a good separation for DR.
Customers like Scotiabank and Natural Resources Canada are happy with the opening.
“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions,” said Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada, in a statement. “At Natural Resources Canada, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.”
Google partners like Softchoice are also enthusiastic.
“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market,” Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”
And, Lambe said, Google isn’t stopping with its current offerings. He sees further expansions in the cards, noting that we’re likely to see Google edge computing as well as Google at the edge of various organizations’ capabilities.
But, he added, he doesn’t see the company doing things like launching its own satellites (though it does provide the backbone for SpaceX’s communications). “Predominantly, our focus is going to be on being a top-notch cloud provider,” he said. “Our goal is to enable industry,”
