Google Cloud is set to open a new cloud region in Melbourne, which will be the firm’s second region in Australia and its 11th in the APAC region overall.

The tech giant revealed that Melbourne joins the existing 26 Google Cloud regions worldwide connected via its high-performance network.

“With this our second region in Australia, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, all the while maintaining data sovereignty in-country,” said Alister Dias, Google Cloud vice president of Australia & New Zealand.

The company stated that its cloud customers operating in Australia and New Zealand will benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. 

Furthermore, the region opens with three zones to protect against service disruptions and offers a portfolio of key products like Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Spanner, and Compute Engine.

Google Cloud stated that it will continue to invest in expanding connectivity across Australia and New Zealand by working with partners to establish subsea cables and new Dedicated Cloud Interconnect locations and points of presence in major cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Auckland.

This aims to deliver geographically distributed and secure infrastructure to customers across the region, which it said is especially important for those in regulated industries like Financial Services and the Public Sector.

Earlier this month, Google Cloud opened its second region in India in Delhi, four years after the launch of its Mumbai cloud region in 2017. The company said this new region would better support customers and the public sector in India and across the Asia Pacific. 

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, said that the company had seen “enormous growth in demand for Google Cloud services in India” so wanted to be able to offer more capacity with the new region. He called it a “large commitment” from Google Cloud in terms of capital and infrastructure investment and was designed to allow the company to capture the opportunity it sees around growth.