Google is betting big on cloud services to woo Indian companies

In the face of rising competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, global tech giant Google is betting big on its cloud services to woo 44 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs), more than 20,000 start-ups and hundreds of major companies. 
 
Google’s cloud customers in India include Ashok Leyland, goibibo.com, Hero MotoCorp, Policybazaar.com, Quikr, Yaatra, SBI Cards, Hike Messenger, Vistara and ShareChat.
 
The company, which currently has three data centres in Mumbai, is on an expansion spree.
 
Knowing that the demand is set to increase from the fintech sector in over the next couple of months as banks and non-banking financial institutions hurry to meet Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) directive to bring financial data back to India, the company is hoping for a rise in demand.
 
The tech giant is pitching its artificial intelligence and machine learning laden cloud service as an easy to use and secure option, which it claims is better than competition.
 
The company has conducted several roadshows across the country in the past few weeks to woo current as well as prospective customers.

 
The company on Thursday said security was the “bedrock” of its cloud services for enterprises, which saw significant adoption in India over the last few months.
 
Google’s cloud region in India went live in November last year and offers services, including Big Data, storage and networking. Google competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft in this space.
 
“In India, the bedrock of what we are offering is around security,” Google Cloud Asia-Pacific Managing Director Rick Harshman said.
 
The company was witnessing strong growth in demand from across customer segments, from startups and small and medium businesses, to large enterprises in India, he added.
 
On ensuring that data on cloud stayed protected, Harshman said security was always top of the mind for companies. “We take it (security) extremely seriously. When we design a product, security is inherently built into it,” he said.

 
The US-based company has over 1,000 security engineers working on Google Cloud.

Asked if Google was concerned about such proposed regulations, Harshman said: “We need to be aware of what governments are potentially proposing and if there needs to be any potential change, we will evaluate that.”
 
Google has cloud regions across locations, including Oregon, Iowa (US), Montreal, London, Frankfurt, Finland, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo.

The company is also training people on new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) in the cloud era of computing.
 
“We have collaborated with Coursera to offer a series of on-demand training offerings for Google Cloud platform. As part of this, we are launching a new course — Machine Learning with TensorFlow on Google Cloud platform,” he added.