TeleGeography Maps the World’s Cloud Data Centers

Which of the world’s regions is home to the most cloud data centers? According to TeleGeography, it’s Asia. The telco market research and consulting firm, perhaps best known on the internet for its unique, free for all to peruse map of the world’s submarine cables, recently launched a map of computing nodes operated by the six largest public cloud providers, including places that host direct network on-ramps to their platforms.

The listing for the AWS cloud availability region in Sydney, Australia, for example, is accompanied by a list of colocation data centers where companies can connect to the AWS platform via private network links: NextDC C1 in Canberra, or Global Switch Sydney West and Equinix SY3 in Sydney, among others.

The new Cloud Infrastructure Map “illustrates what we’ve been saying in our research for years: the cloud is not ubiquitous,” TeleGeography principal analyst Patrick Christian said in a statement. “On-ramps to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers generally map closely to where those providers have deployed data centers.”

While most users connect to public cloud platforms over the public internet, big enterprises that don’t trust the level of security or performance that’s possible on the internet pay a lot of money to connect to their cloud providers’ networks privately. Hosting these cloud on-ramps has become an essential part of colocation providers’ value proposition.

Related:This is Europe’s Hottest Emerging Data Center Market

TeleGeography’s cloud data center map includes regions and on-ramps for cloud platforms by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle, and Alibaba.

It lists 122 data centers in Asia and 98 in the US and Canada, altogether representing 67 percent of the world’s cloud data centers. Europe is home to 23 percent, while Latin America accounts for only 2 percent.

The most cloud availability zones are in the US and China: 65 and 55, respectively. “Japan, the UK, and Singapore round out the top five but follow at a distance with between 10 to 20 zones each,” TeleGeography’s announcement read.

The cloud platforms covered by the map launched 19 new regions this year alone and announced 29 upcoming regions for the next two years.