Google Expands Cloud Connectivity Options for Enterprise Data Centers

Companies will soon have many more options than before for connecting their own data centers to Google’s global cloud platform.

They will be able to choose from a list of certified carriers and colocation providers to connect to the nearest Google Point of Presence. Google Cloud Platform announced the new cloud onramp, called Partner Interconnect, Tuesday. The company expects it to be generally available “in the coming weeks.”

Partner Interconnect is different from the current GCP onramp in that it gives clients the ability to choose the bandwidth they need. The current onramp, called Dedicated Interconnect, comes as a full 10Gbps circuit, while the new one offers partial circuits, ranging from 50Mbps to 10Gbps.

“Partner Interconnect lets you connect to GCP from a convenient location, at a data rate that meets your needs,” John Veizades, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post.

Public cloud providers offer private connectivity to their networks to make their services more palatable for security and performance-conscious enterprises than consuming those services over the public internet. Infrastructure-as-a-Service offerings like GCP and Amazon Web Services and Software-as-a-Service products like Salesforce’s CRM and Microsoft’s Office 365 can now be accessed this way.

Related:Understand GCP Cloud Traffic with VPC Flow Logs

About two dozen service providers are on the Partner Interconnect list. They include major carriers, such as AT&T, Verizon, BT, CenturyLink, Orange, NTT, and SoftBank, as well as the world’s two biggest data center providers: Equinix and Digital Realty Trust.

Google’s parent company Alphabet reported first-quarter results Monday, posting highest revenue growth in years as well as a massive spike in spending, driven primarily by investment in data center and network infrastructure to support GCP.

Alphabet’s Q1 revenue was $24.9 billion, up 24 percent year over year. Its capital expenditures for the quarter were $7.7 billion, or three times what they were one year ago.

Forrester Research expects Google’s cloud business to generate $2.5 billion in sales this year.