Google has announced plans to expand its cloud footprint dramatically, opening up to twelve new data centers before the end of 2017. Facilities in Oregon and Tokyo will go online this year. According to the company, these new data centers allow enterprises to run applications in cloud computing environments that are physically near their customers. “With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform,” said Google product manager Varun Sakalkar.
Google is currently the fourth largest cloud computing company with a 4 percent share of the market, but it is one of the two fastest-growing service providers. Today, it has fourteen data centers, including nine in the United States. By comparison, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft each have at least 40 data centers to support their cloud computing services.