Google has touted itself as the first public cloud provider to run all its clouds on renewable energy.

The company, which says it is the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world – almost three times as much as Amazon and Microsoft, its primary cloud rivals – has been working to attain this goal for the best part of a decade.

With the belief that 2017 would be the year the ‘road to 100%’ would be completed, the company ramped up its efforts. 2016 saw Google’s...

Google Cloud has unveiled major security revamps to its portfolio, across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), G Suite, Chrome Enterprise, and more.

The company has made 20 announcements in total in conjunction with the CEO Security Forum in New York. GCP had no fewer than eight notes, with alpha services around security perimeters and cloud asset management the highlights.

VPC Service Controls aims to stop identity mismanagement, misconfigured policies and compromised virtual machines by creating a security...

It has been an interesting week or so for Google Cloud, both directly and indirectly. The company has announced new APIs, updates and customers for its healthcare cloud initiative, while other high-profile customers have been disclosed.

At HiMSS, the healthcare information and management systems society conference, Google launched a new cloud healthcare API, which is better equipped to focus on data types such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM, and also allows customers to crunch the numbers using analytics and machine...

Inbound marketing software provider HubSpot is adopting Google Cloud to expand its international cloud infrastructure.

HubSpot will use the Google Cloud Platform Frankfurt region to provide outage and data protection, as well as support local customer data.

The company has long since been a customer of Google, particularly G Suite, with integrations for Google Calendar, Gmail, AdWords, Docs, and Drive being among the most popular among HubSpot users.

Kerry Munz, director of engineering and platform...

Google has announced that its cloud tensor processing unit (TPU) chips are available in beta on Google Cloud Platform, aimed at speeding and scaling up specific machine learning workloads.

The company claims that using the new chips will help train business-critical machine learning models in hours rather than days or weeks. The units will utilise TensorFlow, the open source machine learning framework, with up to 180 teraflops of floating point performance – in other words, being capable of handling 180...

Look out Box, Dropbox and Google – Microsoft is offering free OneDrive to customers of its cloud storage rivals in an attempt to poach them.

The move was announced on an official Microsoft blog yesterday. The company will offer free OneDrive for Business to Box, Dropbox and Google customers with a couple of caveats; the organisations must not currently be OneDrive for Business or Office 365...

Google Cloud has announced its latest infrastructure expansion plans, opening five new regions this year and commissioning three subsea cables in 2019.

The first quarter of this year will see data centre facilities opened in the Netherlands and Montreal, with Los Angeles, Finland, and Hong Kong to follow, while the cables will cover four continents respectively.

The first cable, Curie, will make Google the first major non-telecom company – in their words – to build a private intercontinental...

Google has announced the launch of GPUs attached to preemptible VMs, offering a 50% discount – but with a catch.

As with the preemptible VMs, first announced in 2015 but with prices significantly lowered in August last year, resources can be used for a maximum of 24 hours. In addition, Google Compute Engine can shut them down with a 30 second warning. The ideal place for these instances is distributed, fault-tolerant...

It has been a little over a month since Amazon and Google switched some of their cloud services to per-second billing and so the first invoices with the revised billing are hitting your inboxes right about now. If you are not seeing the cost savings you hoped for, it may be a good time to look again at what services were slated for the pricing change, and how you are using them.

Google Cloud...

It was ranked as the most cloud-ready area in the Asia Pacific region – and now one of the largest players in the industry is set to build a region there in 2018.

Google has announced that a new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region will be opened in Hong Kong next year, making it the sixth GCP region in Asia Pacific alongside Singapore, Sydney, Taiwan, and Tokyo, as well as Mumbai, which went live earlier this month.

Including Hong Kong, the total now stands at 18 global locations and 53 zones either open...