Thailand is turning into a battleground for public cloud services among American and Chinese firms with internet giant Google becoming the latest operator to announce a plan to launch its cloud region in the country amid surging demand in the segment.
In February, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud service arm under US tech giant Amazon, announced a plan to launch its cloud infrastructure -- AWS Local Zone -- in Bangkok.
Chinese tech titans Tencent and Huawei have been investing in local data centres in Thailand while Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing service arm of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, recently reached out to Thailand to offer its services.
According to research firm Gartner, spending on cloud services in Thailand is predicted to reach 40.8 billion baht in 2022, up 36.6% year-on-year.
Cloud regions are operated by Google Cloud, the cloud service arm of Google.
The Thailand cloud region will join Google Cloud's 11 existing regions across Asia Pacific and Japan, including two in Asean -- in Singapore and Jakarta. At present, there are 34 regions and 103 zones for Google Cloud.
"The new Thailand cloud region is set to be Google Cloud's most significant infrastructure investment in Thailand to date to support the growing demand for cloud services and powering the new possibility opportunity," said Ruma Balasubramanian, managing director for Southeast Asia of Google Cloud.
Recently it also announced it would add cloud regions in New Zealand, Malaysia and Mexico.
Ms Balasubramanian said Thailand is a strategic market for Google Cloud and that it is investing to seize new opportunities in Thailand. The cloud region will also contribute to Thailand, making it become one of the most competitive countries in the world, she said.
Thailand's digital economy is expected to reach US$57 billion by 2025 while digital transformation, if leveraged fully, could create up to $79.5 billion in annual economic value in Thailand by 2030 -- the equivalent of 16% of local GDP in 2020, according to research by AlphaBeta, commissioned by Google.
According to her, the new cloud region will support the government's plan for the country's next phase of economic development, ranging from the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) to Thailand 4.0, as well as delivering the cloud foundation that more businesses need to transform and grow by maximising the use of data, enabling a hybrid workforce, or having a flexible platform to adapt to evolving market and regulatory conditions.
Google cloud region is a geographic location where the public cloud resources are deployed.
When launched, the Thailand cloud region will deliver high-performance and low-latency services to local organisations, with three zones offering protection against service disruptions as well as cost savings.
Organisations can benefit from key controls that allow them to attain the highest security, data residency, compliance standards as well as specific data storage requirements.
Cloud regions are in data centres that may be owned by Google Cloud or by a third party location provider.
The hardware, software and operational expertise that goes into them are the same as what is found at Google Data centres.
Each cloud region has multiple zones, which are collections of computing, storage and network resources.
Thailand cloud region is aimed at serving highly regulated industries, such as health, public sector, telecom, financial services as well as retail and manufacturing.
