news Google has announced two new regions for its Cloud Platform network of datacentres, with more on the way, but it is still unclear if Australia will eventually be included in the list.

“Our global network has allowed us to build products that billions of users around the world can depend on. Whether you’re in Taipei or Tijuana, you can get Gmail, Search, Maps or your Google Cloud Platform services with Google speed and reliability,” the search giant said in a blog post.

Now as the latest stage in the growth of that network the firm is expanding its range of existing Cloud Platform regions with two more: the US Western region based in Oregon and the East Asia region based in Tokyo, Japan – both of which are expected to be operational later this year.

As with Google’s other regions, the two new additions will have have “multiple availability zones”, to enable the high availability of computing resources to customers in each locale.

Google also announced that the Oregon and Tokyo sites are the first of over 10 additional Cloud Platform regions it will be adding in the next two years. Google already has centres in operation in Belgium, South Carolina, Iowa and Taiwan.

The advantage of basing the platform on data centres distributed across different world regions is that users can access data at higher speed, and firms need not fall afoul of local laws by keeping data in other jurisdictions.

“We’re opening these new regions to help Cloud Platform customers deploy services and applications nearer to their own customers, for lower latency and greater responsiveness,” said Varun Sakalkar, Google Product Manager.

“With these new regions, even more applications become candidates to run on Cloud Platform, and get the benefits of Google-level scale and industry leading price/performance,” he added.

The move has been seen as Google’s latest strategy for competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which has 12 regional centres and five more on the way.

Whether Australia will soon join the list isn’t yet known, but with AWS already maintaining a centre in Sydney, the possibility must be considered.

Back in September 2105, Macquarie University revealed it had decided to abandon Google’s hosted email and calendaring platform and make the switch to Microsoft’s Office 365 platform following a controversial decision by Google to shift the university’s data from a data centre in Europe and move it to the US.

At the time, Macquarie aired concerns over legislation such as the Patriot Act, which could give US law enforcement authorities access to its data if hosted in the country.

Image credit: Robert Scoble, Creative Commons