Google brings the Public Cloud to Finland

The first public cloud region in Finland is finally open!

Google has finished its many years long project of turning Hamina paper mill into a modern data centre in June 2018 and connected it to Google Cloud Platform (GCP), one of the largest public cloud services in the world. The new Finland region, europe-north1, is the 16th region in the cloud network, but the first in the Nordics and fifth in Europe accompanying the Netherlands, Belgium, London, and Frankfurt regions.

A new hub bringing concrete benefits

Opening the Hamina data centre is not only a big nod to Finnish application know-how, but it also offers a lot of concrete benefits. The most obvious one being is the physical location of the data and computing power. Google regions are independent and won’t automatically share or replicate with other regions, meaning data will stay in Finland. The location naturally improves the latency of the whole area. Google estimates that the new region can improve latencies by up to 65% for end-users in the Nordics and by up to 88% in Eastern Europe. The Hamina region is split into three zones and distributing the data across multiple zones will protect against service disruptions but will still keep all data within Finland.

Added value from Multi-Regional services

While offering strong local presence, Google also offers a portfolio of Multi-Regional services. The biggest added value of the public cloud lies in the complete toolbox enabling usage of, for example, ready-made Big Data, Compute, Networking, Security and Storage applications to compliment customers own environments. Nordcloud is excited about all the possibilities Google Hamina brings and are eager to support companies and organisations in their cloud journey. You can read more about our cloud services here. Nordcloud is a Google Cloud Platform Strategic Partner.