Announcing the partnership, Google Cloud said the work would “boost the digitalisation of companies, support Spain's public administration and aid the economic recovery of the country post-Covid-19”.
And it isn’t just Spain and Spanish organisations that will enjoy a boost – Telefonica is to leverage the new capabilities for its own digitalisation.
Telefónica will use Google Cloud services to boost its digital capabilities in such areas as machine learning, A), data analytics, and application development, to continue to provide new services and tools to its global customer base.
“The unusual situation that we have had to live in, marked by the confinement of the world's population and the exponential increase in remote work and online education and entertainment, has highlighted the key role that connectivity and digitalisation play in society to create a more inclusive and sustainable future," said José María Álvarez-Pallete, chairman and CEO, Telefónica (pictured).
“With our alliance with Google Cloud we want to fulfil our social commitment and foster the recovery of the economy helping companies, the public administration and all types of organisations not only to recover the ground lost by the crisis but also to promote their digital transformation and strengthen themselves for the future.”
On the customer side side, the new Google Cloud region in Spain will benefit Telefonica customers through integration with its communications and cloud services, and will have the opportunity to use Google Cloud products with low latency and high performance while also having the option to store their applications in local public cloud servers.
The region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions, and will launch with the standard set of Google Cloud Platform products, including: Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Cloud Storage, Spanner, and BigQuery.
Google said the investment will facilitate enterprises and public administrations to “fully unleash the potential of cloud computing based on Google Cloud's AI technologies, while maintaining the highest cybersecurity, data residency and compliance standards, in particular those with specific data storage requirements”.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, added: “Helping businesses adapt to our changing world has been a big focus for Google, before and during the COVID-19 crisis. We're excited to be partnering with Telefónica to launch a new cloud region in Spain and help Spanish businesses big and small find new ways to innovate and contribute to the country's economic recovery.”
