Following the announcement that it would open a London region back in September 2016, Google has officially launched its cloud presence in the British capital.

Specific details about the data centers comprising the ‘europe-west2’ region were not shared.

Not on Google Maps

Google in London
Google in London – DCD/Sebastian Moss

“We don’t say for a number of reasons, but one is that our customers are actually really keen on not having people know exactly where their application is hosted,” Benjamin Treynor Sloss, VP of Engineering at Google, told DCD.

“In reality, terrorism or intentional sabotage is a non-event, but it doesn’t matter - psychologically, I don’t want you to know where my data is.”

Google was even reticent to share the number of data centers comprising the region, but Sloss told DCD: “Typically we offer three data centers. Three seems to be the number everybody wants.

“They tend to be quite close - what you want is sufficient redundancy so that no normal physical event would ever affect more than one of them at a time, but other than that, you want them as close as possible because often what people do is replicate data back and forth between them, so sub 1ms latency is kind of the target.”

At a launch event celebrating the new region, Karen Bradley, the UK’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said: “I am so grateful that Google has put this vote of confidence into the UK’s economy.”

Future confirmed Google Cloud regions in Europe include Frankfurt, the Netherlands and Finland. The company is also reportedly aggressively considering a Luxembourg location.