The initiative “Isolated Region” was taken down by the multinational tech company in May, which was targeted towards the control of data within one’s domain, and not deviating elsewhere. According to one employee, the movement had been labeled as a “massive strategy shift”, and it was known that the network of this action extended over to more than hundreds of workers all around the world.
Google, over the years, has invested a great deal of money and time in cloud services, and the overall revenue generated in 2019 from Cloud alone was $8.9 billion- a 53% increase if compared with the previous year. On the other hand, Microsoft and Amazon also offer the same Cloud options.
Google’s withdrawal from Isolated Region happened because of political divisions around the globe made worse by the novel Coronavirus outbreak. The geopolitical problems had their expectations with Isolated Region that it only couldn’t live up to. Therefore in January 2019, Google instead focused on its potential users in the Middle East, China, and Africa, as told by the two employees.
Nevertheless, a Google spokeswoman had something different to say about this. She says that Isolated Region wasn’t abandoned over geopolitical concerns or COVID-19. It was neglected because “other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes,” she affirms.
We have a comprehensive approach to addressing these requirements that covers the governance of data, operational practices, and survivability of software. Isolated Region was just one of the paths we explored to address these requirements”, the Google spokeswoman says.
Moreover, the Google representative says,
“What we learned from customer conversations and input from government stakeholders in Europe and elsewhere is that other approaches we were actively pursuing offered better outcomes. Google does not offer and has not offered cloud platform services inside China.”
One of the employees has stated that Google had in mind to offer cloud services in “sovereignty sensitive markets”, referring to China and the E.U., where there are many restrictions in place for entities that tend to process people’s precious data.
Isolated Region was a fragment of a more significant Google project known as “Sharded Google”, which seemed to introduce newer methods of data storing and data processing.
With that being said, the other majority of Cloud service providers are striving to produce physically independent or software-reliant data centers to keep the flow of information apart.
The process is expensive and can take a decent budget. The demands come from two ends, finance being one of them. The other is about the regulations that insist upon data retaining inside the country where the data originates.
To date, 100 countries plus have data sovereignty laws in check, and this is, according to David Gilmore, CEO of DataFleets Ltd. With the introduction of new consumer law in California, Gilmore says that “It’s just the tip of the iceberg”, as of now.
Google Cloud Chief Computing Officer Thomas Kurian closed down many operations that the company hoped to execute in China. With Microsoft and Amazon providing its cloud computing services in one of the world’s most populous country, Google also wanted to strike a difference here. Therefore, working on a good amount of projects in China and also providing free machine learning tools, the company had big hopes. Nevertheless, those hopes were short-lived.
In an interview with CNBC in 2019, Google’s cloud services saw “enormous growth”, and seemed not to be affected by the U.S trade war in China, according to Thomas Kurian. Furthermore, he has said, ” “We continue to monitor the demand for our technology from Chinese customers”.