Google promises cloud data will stay in the EU

After losing too many contracts, Google has decided it is safer to promise its partners and customers that their data will stay inside the EU.

Google partners have found the company’s cloud packages a hard sell, particularly to government departments. This is because Google could not promise customers that data would stay within the bloc.

The fear of many EU governments was that under the US Patriot Act, their data could be seized by US spies if it was stored in US servers.

According to a Google blog, the company can now be sure that all the data is hosted in European datacentres following announcing upgrades to its Cloud platform.

The company is also increasing its European datacentre support, lowering its storage prices and has added 36 compute platform configurations to its cloud offering.

In the past, Google used to lean heavily on an extended network of partner organisations some of which were in other countries. This was costing it business because it has been estimated that some 22 percent of companies or organisations that were surveyed were not legally allowed to process or store data outside of the EU.

Google also said that more European datacentre support helped bring solutions even closer to its partner’s customers for faster performance. It also improved international redundancy.

Jessie Jiang, Product Management Director said that the changes to the Google App Engine, Cloud Storage, Big Query, Compute Engine and others were based on user feedback and to improve the overall “experience”.

But that might have also been because of the drubbing the company suffered when it came to bidding for the UK government’s eGov project. Google did not even qualify for the tender, which was deeply embarrassing.