New GCP region in Zurich: Growing our support for Swiss and European businesses

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Our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region in Zurich is now live and ready for business. Our sixth European region and nineteenth overall, this new region gives companies doing business in Switzerland more opportunities with lower latency access to their data and workloads.

A cloud made for Switzerland

Designed to support Swiss and European customers, the Zurich GCP region (europe-west6) comes with three availability zones, enabling high availability workloads. Hybrid cloud customers can seamlessly integrate new and existing deployments with help from our regional partner ecosystem, and via two dedicated interconnect points of presence.

The launch of the Zurich region brings lower latency access to GCP products and services for organizations doing business in Switzerland. Hosting applications in the new region can improve latency for end users in Switzerland by up to 10ms. Visit GCPing.com to see latency to  the Zurich region from wherever you happen to be.

The Zurich region launches with our standard set of products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery.

To take advantage of many GCP services, you first have to get your data into the cloud. Transfer Appliance is a high-capacity server that lets you transfer large amounts of data to GCP, quickly and securely, and it’s coming to the Swiss market. We recommend Transfer Appliance if you’re moving large quantities of data that would take more than a week to upload. You can request a Transfer Appliance here.

This region comes with Cloud Interconnect, our private, software-defined network that provides a fast and reliable link between each region around the world. You can use services that aren’t presently available within the Zurich region via the Google Network, and combine them with other GCP services deployed around the world. That lets you quickly deploy and scale across multiple regions with products designed for organizations with a global footprint.

Celebrating with Swiss customers

We kicked off the new region with a special event in Zurich with over 800 business leaders and developers in attendance. SVP of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle officially opened the region. Customers from pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and financial businesses all over Switzerland and Europe learned about GCP and how the local region can benefit their cloud operations.

What customers are saying

“Swiss-AS dedicates its business exclusively to the support of AMOS, leading aviation maintenance and engineering software. Today, Google Cloud Platform enables us to deliver our AMOS Cloud Service fully dedicated cloud environment worldwide. Now with GCP’s local presence in Zurich, we can bring our service even closer to our AMOS customers based in German-speaking countries.”

“The new Swiss cloud region opens up exciting opportunities for the health sector. It will enable Balgrist University Hospital to introduce new real-time processing technologies. Collaborations in medical research and development will also be easier and more effective.”

– Thomas Huggler, Executive Director, University Hospital Balgrist

“We are very excited about the arrival of Google Cloud Platform in Switzerland. With Google Cloud, we can focus our efforts on developing new innovative software features for our customers. It gives us the opportunity to have new environments ready within seconds."

– Marc Loosli, Chief Innovation, NeXora AG (part of the Quickline Group)

“Belimo is the leading global manufacturer of actuators, valves, and sensors used in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Recently, IoT technologies have allowed us to offer HVAC systems controlled by cloud-connected devices, which deliver additional comfort, energy efficiency, safety, ease of installation and maintenance. Belimo chose GCP because we depend on high availability, reliable performance as well as scalability for our global cloud services. The cutting-edge technology and tools from GCP help our teams to focus on the essential.”

– Peter Schmidlin, Chief Innovation Officer, Belimo Automation AG

What partners are saying

"Wabion is more than just excited to see Google Cloud coming to Switzerland. Frankly, I believe this is the best thing that could happen to the Swiss cloud market. We have customers that are very interested in Google's innovation who haven’t migrated because of the lack of a Swiss hub. The new Zurich region closes this gap, unlocking huge opportunities for Wabion to help customers on their Google Cloud journey."

– Michael Gomez, Co-Manager, Wabion

What’s next

For more details about this region, please visit our Zurich region page where you’ll get access to free resources, whitepapers, the "Cloud On-Air" on-demand video series, and more. If you're new to GCP, check out Best Practices for Compute Engine Region Selection and contact sales to get started on GCP today.

We are launching more GCP zones and regions later this year, starting with Osaka. Our locations page provides updates on the availability of additional services and regions.