In an effort to make its cloud services more competitive with rivals such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, Google Inc. is announcing a new Dedicated Interconnect option for enterprise customers seeking higher availability or lower-latency connections.

In a blog post, John Veizades, product manager for Dedicated Interconnect at Google, said the new offering allows Google Cloud Platform customers to connect to its data centers via enterprise-grade connections with higher availability and lower latencies than their existing Internet connections.

What this means is that customers’ network connections will be more highly available than a typical, web-based, so-called IPsec virtual private network connection. In addition, the service comes with a higher service-level agreement, and provides increased throughput compared to standard connections, as well as a potential reduction in costs for some customers.

“Using Dedicated Interconnect, data from customer to GCP VPCs can now be delivered through a direct high capacity private network connection between Google Cloud Platform and the customer’s data center or corporate network without using the public internet,” Veizades told SiliconANGLE. “Previous to this product, customers had to setup IPSec VPN over the Internet in order to have a private connection to GCP, with the associated bandwidth restrictions and complexity. While this is still an option for users, Dedicated Interconnect delivers a higher bandwidth connection through Google’s superior network, at a POP colocation facility that is close to the user, without transiting to public Internet.”

The new offering is primarily targeted at enterprises that offer data- and latency-sensitive services, particularly in the financial services, media, oil & gas and retail industries. Veizades said. For example, Metamarkets Group, a real-time data analytics firm, is one such customer that said it’s already benefiting from superior connectivity to Google’s cloud.

“Accessing GCP with high bandwidth, low latency, and consistent network connectivity is critical for our business objectives,” said Nhan Phan, vice president of engineering at Metamarkets. “Google’s Dedicated Interconnect allows us to successfully achieve higher reliability, higher throughput and lower latency while reducing the total cost of ownership by more than 60 percent, compared to solutions over the public Internet.”

One of the key benefits is that it allows enterprises to extend their private cloud deployments into Google’s cloud, so companies can easily switch workloads between the two with minimal disruption. In addition, it helps companies to control the amount of data that gets routed through Google’s cloud when working with larger and real-time data sets.

Google is actually a little late to the game. Dedicated Interconnect is comparable with AWS’s Direct Connect and Azure’s ExpressRoute options, both of which have been available for some time. But Veizades said it differs from those services in a couple of interesting ways. For example, it connects users via a global virtual private cloud, ensuring private access to their deployments. In addition, the service allows for different departments and developer teams working on separate projects to access on-premises deployments privately by reusing a single interconnect, Veizades said.

In his blog post, Veizades offered the following graphic to help users decide if Dedicated Interconnect would be beneficial to them:

Google is offering a 99.9 percent uptime SLA for those that create a second Dedicated Interconnect for redundancy purposes, and a 99.9 percent SLA for customers with four links across two metros.

Image: Google