Google LLC today announced plans to open four new data center regions later this year as part of the ongoing expansion of its cloud infrastructure.

The new regions will open in Delhi, Melbourne, Toronto and Doha, Qatar. They’ll give Google Cloud a total of 26 regions around the world.

Google Cloud’s regions relate to a specific geographical location where customers can host their resources. Each region is home to at least one availability zone, though most have two, three or even more zones.

The expansion into Doha is an important one since it will become Google’s first strategic collaboration agreement in the Middle East with the Qatar Free Zones Authority, Dave Stiver, senior product manager for geoexpansion at Google, wrote in a blog post.

“The region will launch in Doha, Qatar, allowing new and existing customers, as well as partners, to run their workloads locally,” Stivers said. “We see substantial interest from many customers in the Middle East and Africa, including Bespin Global, one of Asia’s leading cloud managed service providers.”

Google Cloud already has a presence in India, Australia and Canada, but the new data centers will enable it to offer two geographically separate regions in each country. The idea is to give customers more options for in-country disaster recovery, and to help them meet data compliance and security requirements, Stiver said.

“Last year we launched Osaka which, when paired with our Tokyo region, provides customers with an in-country disaster recovery solution,” he explained. “Customers in Canada, India, and Australia will be able to leverage the Toronto, Delhi, and Melbourne cloud regions in the same manner.”

Google said each new region will have three zones and will launch with a portfolio of key Google Cloud Platform products.

Google currently operates 22 cloud regions with 67 availability zones across 16 countries. The company has also announced plans to open new regions in Las Vegas, Jakarta and Warsaw later this year.

In another announcement, Google Cloud said it would collaborate with the German global IT services and consulting firm T-Systems International GmbH. The new partnership is aimed at helping enterprises accelerate their digital transformation strategies. The idea is that T-Systems can provide consulting services, migration support and other managed services for enterprises that are unsure of the best way to migrate to Google’s cloud.

“Our joint goal is to support organizations in their digitalization and to improve business processes with the cloud,” said Adel Al-Saleh, chief executives officer of T-Systems. “This partnership is a core element of our strategy, generating value-add for our clients with managed cloud services.”

The partnership will see T-Systems create a new Google Cloud competence center, which will help customers evaluate their business needs and build and implement customized cloud solutions to address them. The competence center will focus on the automotive, logistics and manufacturing sectors.

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