Introducing Cloud Storage bucket relocation

As your operational needs change, sometimes you need to move data residing within Google’s Cloud Storage to a new location, to improve resilience, optimize performance, meet compliance needs, or simply to reorganize your infrastructure. Yet moving buckets can be a daunting, complex, risky endeavor that involves manual scripting, painstaking coordination, and the risk of data loss, or worse yet, extended downtime. This can discourage organizations from making the changes they need to their storage environments.

We recently introduced Cloud Storage bucket relocation, a unique feature among leading hyperscalers that makes it easy  to change your bucket’s location. Bucket relocation eliminates the need for complex manual planning and helps prevent extended downtime, for an easy transition with minimal application disruption, and strong data integrity. Your bucket’s name, and all the object metadata within it, remain identical throughout the relocation, so there are no path changes, and your applications experience minimal downtime while the underlying storage is moved. Furthermore, your objects retain their original storage class (e.g., Standard, Nearline, Coldline, Archive) and time-in-class in the new location. This is key for many cost efficiency strategies, helping ensure capabilities such as Autoclass continue to operate intelligently to optimize your storage costs post-migration.

Bucket relocation is a key capability within the Storage Intelligence suite, alongside tools like Storage Insights, which  provides deep visibility into your storage landscape and identifies optimization opportunities. Bucket relocation then lets you act on these insights, and move your data between diverse Cloud Storage locations — regional locations for low latency, dual-regions for high availability and disaster recovery, or multi-regions for global accessibility — to meet your  business, performance, and compliance objectives.