Google was firmly overshadowed by Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure in the telco cloud market – until the past couple of months, when it has been closing on its rivals, with a rear-guard action that hits two current telco sweet spots, edge computing and the desire to avoid a cloud lock-in. The latest operator to sign up a strategic partnership with Google Cloud is Telefónica, which said the cornerstones of the deal are Google’s newly announced Mobile Edge Computing platform and services, plus its development of a multicloud strategy. Google will extend its cloud services using Telefónica’s infrastructure in the Madrid region, initially. That will enable the telco to use Google Cloud to expand its own services, especially for enterprises.…