Google Cloud kicks off next ‘21: Helping customers solve for What’s Next

Google Cloud kicked off its annual flagship event, Google Cloud Next ‘21 today and announced a series of innovations focused on solving the most pressing business problems across industries. 

These announcements span Google Cloud’s open cloud infrastructure that helps companies deploy mission-critical applications where they need them most; data cloud that enables businesses to understand and connect with their customers, products, and partners; collaboration technology that empowers hybrid work; and cybersecurity technology that protects users, applications, and data everywhere—all on the industry’s cleanest cloud.

Ferdie Saputil, Google Cloud Country Lead for the Philippines, said, “Digital transformation is important and companies need to leverage the power of data, artificial intelligence and digital experiences to further unlock growth opportunities. Ultimately, the organizations that will thrive will not simply make infrastructure decisions about storage and compute, but will use the cloud to transform how their entire company collaborates and innovates.” 

Open Infrastructure: An open cloud that can run anywhere.

To help organizations accelerate their cloud deployments regardless of location, Google announced Google Distributed Cloud, a portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions that extend Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to the edge and data centers

Built on Anthos, an open-source-based platform that unifies the management of infrastructure and applications across on-premises, edge, and in multiple public clouds, all while offering consistent operation at scale, the first products under this portfolio include:

● Google Distributed Cloud Edge – Available in preview today, this fully managed product brings Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services closer to where data is being generated and consumed. Whether that is at one of Google's owned 140+ network edge points-of-presence, customer edge locations such as a retail store, factory floor, or branch office, or at communication service provider edge locations. Google Distributed Cloud Edge is ideal for running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads, modernizing on-premises environments, and deploying private 5G/LTE solutions across a variety of industries. The solution builds on Google Cloud’s telecommunication solutions and empowers CSPs to run workloads on Intel and NVIDIA technologies to deliver new 5G and edge use cases. 

● Google Distributed Cloud Hosted – Available in preview in the first half of 2022, Google Distributed Cloud Hosted offers customers a safe and secure way to modernize on-premises deployments whether they choose to do it themselves or to host through a designated, trusted partner. It does not require connectivity to Google Cloud at any time to manage infrastructure, services, APIs or tooling. Instead, it uses a local control plane managed by Anthos for operations, thereby supporting public-sector customers and commercial entities that have strict data residency, security or privacy requirements.

Data & Analytics: The most complete and unified data, analytics and AI solutions.

To help customers build modern data architectures with real-time analytics and power their mission-critical data-driven applications, Google Cloud announced new updates including:

● General Availability (GA) of BigQuery Omni – BigQuery Omni addresses complex data management across hybrid and multicloud environment. Now in GA, it enables organizations to run cross-cloud analytics with data in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

● Spark on Google Cloud – Available in preview, Spark on Google Cloud is the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for the Google Cloud data platform. This new service makes Spark a premium offering on Google Cloud and enables customers to get started in seconds and scale infinitely, regardless if they start in BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataplex or Vertex AI.

● Salesforce Tableau Partnership – Google is also announcing a partnership with Salesforce Tableau to provide best-in-class BI Experience, enabling Tableau users to seamlessly analyze data from BigQuery, get the benefits of Looker’s semantic model, and to launch Tableau directly from Google Sheets. 

Google Workspace: Collaboration across every facet of the business. 

Google Workspace enables more than 3 billion users to communicate and collaborate, regardless of where they are, by creating a digital location for work. It helps increase productivity through assistive tools like Smart Canvas, and delivers a seamless user experience across products like Docs, Gmail, Meet, and Chat to address the unique requirements of front-line workers. Today, Google Workspace is announcing:

● A new Atlassian Jira integration that helps people easily create new tickets and monitor issues within the platform.

● A new Gmail AppSheet integration that allows anyone—even non-coders—to build email apps for tasks like budget approvals, vacation requests and more. 

● An expanded partnership with Citrix to ensure that distributed and hybrid workers have easy, secure, and low-latency access to virtualized applications and desktops from anywhere, with management controls from Citrix and Google Cloud’s global infrastructure.

● New security innovations in Google Workspace, including client-side encryption for Meet that gives customers control over encryption keys, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Chat to prevent sensitive information from leaking outside an organization. 

Security: Keeping more people safe online than anyone else in the world.

To address the unprecedented security challenges facing organizations in every industry today, Google Cloud made two significant announcements:

● A new Google Cybersecurity Action Team – This security advisory team will help governments and businesses  use Google’s own security best practices to guide, educate, and inform on security transformation, threat intelligence, and cybersecurity policy. 

● A new Work Safer program –  Work Safer is a new security program built to meet the needs of all organizations, including small businesses, enterprises, and public sector institutions, many of which rely on legacy technology and often lack the expertise to fully address rising security challenges associated with hybrid work. The offering will provide them with access to best-in-class security for email, meetings, messages, documents, and more. It uniquely brings together the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with industry-leading solutions from across Google and its cybersecurity partners, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. 

Sustainability: The Cleanest Cloud in the Industry

As the cleanest cloud in the industry, Google Cloud has launched innovations to help customers take immediate climate action. 

● Carbon Footprint is available today to every customer at no charge in the Cloud Console so they can report on the carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage and measure, track and report on the progress against their climate goals. 

● Google Earth Engine is now available in preview as part of Google Cloud Platform. Combined with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery, Cloud AI and Google Maps Platform, Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. Bringing the best of Google together, this new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability. 

● Unattended Project Recommender is a new feature that uses machine learning to identify projects that are likely abandoned, flagging them so organizations can choose to easily delete them, reducing their carbon emissions, saving money, and mitigating security risks. 

Saputil underlined, “As a transformation partner to our customers, we’re laser focused on delivering the best data and analytics platform, the right software solutions, a trusted platform, and the best tools to support a hybrid workplace — all while addressing the planet’s most important challenges. No single aspect of transformation is enough, and cloud providers must take responsibility to offer the best solutions in every area, not simply repurpose legacy technologies on a new platform.”