If success in the digital age could be summarized by three core capabilities it might boil down to these: connectivity, accessibility, and ease of use. Not surprisingly, these same essential attributes seemed to permeate through the content and underpin the theme of Google Cloud Next ’20: OnAir ― Google Cloud’s first digital series event focused on helping businesses grow and transform digitally.
Next OnAir kicked off July 14 and is running through September 8. The digital event replaces Google Cloud’s annual in-person Next conference, which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
One reality of today’s ongoing health crisis has been the way it has fundamentally changed how we live, work and socialize. As organizations chart a path to recovery, many are shifting deeper into digital models to sell and deliver products and serve customers. At the center of these changes is the need to modernize infrastructure using the cloud as a way to respond quickly, optimize costs, and prepare for the future.
The presentations from Google Cloud executives during the first week of Next OnAir ― including a keynote address from Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian ― provided insights into how businesses are responding to these transformations and the role technology is playing in these uncertain times. Outlined below are a few of the key takeaways from the opening keynote:
Data Unification, Access and Ease with Google Cloud
1. Breaking Down Data Silos
While connections between digital applications and systems are critical, the reality is that many businesses continue to struggle to manage data across multiple public clouds. Helping to address this challenge head-on is BigQuery Omni, a new multi-cloud analytics solution powered by Anthos, which helps extend Google Cloud’s analytics platform to other public clouds. Users can leverage BigQuery’s familiar interface to break down data silos and create actionable business insights, all from a single pane of glass.
BigQuery Omni represents a new way of analyzing data stored in multiple public clouds. By decoupling compute and storage, BigQuery provides scalable storage that can reside in Google Cloud or other public clouds, and stateless resilient compute that executes standard SQL queries.
Since BigQuery runs on Anthos clusters that are fully managed by Google Cloud, users can query data without worrying about the underlying infrastructure. Compute resources run in the same cloud region where data is stored, providing a completely seamless data analysis experience.
With this latest innovation, Google Cloud’s far-reaching vision it had for Anthos is beginning to take shape, with platform services now becoming available anywhere and everywhere. The ability to run BigQuery on other clouds and in Google Cloud data centers will greatly expand the range of analytical possibilities for organizations of all sizes. BigQuery Omni is currently in private alpha.
2. More Control Over Data
In today’s tightly controlled IT environments, it’s difficult to imagine how a business can entrust data to a cloud provider for processing with a simple guarantee that said data would not be breached or compromised. The troubling nature of that question is why Google believes the future of cloud computing will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services.
Marking an important step in that direction, Google Cloud unveiled Confidential VMs, the first solution in the company’s Confidential Computing portfolio. The breakthrough technology allows users to encrypt their most sensitive data in the cloud while it’s being processed. While Google Cloud encrypts data at-rest and in-transit, Confidential VMs take this to the next level by offering memory encryption that allows users to further isolate their cloud workloads.
Confidential VMs can help unlock computing scenarios that have previously not been possible, allowing users to share confidential data sets and collaborate on research in the cloud while preserving confidentiality. This innovation represents a major step toward much-needed privacy controls in today’s open communication environments.
The product’s ability to protect sensitive data should help remove cloud adoption barriers for many organizations, particularly those operating in regulated markets. The solution is currently available in beta for Google Compute Engine.
3. Multi-Cloud Application Modernization
When building platforms to power your organization in times of uncertainty, you need agile technology that allows you to not only adapt to change, but to also take advantage of it. That type of agile-focused innovation is at the center of Google Cloud’s new Anthos capabilities, which are designed to support more kinds of workloads, in more types of environments, and in more locations.
Since first announcing Anthos just under two years ago, Google Cloud has been continuously advancing the platform’s capabilities, giving organizations greater flexibility to run applications where they need them without adding complexity. The latest improvements take these capabilities a step further with features that bring Anthos to bare metal hybrid environments, and to other clouds including Microsoft Azure and AWS. Bare metal also powers Anthos at the edge, providing users with greater flexibility to deploy workloads beyond their data center and public cloud environments to wherever they need it.
In times of disruption, it can be difficult to manage workloads consistently, and at scale. With these latest Anthos improvements, Google Cloud is making managing diverse environments easier than ever before. Deeper support for virtual machines allows organizations to extend the management framework of Anthos to the types of workloads that make up the vast majority of existing systems.
Google Cloud also announced a planned update that will allow users to run Anthos with no third-party hypervisor required, helping businesses improve performance, increase efficiency, and eliminate the management overhead of an additional vendor relationship.
Driving Growth in the Midst of Change
Google Cloud’s latest announcements underscore the importance of providing organizations more ways to innovate, capitalize on new opportunities, and still support the technology choices that have already been made.
Because these solutions require the right balance of strategic adaptability, customer-centric design, and technical expertise, knowing you have the right people in the room has never been more important. That’s why we’ve partnered with Google Cloud.
As an esteemed Google Cloud Premier Partner, we’ve developed an integrated and collaborative approach to serving clients. The difference? World-class technology, a seamless client experience, and a faster path to value.
To learn more about how Kin + Carta partners with Google Cloud to build intelligent customer experiences and future-focused modern infrastructure, click here.