During Cloud Next event in San Francisco, the team of Google segmented the roadmap for its cloud business. Having more than 10,000 attendees, the event also resembled the world that it is ready to take on the enterprises.
Having a hard work since 18 months to get a position to the cloud market, it has been a strong player. The top executives didn’t miss the opportunity to pitch its cloud platform to enterprises. Though Amazon and Microsoft are major player of this game, Google is using some of its deep strengths to provide the differentiate platform to the customers.
Let’s go through some takeaways from Google Cloud Next 2017.
Securing the cloud
The first priority for Google is to maintain security for its cloud platform. It is all about innovating in the fields of key management, compliance, multi-factor authentication and data loss prevention.
Secure access to enterprise application without using VPN is done with the help of Identity-Aware Proxy. It limits the access of user identity and groups that comes up with integrated phishing resistant Security key.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) API scans data for many tactful data types and automatically edits them. Customers can find and edit the sensitive data that is store in GCP with few API calls.
Customer wins by securing enterprise
The case studies of Google’s cloud base were based on Spotify, Snapchat etc. Though it was a large implementation, they are not considered as traditional enterprise companies. Now, Google claims impressive customer list that includes Verizon, Disney, HSBC, eBay etc. Adding these brands in the keynote, Google made a statement that its cloud platform is enterprise-ready.
GCP into a data-centric cloud platform
The secret sauce of Google is data and analytics. Being, one of the Big Data and Machine Learning, the company is turning it into a differentiating factor. GCP has list of Machine learning services in the form of Cloud ML engine, Cloud Vision API, Cloud Jobs API and Advanced Solution Lab (ASL). Developers can explore video content by providing information about the entities within the video content with the help of Cloud Video Intelligence API.
Cloud Dataprep is a new service that aims to make the extract, transform, and load (ETL) jobs easier on GCP, build in the collaboration with Trifacta. The GCP customers can now analyze commercial datasets that are coming from Xignite, Remine, AccuWeather and HouseCanary with BigQuery.
Boosting Developers Productivity
Google announced the fleet of services, new features and tools to bring the developer productivity. App Engine now supports a flexible deployment model based on containers. Developers can choose from multiple languages, runtimes, and frameworks to run their mobile application in the cloud.
Enabling deployment workloads in GCp, Google has launched a service called Cloud Container Builder where developers can develop complex CI/CD pipelines to manage the workflow of containerized applications running on Google Cloud Platform.
Commitment to Open-source and Multi-platform
Kubernetes and Tensor Flow are making significant strides in the open source. Google donated Kubernetes, container orchestration platform to Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Tensor Flow, an open source Machine Learning platform powers the managed Cloud ML engine. Google collaborating with Pivotal Labs made Kubernetes deployment accessible across multiple cloud platforms.
Talking about multi-cloud deployments, CloudEndure, a GCP partner, enables one-click migration of VMs from other platforms to Google Cloud. Google’s Stackdriver is a multi-cloud monitoring platform that works across GCP and AWS.
Collaborating with the Proven leaders
At Google Cloud Next, the company made few announcements about involvement of some independent software vendors and global system integrators. Google was often criticized for the lack of ecosystem for its cloud business.
HANA to GCP is integrated that includes the certification of SAP HANA on GCP, new G Suite integrations, and collaboration on building machine learning features into intelligent applications, bringing Google and SAP partnership into the picture.
Rackspace, the leader in managed services partnered with the Google cloud to become one of the first managed services support partner.
Since many enterprises are using Microsoft Windows, Google is presently working with principal SIs from the Microsoft ecosystem to integrate workloads to GCP.
Concluding Note
Concluding all, Google is trying to transform itself into an enterprise-friendly company by figuring out a niche being the most open and developer friendly. With Google Next, the company tried to consolidate its place in the market. It implicits the strong message that Google Cloud is yet to stay. Though AWS and Azure are top players in the game, but Google is moving at the rapid pace, inching closer to become a viable alternative to Amazon and Microsoft’s public cloud.