GCP – Google charts the course for a modern data cloud

Google Cloud is a leader when it comes to data, and in the past few years, we’ve made leaps and bounds to help our customers level up their enterprise databases and analytics capabilities. Our data platform is a primary reason why the largest enterprises in the world like The Home Depot, HSBC, and UPS run their mission-critical applications on Google Cloud. We’ve also seen momentum in the analyst community, with Gartner, Forrester, and IDC validating our leadership in analyst evaluations across data analytics, databases, and AI. Our fully managed database and analytics services continue to power enterprise digital transformation as the always-on, hyperconnected world drives migrations to the cloud. 

Google was built to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. To deliver on this vision, we process and analyze the world’s largest data sets on the cleanest and most reliable cloud infrastructure. We have leveraged this expertise to deliver a new kind of enterprise-ready data cloud to our customers that is simple, intelligent, and open. It offers built-in automation to ensure your data-first business is operating at its best, with the simplicity to build whatever is next. 

Let’s dive into five reasons why we lead in the data cloud space.

1. Leading analyst firms agree that Google Cloud’s database and analytics are proven and enterprise-ready for any size data team. Today, our customers process and analyze up to petabytes of data on the world’s most advanced and scalable data platform. Customers of every size and maturity are able to seamlessly grow from small prototypes to global success. Cloud Spanner leads the relational world with its unique pairing of a relational operational database with non-relational scale. Cloud Bigtable unlocks high-throughput, low-latency applications and supports customers with millions of queries per second. Google Cloud delivers industry-leading reliability across regions, so you’re always up and running to support your mission-critical applications. Google has some of the highest SLAs in the industry. Spanner includes up to a 99.999% SLA and BigQuery recently announced a 99.99% SLA. When it comes to performance, third-party analyst firms recognize that Google Cloud is a leader when it comes to high-performance and scalable data management for analytics. To bring this all together, you need robust security and governance controls to protect customer’s data. Our customer’s data is encrypted by default, and identity and access management across our solutions are provided by Cloud Identity and Access Management (Cloud IAM). 

2. Google Cloud is one of the fastest-growing cloudsin the world across industries.We’re seeing growth across customer segments and industry verticals. BigQuery is widely perceived as the leading solution for analytics and data warehousing; Looker, with its multi-cloud universal semantic layer, gets people to insights from data quickly; and our database services, like Spanner and Cloud SQL, power the most mission-critical applications while redefining the bounds of scale, availability, and performance. Our document database, Cloud Firestore, even has the most satisfied developers compared to any other cloud databases on the market, according to a recent study by SlashData. Over the past year we’ve seen Cloud SQL’s popularity grow—it’s now one of Google Cloud’s fastest-growing top services. With the release of Database Migration Service, we’re now making it even easier for enterprises to move to Cloud SQL from on-premises or other clouds without disrupting their business. Our leadership in the data realm is a primary reason organizations like HSBC, Major League Baseball, Mayo Clinic, and Sharechat choose Google to run their data-driven applications. And that’s also why IDC named our data platform a leader in their 2020 MarketScape report on APeJ Cloud Data Analytics Platform Vendors.

3. Google Cloud’s databases and analytics operate with an open philosophy, which includes open source software and databases, open APIs, open data formats, and an inclusive partner ecosystem. Customers can choose from a wide range of operational and analytical engines, open source tools, and machine learning services. Cloud SQL provides a managed service for the world’s most popular open source databases, MySQL and PostgreSQL, so customers can benefit from the latest community enhancements paired with enterprise-grade availability, security, and performance. And open APIs ease migrations, portability, and data access through your preferred tools. In addition, our open platform enables out-of-the-box interoperability between a variety of services for ingestion, storage, processing and analytics—including Apache Spark, Presto and more. And with our rich partner ecosystem and integrations with core Google services (such as Google Analytics), you can quickly and seamlessly integrate with the data sources and technologies you and your team know and love. We are committed to partner and customer success. Our open, partner-friendly platform not only helps our customers scale their data and analytics needs, but helps our partners like Elastic, Confluent, and MongoDB scale their cloud go-to-market.

4. Google makes it easy for enterprises to solve their biggest data-driven problems with packaged horizontal and vertical analytics solutions, embedded with market-leading AI. Packaged, priced, and supported by partners, solutions range from improving contact center operations and document processing to targeted industry solutions for healthcare, retail, manufacturing and industrial, financial services, and media and entertainment. As companies look to expand their business across new channels and deliver real-time experiences, Firestore helps accelerate mobile, web, and IoT application development. Firestore enables developers to quickly build reliable, real-time applications at scale that can handle the changing demands of today’s business. For companies that want to build their own analytics solutions and ask questions of their data, we’ve made it easier for anyone within the organization—from the business user to the data scientist—to get insights from data with BigQuery ML, Dataproc Hub, Connected Sheets, and Data QnA. “With Connected Sheets, we’re not really pulling the data into the spreadsheet; rather it lives in the database where it belongs,” says Peter Van Nieuwerburgh, Global Change Manager at PwC. “The ability to go and so easily analyze and visualize the data is really powerful.”

5. We’re the only hyperscale cloud provider that’s executed on a multi-cloud vision. Google Cloud’s commitment to multi-cloud enables customers to use their data where and how they want. Customers can build or modernize their apps anywhere and deliver new app features faster, enabling success in this rapidly changing environment. Industry analysts have recognized Google Cloud as one of the only hyperscale cloud vendors to deliver on the promise of multi-cloud. In addition to facilitating customer innovation with our dedication to open standards, Google Cloud ensures customers can choose the right cloud vendor or environment for each of their workloads, removing over-dependence on one IT vendor. Customers can run apps wherever they want and get the management and support that comes with Google Cloud, creating opportunities for developers to rapidly build and innovate in any environment, including on-premises. With solutions like Anthos, customers can run cloud offerings in a hybrid environment using containers. This architecture also runs in a multi-cloud environment and today runs on AWS. Moving up the stack, Dataproc on Kubernetes allows enterprises to build containerized Spark machine learning and data processing jobs that can be deployed anywhere. Additionally, BigQuery Omni allows you to analyze data in AWS using standard SQL, and without leaving the familiar BigQuery interface. 

We’re just getting started
Google is a leader when it comes to data. By building a data infrastructure that powers Google products used by billions of people, such as Search, Maps, Ads, and YouTube, we have stress-tested our systems, services, and expertise. We have used this expertise to deliver a new kind of data cloud to every enterprise, with fully managed automations to ensure your data-first business is operating at the highest level and the simplicity to build whatever is next. We will continue to help our customers spend less time on management and more time on building. That means continuing to deliver a data cloud that creates an integrated experience across multi-cloud and hybrid environments for your enterprise data and analytics needs. 

Stay tuned for more to come, and get started today with our free trial offering. 

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems,  November 23, 2020, Donald Feinberg, Adam Ronthal, Merv Adrian, Henry Cook, Rick Greenwald}

^{Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}