GCP – Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir—Accelerating digital transformation in the cloud

Today, I am excited to welcome you to Google Cloud Next ‘20: OnAir, our first digital event series that gives our community an opportunity to learn from top industry leaders and get inspired by our latest cloud innovations. 

As we’ve all experienced, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed how we live and work—for citizens, communities and organizations. At Google Cloud, we’ve been touched by how heroically and graciously people and organizations everywhere have stepped up to the challenge, and we have been humbled by the opportunity to support them during this period of profound change. Remote work, telemedicine, digital banking and distance learning have all become new standards in today’s environment. 

As we face a period of gradual recovery, we see organizations shifting to digital models to sell to and service customers, to deliver products and services and even to design and manufacture products. These changes have driven many organizations to modernize their technology infrastructure rapidly using the cloud to pivot quickly, optimize costs and prepare for the future. 

Our mission at Google Cloud is to accelerate our customers’ ability to digitally transform and reimagine their businesses through data-powered innovation. We offer three primary capabilities to help you: global-scale distributed infrastructure as a service, a digital transformation platform, and industry-specific solutions powered by Google’s AI and machine learning advances. We continue to see organizations across various industries place their trust in Google Cloud because of the differentiated technology we provide to help them solve real business problems. This includes several leading global companies we’ve recently announced such as Deutsche Bank, FOX Sports, Procter & Gamble, Group Renault, Telefónica and Verizon—to name just a few.

Over the past year, we’ve made many significant advances in our technology and we have several important updates to share with you as we kick off Next OnAir. Here are just a few of the important areas where we are introducing new capabilities:

• Infrastructure enhancements: We continue to expand our global footprint, opening several new regions over the last year, with plans for many more. We have introduced new capabilities in compute with expanded availability of our Bare Metal solution; in storage with our high scale file solutions; and in new networking with enhancements to our CDN, Cloud Armor, and Network Intelligence Center solutions. We have also introduced important new machine learning-powered capabilities to make our infrastructure significantly easier for you to use.

• Multi-cloud application modernization: We continue to see rapid uptake of Anthos and have introduced new capabilities that bring Anthos to bare metal hybrid environments, and to other clouds including Microsoft Azure and AWS. We also continue to build tools to help you migrate and modernize a broad array of enterprise workloads to Google Cloud. 

• Multi-cloud analytics: We are introducing BigQuery Omni, our new multi-cloud analytics solution—powered by Anthos—which extends our analytics platform to other public clouds, allowing you to use BigQuery’s familiar interface to break down data silos and create actionable business insights, all from a single pane of glass. We are also introducing new capabilities to make analytics significantly easier with new natural language interfaces and enhancements to Looker, our enterprise analytics offering.

• More control over data: Also new today is Confidential VMs, the first product in our Confidential Computing portfolio, which lets you run workloads in Google Cloud while ensuring your data is encrypted, not only at rest and in transit, but while it’s being processed as well. This helps remove cloud adoption barriers for customers in highly-regulated industries.

• Additional compliance controls: We are also announcing Assured Workloads for Government, which allow you to automatically apply controls to your workloads, making it easier for customers to comply with things like data location and personal access requirements. 

• Industry-specific solutions: We continue to enhance our roadmap for industry-specific solutions across retail, financial services, communications, healthcare and manufacturing. One important example is the new capabilities we have introduced to help you harness 5G as a business services platform. Our Global Mobile Edge Cloud strategy will deliver a portfolio and marketplace of 5G solutions built jointly with telecommunications companies; an open cloud platform for developing these network-centric applications; and a global distributed edge for optimally deploying these solutions. 

These are only a few of the new product innovations and customer stories we’re showcasing over the course of Next OnAir. Throughout the next nine weeks, we’ll be exploring in detail all the ways we’re building on these and other announcements with an aim toward supporting you no matter where you are in your cloud journey. Our Sales, Customer Engineering, and Customer Service teams are here to support you with industry knowledge and technology expertise to meet your needs. We are also grateful for the broad network of partners who help us create and deliver new solutions to our customers. 

Together, with all of the Googlers who help support our customers each and every day, I invite you to join us as we kick off Next OnAir.