5 Ways Google is Establishing Itself Amongst the Big Cloud Players: A Recap of Google Cloud Next 2021

The Google Cloud Next 2021 conference took place last week, and it was interesting to hear how Google continues to establish itself in the cloud marketplace and where they are focusing their efforts in the near and long-term future. The keynote was given by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, and Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. They spoke about how the pandemic has sped up digitization in all parts of our lives, giving us new opportunities to transform our organizations—which is exactly what Google is helping its customers do.

They say Google continues to grow and innovate. In fact, today, its large, low latency network has expanded to 28 regions, with plans for 10 more. And, over the past year, they announced the release of over 1,500 products and features, including Smart Canvas and AI-powered industry solutions.

Kurian says to help customers transform and innovate, Google focuses on five key themes: data, leading edge technology, hybrid environments, security and sustainability. We broke these themes down below and explain how they’re helping close the gap between Google and other cloud players.

It’s All About Data

Google understands that data is at the center of digital transformation. Kurian mentioned there are several benefits to using its data cloud, including a recent move to embrace open standards: With the official release of Google’s new BigQuery Omni tool announced during the keynote, customers can now analyze, govern and visualize data from many databases and storage systems on Google or other clouds—including their competitors, AWS and Azure.

That last part was especially interesting, as Google acknowledges customers can move large workloads over to their cloud but will still work on datasets that are stored in other clouds. It could be Google trying to expand its customer base by being flexible—and it also shows that Google acknowledges its place in the competitive cloud landscape. We haven’t heard anything like this from the other large cloud providers.  

Lastly, Walmart, one of Google’s customers, spoke about its experience on Google Cloud and how they’re working together to accelerate transformation. They say 97% of their tables used for data warehousing have already migrated to the cloud and that they partnered with Google Cloud to use BigQuery. Walmart notes that leveraging Google Cloud has allowed them to unleash the full potential of AI, which they’re already using in multiple ways, including to predict demand, optimize the supply chain and free up time for associates to help customers in stores.

Implementing and Expanding Upon Leading Technology

While the keynote was mostly focused on what Google has done and is doing as one of today’s leading hyperscalers, Kurian did announce their new Google Distributed Cloud—a solution meant to help customers that want to expand where they use Google Cloud, whether in private data centers or on the edge. There are four deployment models, depending on a customer’s needs: Google’s network edge, Operator edge, Customer edge and Customer data center.

This announcement is part of a larger trend we’re seeing across hyperscalers today. While more organizations are looking to accelerate their cloud adoption, many are faced with workloads that they can’t move to the public cloud entirely (or at least right away). To better meet the needs of their customers, cloud providers like AWS, Azure and now, Google, are making it possible to install and run their cloud services in an on-premises environment.

Helping Customers Adopt and Adjust to Hybrid

We know that hybrid work environments have become the new normal for many companies throughout the COVID pandemic—and we also know that this flexibility is likely here to stay. With that in mind, Google boasted that its Google Workspace has kept employees connected by allowing them to communicate seamlessly across platforms—think Google Docs, Sheets, etc. It shows that they continue to place flexibility and convenience for its customers at the forefront.

Kurian also discussed AppSheet, which he says is a Google Cloud secret. He says the tool makes it easy for anyone to build an app and workflow, which means companies can build whatever they need to keep employees connected.

A Pioneer of Security

Amidst high-profile cyberattacks in recent months, Google says they are a pioneer of zero trust security and have implemented it at the core of their services and operations. They have also built cloud scale threat detection and response and provide advisory services to elevate a company’s security operations. 

But with that, Kurian says they are expanding their zero trust capabilities and security ecosystem to include new partners and tools that will be available to customers through their open-source framework and as managed services on the cloud. Lastly, Google says it is implementing a new “Work Safer” program, which will provide the highest level of security for meetings, messaging and more.

Keeping Sustainability at the Core

Pichai took this last bit of time to address climate change, and how Google is the cleanest cloud in the industry. They have been carbon neutral since 2007 and are still aiming to be completely carbon-free by 2030, across offices and datacenters.

They announced they are expanding their solutions to help customers do the same by developing Carbon Footprint. The tool will help customers see data on their own carbon emissions associated with Google Cloud usage and integrate directly with Salesforce Sustainability Cloud.

Overall, Google has had a busy few years, with more big things to come on the horizon. From our perspective, a lot of what Kurian and Pichai mentioned show that Google is catching up to the bigger cloud providers. We recently wrote a blog about how Google has established itself as a top contender in the marketplace, and the Google Cloud Next event shows that they aren’t through yet.

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