Google Cloud offers unified data cloud strategy

At Google Cloud’s inaugural Data Cloud Summit, the company announced three new solutions across their database and data analytics portfolio to provide organizations with a unified data platform. With the preview availability of Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream, organizations can break free from data silos to securely predict business outcomes, empower users, and make informed, real-time decisions in today’s dynamic digital environment.

“A recent Gartner survey found that organizations estimate the average cost of poor data quality at $12.8 million per year.” With data sprawling across databases, data lakes, data warehouses, and data marts, in multiple clouds and on-premises, enterprises are grappling with how to centrally manage and govern their applications - and more importantly, integrate data in real-time to help improve decision making, innovate faster, and elevate customer experiences. 

“Data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it. Every industry is accelerating their shift of being digital-first as they recognize data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, Vice President and General Manager, Databases, Data Analytics and Looker, Google Cloud. “At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable, real-time insights, needed to future-proof their business.”

By leveraging Google Cloud’s data platform, customers now will have a comprehensive approach to their data cloud that embraces the full data lifecycle, from the systems that run their business to the AI and machine learning tools that predict and automate their future.

• Providing customers with real-time data replication: Available in preview, Datastream is a new serverless Change Data Capture (CDC) and replication service. Datastream enables customers to replicate data streams in real-time, from Oracle and MySQL databases, to Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, Cloud SQL, Google Cloud Storage, and Cloud Spanner. This solution allows businesses to power real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures. For early customers like Major League Baseball and Schnuck Markets, Inc., Datastream simplified their architecture and eliminated hours of lag for Oracle data replication to BigQuery and Cloud SQL. Read more about Datastream technical capabilities here. 

• Making data sharing secure and easy: Preview coming soon, Analytics Hub is a new capability that will allow companies to create, curate, and manage analytics exchanges securely and in real-time. With Analytics Hub, customers can share data and insights, including dynamic dashboards and machine learning models securely inside and outside their organization. Analytics Hub enables organizations to combine enterprise datasets with unique Google, commercial, industry and public data. Analytics Hub builds on BigQuery’s existing and popular sharing capabilities, which have already seen thousands of organizations innovate with analytics and accelerate their path to insights by sharing much more than just data. Read more about Analytics Hub technical capabilities here.

• Helping organizations simplify data management: Available in preview, Dataplex is an intelligent data fabric which provides an integrated analytics experience, bringing the best of Google Cloud and open-source together, to enable you to rapidly curate, secure, integrate, and analyze their data at scale. Automated data quality allows data scientists and analysts to address data consistency across the tools of their choice, to unify and manage data without data movement or duplication. With built-in data intelligence using Google’s best in class Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities, organizations spend less time wrestling with infrastructure complexities and more time using data to deliver business outcomes. As an early customer, Equifax is working with Google to incorporate Dataplex into their core analytics platform to simplify their workloads and build a single interface for policy management and governance across all their analytics data. Read more about Dataplex technical capabilities here.

“Google Cloud innovations continue with the powerhouse trifecta of Dataplex, Datastream and Analytics Hub. Deloitte will be a leading teammate in delivering these solutions with industry-critical tools for enterprise customers and institutions," said Tom Galizia, Global Chief Commercial Officer, Deloitte. “What is truly powerful here is that Google Cloud solves for disparate and bespoke systems housing hard-to-access siloed data with enhanced data experiences. They've also simplified implementation and management for better decision making. We are truly excited to realize the market potential with Google Cloud's innovations for building data clouds.”

Customers such as Equifax, Deutsche Bank, and Loblaw trust Google Cloud to build their own data cloud strategies because of its long-standing leadership in analytics and AI.

“Google Cloud has been a critical part of the Equifax journey, helping us protect our customers’ sensitive and proprietary data,” said Bryson Koehler, Chief Technology Officer, Equifax. “Google Cloud allows us to create a rich, unified and trusted data ecosystem between business units and partnerships–one in which everyone gains immediate value.”  

“Our partnership with Google Cloud will enable us to use data more intelligently and more quickly deliver new products and services. By building a data cloud with Google Cloud, we will expand our ability to unify data across our entire organization and innovate faster for our customers,” said Gil Perez, Chief Innovation Officer, Deutsche Bank.

“Loblaw is Canada's food and pharmacy leader, and we are excited to be an early adopter of Dataplex. We could significantly benefit from Dataplex as it provides a single pane of glass for end-to-end data management and governance. We are particularly interested in improving platform resilience and data quality by detecting anomalies as early as possible in the data pipeline with the help of Dataplex,” said Elton Martins, Senior Director of Data Insights & Analytics, Loblaw.

During the Data Cloud Summit, Google Cloud also introduced additional updates across its database and analytics portfolio:

• Building on its strategic commitment to multi-cloud, Google Cloud will also introduce BigQuery Omni for Microsoft Azure (preview) and Looker for Microsoft Azure (GA) to  help customers gain critical data insights across any cloud environment. These announcements build on last year’s market momentum with the technology preview of BigQuery Omni for AWS. Read more about Looker for Microsoft Azure here. 

• BigQuery ML Anomaly Detection is also generally available for customers to more easily detect abnormal  data patterns using BigQuery’s “built-in” machine learning capabilities.  Customers are using the technology for a variety of industry use cases, including bank fraud detection and manufacturing defect analysis. 

• Dataflow provides customers today with a fast and cost effective solution for streaming analytics. Available in Q3, Dataflow Prime will provide industry leading support for vertical auto scaling and right fitting for data pipelines providing the lowest total cost of ownership for customers. Dataflow Prime will embed AI and ML capabilities to provide  customers with streaming predictions such as time series analysis, smart diagnostics which proactively identifies bottlenecks, and auto-tuning for increased utilization. Read more here.

• The company will also lower the barrier of entry for Cloud Spanner, its fully managed, relational database, by reducing the entry price by 90% with the introduction of granular instance sizing (coming soon), while providing the same unlimited scale and 99.999% availability to support the most demanding applications. In addition, BigQuery federation to Spanner is coming soon, which lets BigQuery users query transactional data residing in Spanner, for richer, real-time insights. Spanner also adds Key Visualizer, available now in preview, to provide  interactive monitoring and  allow developers to quickly identify usage patterns. Lastly, Cloud Bigtable introduces best-in-class availability with a new 99.999% (5 9s) SLA. Read more here.