Helping customers solve what's next

Google Cloud has kicked off its annual flagship event, Google Cloud Next ‘21 and announced a series of innovations focused on solving the most pressing business problems across industries. 

These announcements span Google Cloud’s open cloud infrastructure that helps companies deploy mission-critical applications where they need them most; data cloud that enables businesses to understand and connect with their customers, products, and partners; collaboration technology that empowers hybrid work; and cybersecurity technology that protects users, applications, and data everywhere—all on the industry’s cleanest cloud.

Open Infrastructure: An open cloud that can run anywhere.

To help organisations accelerate their cloud deployments regardless of location, Google announced Google Distributed Cloud, which gives customers more choice for how and where to run their most sensitive workloads without the need to worry about underlying hardware. 

Built on Anthos, the first products under this portfolio include:

• Google Distributed Cloud Edge - Available in preview today, this fully managed product brings Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services closer to where data is being generated and consumed. Whether that is at one of Google's owned 140+ network edge points-of-presence, customer edge locations such as a retail store, factory floor, or branch office, or at communication service provider edge locations. This makes it ideal for running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads, modernising on-premises environments, and deploying private 5G/LTE solutions across a variety of industries. The solution builds on Google Cloud’s telecommunication solutions and empowers CSPs to run workloads on Intel and NVIDIA technologies to deliver new 5G and edge use cases. 

• Google Distributed Cloud Hosted - Available in preview in the first half of 2022, Google Distributed Cloud Hosted mode extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure for sensitive workloads with strict security and privacy requirements, all with an Anthos-managed control plane. We’re also announcing expanded partnerships, including NetApp as our primary partner supporting Google’s Distributed Cloud storage infrastructure. Our Distributed Cloud also helps us further our digital sovereignty vision, where we have recently announced partnerships with T-Systems in Germany and Thales in France to give customers more control over their data and more choice for how and where to deploy and run their workloads. Customers choose our open infrastructure because we make it easy to migrate to the cloud, we can run the most demanding workloads on our high-performance network, we have a clear strategy to support multicloud environments, and we provide a consistent developer experience built on open source that allows customers to write once and deploy anywhere.

Data & Analytics: The most complete and unified data, analytics, and AI solutions.

To help customers build modern data architectures with real-time analytics and power their mission critical data-driven applications, Google Cloud announced new updates including:

• General Availability (GA) of BigQuery Omni – BigQuery Omni addresses complex data management across hybrid and multicloud environment. Now in GA, it enables organisations to run cross-cloud analytics with data in Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

• Spark on Google Cloud – Available in preview, Spark on Google Cloud is the world’s first autoscaling and serverless Spark service for the Google Cloud data platform. This new service makes Spark a premium offering on Google Cloud and enables customers to get started in seconds and scale infinitely, regardless if they start in BigQuery, Dataproc, Dataplex or Vertex AI.

• Vertex AI Workbench - Building off the launch of Vertex AI in May 2021, Vertex AI Workbench offers a unified user experience for building and deploying ML models faster, which accelerates time-to-value for data scientists and their organizations. Now integrated data engineering capabilities are directly available in data science environments to make ingesting and analyzing data, along with deploying and managing ML models, all available from a single interface.

• Salesforce Tableau Partnership We are also announcing a partnership with Salesforce Tableau that provides a best-in-class BI Experience enabling Tableau users to seamlessly analyze data from BigQuery, to get the benefits of Looker’s semantic model, and to launch Tableau directly from Google Sheets. 

Google Workspace: Collaboration across every facet of the business. 

Google Workspace enables more than 3 billion users to communicate and collaborate, regardless of where they are, by creating a digital location for work. Google Workspace helps to increase productivity through assistive tools like Smart Canvas, and delivers a seamless user experience across products like Docs, Gmail, Meet, and Chat to address the unique requirements of front-line workers. Today, Google Workspace is announcing:

• A new Atlassian Jira integration that helps people easily create new tickets and monitor issues within the platform.

• A new Gmail AppSheet integration that allows anyone—even non-coders—to build email apps for tasks like budget approvals, vacation requests and more. 

• An expanded partnership with Citrix to ensure that distributed and hybrid workers have easy, secure, and low-latency access to virtualized applications and desktops from anywhere, with management controls from Citrix and Google Cloud’s global infrastructure.

• New security innovations in Google Workspace, including client-side encryption for Meet that gives customers control over encryption keys, and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Chat to prevent sensitive information from leaking outside an organization. 

Security: Keeping more people safe online than anyone else in the world.

To address the unprecedented security challenges facing organisations in every industry today, Google Cloud made two significant announcements:

• A new Google Cybersecurity Action Team – this security advisory team will help governments and businesses build a trusted cloud. This team will use Google’s own security best practices to guide, educate, and inform the world on security transformation, threat intelligence, and cybersecurity policy. 

• A new Work Safer programme – Work Safer is a new security program built to meet the needs of all organizations, including small businesses, enterprises, and public sector institutions, many of which rely on legacy technology and often lack the expertise to fully address rising security challenges associated with hybrid work. The offering will provide them with access to best-in-class security for email, meetings, messages, documents, and more. It uniquely brings together the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with industry-leading solutions from across Google and its cybersecurity partners,  CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.

Sustainability: The Cleanest Cloud in the Industry

As the cleanest cloud in the industry, Google Cloud has launched innovations to help customers take immediate climate action. 

• Carbon Footprint is available today to every customer at no charge in the Cloud Console so they can report on the carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage; and measure, track and report on the progress against their climate goals. 

• Google Earth Engine is now available in preview as part of Google Cloud Platform. Combined with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery, Cloud AI and Google Maps Platform, Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. Bringing the best of Google together, this new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability. 

• Unattended Project Recommender is a new feature that uses machine learning to identify projects that are likely abandoned, flagging them so organisations can choose to easily delete them, reducing their carbon emissions, saving money, and mitigating security risks. 

EMEA Customer Momentum 

From large multinationals, to public sector entities and technology startups, companies in EMEA continue to choose Google Cloud as their partner to help them grow, scale, and innovate with speed and efficiency. Today, Google Cloud announces new or expanded strategic relationships with Deutsche Post DHL (DPDHL Group), Siemens Energy and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA):

• DPDHL Group – In response to the rapidly growing demand for API transactions, DPDHL Group, one of the world’s leading logistics companies, has partnered with Google Cloud to help deliver scalable cloud services for both businesses and consumers. As of Q1 2021, Google’s cloud API services have provided seamless scaling technology to serve an exponential growth in tracking events for DHL.com, with zero downtime over the past six months.

• Siemens Energy – Google Cloud has signed a multi-year partnership with world-leading energy technology company Siemens Energy. Under this new partnership, Siemens Energy will bring its company-wide SAP systems onto Google Cloud, and will power sustainable digital transformation with the industry’s cleanest cloud. Aiming for a majority completion within 15 months, the transformation will see Siemens Energy migrating more than 2.6 petabytes of manufacturing, supply chain, and sensor data, stored across its multiple data centers, to a future-proofed cloud environment. 

• RSPCA – The RSPCA uses Google Workspace to help reduce the barriers to clear communication and collaboration as it works to improve the lives of animals across England and Wales. During the COVID lockdown, Google Workspace became an even more critical tool for the RSPCA as it helped place animals into new homes, despite social distancing measures, with digital rehoming trials using Google Meet.