Top 8 Takeaways from Google Cloud Next ‘22

Here’s what our experts heard during keynotes and announcements at Google Cloud Next.

Nov. 3, 2022 | By Ramesh Vishwanathan and Adam Shea

The hybrid summit streamed around the world, bringing the tech community together. New announcements signal Google Cloud’s priorities and predictions for the future of technology and business. 

Security Will Always Be Front and Center

With its recent acquisition of Mandiant, Google will move forward with a stronger Chronicle Security Operations, boosting security operations and threat response services. Security must keep pace with the ever-expanding threat landscape.

Accessing Data Across Cloud Providers and More

Google Cloud announced a data cloud strategy that could truly democratize data across all enterprise users by consolidating data products. Open data cloud powered by BigQuery provides a single, unified platform to support different needs and use cases for end users. This allows users to access data across various cloud providers, sources, data formats and user profiles.

Company leaders can struggle with extracting value from their data. The culprit? A technology environment filled with disconnected data and tools that don’t work well together. Google’s efforts will empower end users and business stakeholders with easy-to-consume data though self-service on a single interface.

More Demand for Simplified Business Intelligence

Google brings together Google Data Studio and Looker to build a single lens to consume data. Simplification and ease of use is the name of the game, and Google continues to prioritize UI and self-service. Meet Looker Studio, where businesses now have a single source of truth while maintaining better security. These updates will enable better business decision-making through predictive analytics and business intelligence.

Improving Business Through AI

With the open data cloud news also comes an expansion into the AI services portfolio, consolidated under the Vertex AI umbrella. This supports an effort to make AI much more accessible for business use cases, including pretrained models for easy adoption.

For example, pretrained AI models can be used across vision, speech and language to improve translation times for crucial information. This solution still includes an optional human element of expert language review for customers, but expect to see better support and translation turnaround times for contact centers, back-end document processing and more.

Better Visibility, Better Governance

Google is ensuring visibility and safety in the supply chain of code itself, with Assured Open Source Software (AOSS) service as part of Google’s Software Delivery Shield.

Developers have used open source to fill in gaps and improve development and deployment speed. But with open source comes more exposure, risk and a lack of formal governance.

AOSS aims to solve this challenge by providing a curated repository of widely used, open-source software, while building in protections to reduce risk. This end-to-end protection will reduce friction for developers and add speed. Think: distributed, but still governed.

Developers will also need fewer reworks because the integrated validity checks within the software build and delivery life cycle will identify potential risk candidates early in development. In this moment, site reliability engineering (SRE) meets DevOps meets security.

Optimizing Infrastructure for Workloads

Google debuted infrastructure solutions targeting workloads many enterprises need to optimize. With defined templates, organizations can prioritize when and how to migrate workloads to the cloud. Through this offering, enterprises can:

• Reduce risk
• Manage compliance needs
• Meet regulatory requirements

Companies across industries can leverage these developments, focusing on their key pain points. While the media, entertainment and gaming world seeks to scale in the cloud, the finance and healthcare sectors can target traditional workload migrations for mainframe applications.

Looking to the Future with Blockchain and Beyond

Google announced its partnership with Coinbase, empowering Web3 developers and expanding the Web3 ecosystem. For starters, BigQuery simplifies accessing blockchain data without having to manage complex infrastructure components. Web3 apps will be able to access Google blockchain data through BigQuery with fewer headaches. We may even see Google services start to organically integrate within the ecosystem.

Company leaders are beginning to evaluate blockchain-based solutions, from Web3 to Hyperledger Fabric. CTOs who keep customers and business goals at the core of their digital transformation are better equipped to make the most of emerging technologies without simply chasing the hype.

Business Value Is Paramount

With so many exciting announcements, one clear theme continued to be at the forefront. Google is focused on driving efficiency by tackling industry challenges that impede business goals like disparate tools, technology and data sources. Ultimately, the key is unlocking business value and optimizing operations through technology.