Three Gems of the Powerful Google Cloud Platform: Apps, Analytics, and Security
Abstract: When people think Google, what commonly comes to mind would be search engine or email. But Google Cloud Platform is rapidly becoming an industry-leading cloud platform that rivals the internet cloud giants. Explore three gems of Google Cloud Platform you may not know much about: Application Management services, analytics, and security. You’ll see why Google’s cloud offerings can be a great fit for your business.
What first comes to mind when you hear the name “Google?” If you’re a typical consumer, you probably think “internet search,” or possibly “email.” But in the world of corporate IT, people are starting to think “cloud computing,” specifically Google Cloud Platform. That’s the powerful set of services Google has made available to take on rivals Amazon and Microsoft.
How can Google compete effectively against these two cloud giants? After all, Amazon and Microsoft have a huge combined market share, and both have been in the cloud business longer than Google has.
Good questions. So here’s something to consider: the years that Google spent perfecting its search algorithms made it really good – likely number one – at analytics among the major internet businesses out there, including IBM, Netflix, and Microsoft. Also, the robust security that Google built into its popular Gmail service protects Google’s own corporate resources.
Those strengths, and more, explain why Gartner rated Google a leader in two of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant surveys for 2018, first for public cloud storage, then again for cloud infrastructure as a service. There were only two cloud vendors ahead of Google on the chart. Yes, Microsoft and Amazon. But Google is on the rise.
Here are just three of the powerful capabilities Google has to offer any business thinking about a move to the cloud.
1. Application management
As Gartner noted in May 2018, Google is using its cloud platform to deliver “the internal innovative technology capabilities that Google has developed to run its consumer business at scale, and making them available as services that other companies can purchase.” This is a huge plus for DevOps teams seeking new toolsets and a leg-up on the competition.
For developers building applications, and for operations teams managing the apps in containers and virtual services, Google Cloud Platform offers a serverless environment that frees teams from having to provision compute and storage space required. Specifically, the Google App Engine is a fully managed application platform that allows IT organizations to build and deploy applications using popular languages like Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, C#, .Net, Ruby, and Go. After apps are developed and released to the cloud, Google Stackdriver gives operations teams a powerful tool for managing and monitoring the evolving infrastructure, including services, containers, and container clusters.
Google has staked out its cloud platform territory as a developer friendly zone And they’re savvy enough to have posted almost all their code samples to GitHub.
2. Analytics
You don’t have to be a data scientist anymore to gain deep insight into your data, or to discover new business opportunities that the patterns in your transactional records suggest. Google Cloud Platform puts much of that capability into the hands of, say, developers seeking to embed AI into their applications, even business who want to do a little investigation into data and trends.
There’s a lot to say about Google Analytics, available for years as a tool for non-cloud subscribers. Now, Google Cloud Platform takes that basic business enquiry to a new level with pre-trained models that can get you started on analyzing your data, and custom models for advanced users to probe data in specialized domains. For machine learning basics, you can use Cloud AutoML Beta, a suite of machine learning products for developers with limited machine learning expertise. It allows you to train high-quality models specific to your business needs by leveraging Google’s state-of-the-art transfer learning and neural architecture search technology.
And if hard-core data science is within your team’s scope, GCP can help you bring your “A” game to the analytics work bench. Business intelligence is based on the powerful BigQuery with its fully managed cloud data warehouse. You can use Google Cloud Dataflow or a partner tool to ingest data of any type for analysis.
3. Security
You might say Google Cloud Platform was born with security in its DNA. Google security is built on 15+ years of keeping customers safe on Google applications like Gmail and Google Apps. GCP hosted applications and data take advantage of the same security model.
Google is proud to note that its “chips, servers, software, and private network are controlled by us, end to end.” Cloud customers get the very same built-in protection and global network that Google itself uses. Having earned the highest Strategy score for Public Cloud Platform Native Security from The Forrester Wave, Q2 2018, GCP offers security products to meet its customers’ policy requirements, protecting identities, data, apps, and devices.
How IGNW Can Help
IGNW is a strong advocate for Google Cloud Platform, because we’ve watched so many of our clients implement GCP with amazing results in record time. Talk to us about Google Cloud Platform, and let us show you how your move to the cloud can be the best business decision you’ll make in the coming season.