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In a tech world of constant evolution, Google Cloud remains one of the data market’s standout performers.
Google faces intense competition from the likes of Microsoft, AWS, Oracle, and SAP, and it continues to grow its data offerings. Let’s review some of the core data products in its large portfolio:
Google Cloud migration
Google Cloud’s migration allows you to migrate databases to Cloud SQL from on-premises, Google Compute Engine and other clouds. The process offers migration with minimal and downtime needed.
Migration can be set up with a few clicks and offers continuous data replication from source to destination. It’s a fast-track process for enterprises to move to the Google Cloud.
Key features include:
- Ease of use: A guided experience takes you through every step of the way.
- Server-less experience: No servers to provision, manage, or monitor, ensuring uninterrupted data replication at scale.
- Open source and compatible: Is compatible with other systems, such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. This allows you to migrate data without surprises.
Google Cloud databases
Google Cloud’s databases offer a central and secure location to manage your organization’s data and allows for real-time data analytics from any location.
The database line, Google says, is an opportunity to tap in the database innovation which powers Google’s own underlying business.
They offer a range of features, including:
- Bigtable: Which allows you to manage column databases capable of managing billions of rows and storing single line data, such as financials, marketing and IoT information.
- Firebase real-time database: Provides real-time data services ideal for handling simple datasets.
- Firestore: A more flexible and scalable NoSQL database option which is useful for storing more complex data.
Google Cloud analytics
The multi-cloud analytics are fully managed giving companies the ability to access high-performance analytics capabilities at scale, using real-time insights.
They provide fast and accessible ways for enterprises to upgrade to a solution which is truly fit for the digital transformation.
This enables businesses to solve problems such as dark data, in which data within an organization may be difficult to discover, silos, and latency.
With the Google Cloud behind them, users can scale their data and analytics capacities to power business decisions.
See more: AWS Data Portfolio Review
Use cases
Google Cloud’s data portfolio has been used by some of the biggest companies in the world.
Working with Freedom Financial, Google Cloud helped the client migrate from the monolithic, slow database they had been using to a modern solution, offering the speed and convenience of the cloud. This would enable Freedom Financial to expand its suite of consumer products.
Before making the move, their data was hosted through another provider with a complex on-premises architecture divided by three units, each of which used about 600 GB of space split across three clusters. The structure would have made it difficult and labor intensive to upgrade them, with each cluster affecting the majority of their engineering teams.
Using Google’s migration service, Freedom Financial achieved a migration with minutes’ worth of downtime rather than hours.
“From the time that we told DMS to dump and load to the Cloud SQL instance to completion, they were all done and fully synchronized within 12–13 hours,” Freedom’s principal engineer says. “We’d kick one off in the afternoon, and by the time we got back the next morning, it was done. We’d actually been setting aside a few days for this task, so this was a great improvement.”
AirAsia used Google Cloud to become a “data-first” business, enabling them to capture and analyze vastly increased quantities of data in real-time. In order to ensure they were using data to become as agile and innovative as they could, they used Google’s Big Data Query solution to find and extract data.
This allowed them to collect and retrieve data to be visualized through Google Data Studio. This has given them a fast and secure base to deliver insights and scale new features.
User reviews
Google’s Cloud products enjoy some of the most favorable user ratings in the market.
The Google Cloud SQL database, for instance, scores an average of four stars out of five at TrustRadius, with users praising its security, agility and multi-platform recovery ability.
However, some users complain that many areas of the solution could be developed further, and the dashboard could have better customization capabilities.
Industry recognition
Google’s data has been recognized with a number of industry awards including:
- Gartner named Google Cloud as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems 2020.
- Google was also named a cloud leader for its analytics by Forrester Research in the Streaming Analytics Report for 2019.
See more: SAP Data Portfolio Review
