It’s known that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the leaders among the data platforms, in a market with plenty of options. However, it can be difficult for some companies to understand the need of implementing a good data platform. Even choosing the right one for them. Some may also think it is ok not to have a data platform.
Indeed, managing data is one of the biggest challenges for modern companies of all sizes. Currently, a lot of information is available from different sources, but it’s not always easy to manage it with a strategic approach.
Accenture’s report Data is the new capital states that “72% of surveyed corporations have no data and analytics strategy” and only “25% of surveyed employees feel fully prepared to use data effectively”. In a previous report, Closing the data value gap, Accenture had already pointed the following as the main problems holding companies back from getting value from data:
- lack of strategy and lack of a data-driven culture;
- poor data quality;
- siloed data; and
- slow data supply due to legacy technology.
In this matter, establishing a solid foundation through a robust data platform is key to change the approach and turn the companies more competitive.
Choosing cloud-based platforms to manage your data
Once a business decides to invest in a data platform, they need to decide between the multiple options available. With the idea of helping in this process, readapt.com made an article summarizing some of the most important characteristics of a modern data platform:
- Storage capacity: enormous amounts of data coming from multiple types of sources can be stored for immediate or future use.
- Scalability: a big data platform must allow for rapid increases and decreases of data for usage.
- Usability, security and governance: those needs must be balanced.
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions: a modern platform must be able to leverage the use of tools related to these areas.
Cloud-based platforms can provide these characteristics, as well as more availability, easy connection, minimal maintenance and built-on products that accelerate the migration of your data.
Advantages of using Google Cloud Platform
As we all know, in general, modern big data systems handle massive amounts of data. It’s natural to host big data infrastructures in the cloud, because it provides unlimited data storage and easy options for highly parallelized big data processing and analysis. So why choose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) specifically?
- Global network: Google keeps on growing and adding more and more locations, ever expanding the network and its options for high availability and redundancy. This way uptime and reliability of your products inside Google Cloud’s is maximized.
- Better speed: Google’s infrastructure is interconnected by a gigantic private global network. This means faster network speeds so data can be processed faster overall.
- Cost effectiveness: GCP offers bigger discounts for long-running workloads compared to AWS or Microsoft’s Azure. Overall, big data benefits from the lower costs of deploying projects on the cloud, because these kinds of servers are really expensive. Infrastructure administration costs are also cut because of the use of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a service (PaaS) models.
- Security: Highly regarded inside Google Cloud’s networks with more than 500 security professionals making sure all your data is safe and secure. Minimal data is stored on computers when using web-based apps on the cloud. The security model in Google Cloud Platform is equal for every kind of client, small businesses or the bigger enterprises.
- Easy integration: GCP offers the easiest integration with other Google products, which makes it the best choice for building solutions that interact with the Google environment.
Only on Google Cloud Platform
Besides all of the aforementioned advantages, an extensive group of specialized tools are available inside Google Cloud Platform:
- BigQuery: a serverless, cost-effective and multi-cloud data warehouse designed to help you turn big data into valuable business insights. It processes terabytes of data in seconds, provides insights in real-time and is scalable.
- Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): a great tool when you need to deploy and manage containerized applications.
- Google Anthos: a solution for deploying Kubernetes on GCP, on premises, and across multiple cloud platforms or environments.
- Dataflow: GCP’s managed streaming analytics service that minimizes latency, processing time, and cost through autoscaling and batch processing. It’s a service for automated provisioning, management and optimization of resources.
- Vertex AI: a tool for building, deploying and scaling ML models with pre-trained and custom tooling within an unified AI platform.
- Data governance tools: Google offers some of the most trusted tools to enable data governance at an organizational level. These include a Data Catalog as well other tools like Data Loss Prevention and Identity Access Management.
- Others solutions like Google Cloud SDK, Dataproc, Dataform, DataFusion, Dataprep, Android Studio, Cloud Playground, and more.
Summary
Because of all the characteristics and advantages provided for their users, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is considered a comprehensive and holistic cloud-based data platform. This is powered by a wide range of specialized tools and solutions you can use inside the platform to solve specific problems in your data management architecture.
In 2021, Gartner® named Google as a Leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS). The tech company was also named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Analytics, Q2 2021 report for its Dataflow tool.
Being one of the biggest and most recognized names in the market, it can be a good starting point to incorporate a robust data platform as GCP in your company.