What’s up in Google Cloud? Next ’21 Special
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12. Oktober 2021
Highlights from „The power of Data with Google Cloud“
22. Oktober 2021
By Jörn Steege
What's up in google cloud? Next ‘21 Special
Wabion’s Senior Cloud Architect keeps you up to date with the latest news from, about and around Google Cloud. In this special edition, Jörn highlights his favorite announcements of Next ‘21, Google Cloud’s flagship event that took place October 12-14, 2021.
After the warm-up I provided in the September edition of my monthly GCP update, I can’t resist sharing my personal highlights of Google Cloud Next ‘21.
In particular, multi-cloud and data enthusiasts got their time’s worth thanks to the numerous exciting announcements from Google Cloud.
If you want to start with a high-level intro, I recommend watching Thomas Kurian’s opening keynote. The following list of my favorite announcements lets you dig a bit deeper.
Next ‘21 Security Highlights
- BeyondCorp Enterprise new features: The new client connector (currently in preview) enables identity and context-aware access to client-server applications. With the App Connector (also in preview), enterprise web applications outside of Google Cloud can be accessed. The BeyondCorp Enterprise Policy Troubleshooter (GA by the end of 2021) makes it easier for admins to diagnose access failure, triage events, and unblock users. Watch the live demo to learn more about the new features for Google Cloud’s zero trust access solution.
- Protection of sensitive data with Automatic DLP: Making Invisible Security a reality, Automatic DLP, now in preview, is a game-changing capability to discover and classify sensitive data for all your company’s BigQuery projects without you needing to do a single thing. Companies can better manage their data risk with rich insights for each table and column.
Next ‘21 Multi-Cloud Highlights
- Google Distributed Cloud: This portfolio of fully managed hardware and software solutions extends Google Cloud’s infrastructure and services to the edge and data centers. Enabled by Anthos, it’s ideal for running local data processing, low-latency edge compute workloads, modernizing on-premises environments, running sensitive workloads that meet sovereignty requirements, or deploying private 5G/LTE solutions for customers. Read the full announcement here.
- Google Cloud Cortex Framework: The new Google Cloud Cortex Framework is a foundation of endorsed solution reference templates and content for customers to accelerate business outcomes with less risk, complexity, and cost. This allows customers to kickstart insights and reduce time-to-value with reference architectures, packaged services, and deployment accelerators. Customers can deploy templatized solutions from Google Cloud and our trusted partners for specific use cases and business scenarios in a faster, more cost-effective way. In the first release, customers can take advantage of a rich data foundation of building blocks and templates for SAP environments.
- Anthos for Virtual Machines: For workloads that cannot be easily containerized, Anthos for Virtual Machines (now in preview) enables companies to standardize on Kubernetes. There are two ways to use Anthos for VMs: Customers with active VMware environments can attach their vSphere VMs to the Anthos control plane. Alternately, Anthos for VMs allows to shift VMs as-is onto Anthos with KubeVirt, an open-source virtualization API for Kubernetes. Read the full announcement.
- Anthos Multi-Cloud API: It’s much easier to use Anthos to manage workloads running in other clouds thanks to the new Anthos Multi-Cloud API. Generally available in Q4 ‘21, this new API delivers the provision and management of GKE clusters on AWS and Azure infrastructure through a centralized Google-Cloud-backed control plane. Learn more here.
Next ‘21 Data Analytics & AI Highlights
- Contract DocAI [Preview]: Adding to Google Cloud’s DocAI solutions, a scalable AI platform to help businesses efficiently scan, analyze, and understand documents, Contract DocAI brings new features for contracts – the most important and complicated documents. By automatically discerning important terms and the relationships among them, Contract DocAI also helps human reviewers to process contracts more efficiently.
- Vertex AI Workbench: As a natural evolution of Google Cloud’s Notebook offerings, Vertex AI Workbench (preview) meets the needs of many companies for standardized, integrated ML tooling. The Jupyter-based, fully-managed, scalable, enterprise-ready compute infrastructure with security controls and user management capabilities is the single environment for data scientists to complete all of their ML work, from experimentation, to deployment, to managing and monitoring models. Additionally, data analysts, data scientists, and all data and AI practitioners can analyze all their data from BigQuery, Dataproc, Spark, Looker, and Vertex AI in one interface. Vertex AI Workbench also facilitates training data at scale, with fewer lines of code, and easy connectivity to Google Cloud MLOps services to improve model survivability at the hand-off point to ML engineers.
- BigQuery Omni: The general availability of BigQuery Omni marks a new milestone for cross-cloud analytics. The multi-cloud analytics service enables data and analytics teams to analyze data across clouds – securely and cost-effectively with BigQuery. Available to all customers later this month on Amazon Web Services and for select customers on Microsoft Azure, BigQuery Omni enables secure connections to your S3 data in AWS or Azure Blob Storage data in Azure. Watch the Next ‘21 multicloud session for more details.
Next ‘21 Google Workspace Highlights
- Work Safer Program: Google’s new Work Safer program helps to protect organizations against rising cybersecurity threats, providing companies with access to a range of offers that combine Google Workspace with industry-leading solutions from across Google as well from our cybersecurity partners, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks.
- Drive labels: Now generally available, Drive labels enable organizations to classify files stored in Drive according to their sensitivity level. Drive labels integrate with Google Workspace Data Loss Prevention, making it easier to manage external sharing, downloading, and printing of sensitive files.
- Protections against abusive content and behavior: Google is rolling out additional protections to safeguard against abusive content and behavior. If a user opens a file that is considered suspicious or dangerous, a warning to the users is displayed in order to help protect them and their organization from malware, phishing, and ransomware. This functionality is now available in Google Docs and will be rolling out soon for Google Sheets and Slides.
If you want to learn more about new and upcoming Google Workspace features, I highly recommend you sign up for our monthly “Google Workspace – What’s New” with my colleague Jan Witt.
For more announcements from Next ‘21, you find the complete list here.
Last but not least, I want to highlight Google Cloud Carbon Footprint. With this tool also announced at Next ‘21, Google Cloud users can measure, track, and report their carbon footprint associated with their Google Cloud activities. Learn more about this latest addition to the greenest cloud – and stay tuned for my next regular GCP update in a couple of weeks.
All the best,
Jörn