Google Cloud Next: 10 BigQuery, Workspace, VMs, AI Launches

Google Cloud Next 2022 kicked-off today with the cloud giant launches a slew of new products for Chronicle, BigQuery and AI, as well as a new partner program and six cloud regions.

From new BigQuery, Workspace and virtual machines solutions to six new cloud regions and a partner delivery program, Google Cloud unleashed an avalanche of offerings at Google Cloud Next 2022 that customers and channel partners need to know about.

Google Cloud Next 2022 kicked-off today with thousands of attendees across the globe mostly tuning in virtually to hear about new Google Cloud products and the company’s vision from its top executives including CEO Thomas Kurian.

The event showcased the roaring innovation engine at Google Cloud as the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s sales continue to explode. The cloud services giant now has a roughly $24 billion run rate.

Google Cloud Next 2022

Google Cloud Next this year runs from Oct. 11 to Oct. 13.

With Google Cloud now having more than 90,000 companies inside its flagship Google Cloud Partner Advantage Program, these ten new offerings open the door for massive amounts of new sales and services opportunities.

The new offerings further elevate the company’s strategy around data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data storage and cybersecurity—including the new Chronicle Security Operations which better enables security teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats.

One highlight from Google Cloud Next is C3, which the company says is the first virtual machine (VM) in the public cloud to run on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and the custom Infrastructure Processing Unit that Google co-designed with Intel.

Google is also taking a big step in making Google Workspace a more open and extensible platform for users with the launch of new integrations and developer tools.

Here are the ten biggest product launches and news announcements today at Google Cloud Next 2022:

* BigQuery

* C3 VMs

* Google Workspace

* Chronicle Security Operations

* Google Cloud Regions

* Dual Run

* Software Delivery Shield

* Confidential Space

* Vertex AI Vision

* Delivery Readiness Index

BigQuery Support For Unstructured Data, Apache Spark and Datastream

Google Cloud is taking big steps to provide the most open and powerful data cloud in the market to ensure customers can utilize all their data, from all sources, across all cloud providers and platforms.

At Google Cloud Next, the company launched the support for unstructured data in BigQuery to expand the ability of people to work with all types of data.

“Beginning now, data teams can analyze structured and unstructured data in BigQuery, with easy access to Google Cloud’s capabilities in machine learning, speech recognition, computer vision, translation, and text processing, using BigQuery’s familiar SQL interface,” said Gerrit Kazmaier, vice president and general manager of Data Analytics at Google Cloud in a blog post.

Google Cloud is also unifying BigQuery and its operational databases. Datastream for BigQuery helps customers replicate data from AlloyDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Oracle directly into BigQuery to make sure applications have the latest information.

Lastly, the company announced at Google Cloud Next a BigQuery preview of an integrated experience for Apache Spark, which is a top open-source analytics engine for large data processing.

The move will enable data practitioners to create BigQuery stored procedures using Spark that integrate with their SQL pipelines.

C3 VMs

Google Cloud launched a new virtual machine family: C3, dubbed as the first VM in the public cloud to run on the 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor and the custom Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) that Google co-designed with Intel.

The C3 machine instances feature a System on a Chip (SoC) architecture and use offload hardware for more predictable and efficient compute, high-performance storage, and a programmable packet processing capability for low latency and accelerated, secure networking.

“Customers such as Snap, for example, have seen approximately a 20 percent increase in performance for a key workload over the previous generation C2.,” said Nirav Mehta, senior director of product management for Google Cloud Infrastructure Solutions in a blog post.

The SoC hardware architecture introduced in C3 VMs enables better security, isolation, and performance.

In the future, the purpose-built architecture will allow Google Cloud to offer a richer product portfolio, such as support for native bare-metal instances.

Boosting Google Workspace

Google Cloud said its taking its biggest steps yet in making Google Workspace the most open and extensible platform for users with the launch of new integrations and developer tools.

First, Google expanded its smart chips to ecosystem partners to allow users to view and engage with third-party data in the flow of work rather than switching tabs or context. Partners such as AODocs, Atlassian, Asana, Figma, Miro, and Tableau are already building integrations.

Next, the company created new APIs for Chat & Meet aimed at providing developers access to common functions like starting meetings or initiating messages from a third-party application, starting with partners Asana and LumApps.

Lastly, Google built a new add-on SDK for Meet which lets developers embed their app directly into the Meet experience. Figma is the first add-on partners enabling teams to collaborate on Figma design and FigJam digital whiteboards directly in Google Meet.

Chronicle Security Operations

In one of the biggest security launches at Google Next, the company unveiled its new Chronicle Security Operations—a software suite that better enables cybersecurity teams to detect, investigate, and respond to threats.

Chronicle Security Operations unifies Chronicle’s security information and event management (SIEM) technology, with the security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions from the company’s Siemplify acquisition this year and threat intelligence from Google Cloud.

The new solution provides a single display that pulls together and presents the information about an entity from multiple relevant data sources, including VirusTotal and Google Cloud Threat Intelligence, to help provide context and enable faster decision making.

Additionally, the solution investigates pivots that enable analysts to switch between alerts and entities across Chronicle SIEM detections and Chronicle SOAR modules, which can enable faster investigations. Chronicle Security Operations offers pre-packaged response playbooks to Google Cloud-based alerts surfaced by Security Command Center that can speed up resolutions and reduce manual effort.

“It’s another step in our commitment to democratizing security operations and providing better security outcomes for organizations of all sizes and levels of expertise,” said Chris Corde, Director of Product Management for Google Cloud’s Threat Detection & Response business in a blog post.

Google said, moving forward, all security operations software will come under the Chronicle brand. The Siemplify brand will be replaced with Chronicle SOAR, and security analytics capabilities of the suite will be named Chronicle SIEM.

New Google Cloud Regions: Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden

Google Cloud has been spending billions each year on building and equipping new data centers across the globe to accommodate the growing demand for its cloud services and infrastructure.

The company unveiled plans at Google Cloud Next to build new cloud regions in six counties: Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden.

The six new Google Cloud regions will bring the company’s global network to 49 live and pending regions.

“These cloud regions help bring innovations from across Google closer to our customers around the globe, and provide a platform that enables organizations to transform the way they do business,” said Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager for Google Cloud Infrastructure in a blog post.

In 2022, Google Cloud has opened five new regions including in Milan Italy; Paris, France; Madrid, Spain; Columbus, Ohio; and Dallas Texas.

In August, the company unveiled plans to add cloud regions in Mexico, Malaysia, New Zealand and Thailand.

Dual Run For Google Cloud

Dual Run is a new a mainframe modernization solution from Google Cloud aimed at simplifies and reduces risk of enterprises’ migrations of legacy mainframe systems to the cloud.

The new Dual Run service removes common roadblocks from migrating mainframes into the cloud. It enables parallel processing, so customers can make a digital copy of their mainframe systems and run it simultaneously on Google Cloud without affecting their core business or negatively impacting end-user experience.

“By moving mainframe systems to the cloud, organizations have an opportunity to better utilize their data, implement stronger cybersecurity protections, and build a foundation for their digital transformations that will drive growth,” said Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager for Infrastructure at Google Cloud in a blog post.

“Dual Run simplifies this process and reduces any associated risks,” Gupta said.

Dual Run allows customers in highly-regulated industries—such as banking, healthcare, and public sector—to more easily satisfy the needs of regulators by demonstrating compliance with privacy, security, and data residency requirements.

Google Cloud has optimized the service for industries including banking, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and public sector. Together with its ecosystem of industry and services partners, Google Cloud will deliver migration playbooks specifically for these use cases.

Software Delivery Shield

At Google Cloud Next today, the company unveiled its new Software Delivery Shield to provide an end-to-end solution for developers to tackle the complicated supply chain security challenge.

The new offering is based on the best-practices built in the past decades securing software supply chains at parent company Google.

“This is a fully managed software supply chain security solution that offers a modular set of capabilities to equip developers, DevOps, and security teams with the tools they need to build secure cloud applications,” said Michael McGrath, vice president of engineering for Google Cloud’s Application Ecosystem in a blog post.

Software Delivery Shield spans across a family of Google Cloud services—from developer tooling to runtimes like GKE, Cloud Code, Cloud Build, Cloud Deploy, Artifact Registry and Binary Authorization.

Software Delivery Shield includes capabilities across five different areas to address security concerns along the software supply chain: application development, software supply, continuous integration, and continuous delivery, production environments, and policies.

“It also allows for an incremental adoption path, so organizations can tailor the solution to their specific needs, choosing the best tools to start with based on their existing environment and security priorities,” said McGrath.

Confidential Space

As part of Google’s Confidential Computing portfolio, the company launched its new Confidential Space offering at Google Next.

Confidential Space allows organizations to perform tasks such as joint data analysis and machine learning (ML) model training with guarantees that the data they own can stay protected from their partners — including the cloud service provider.

Whether it is a clinical researcher sharing results or a bank looking at risk management in different parts of the world, Confidential Space helps customers collaborate using sensitive or regulated data securely across teams, organizations, and borders.

“Confidential Space can help ease the tensions between data sharing and regulatory requirements by encouraging collaboration while also maintaining data privacy,” said Rene Kolga, product manager at Google Cloud in a blog post.

With Confidential Space, businesses can gain mutual value from aggregating and analyzing sensitive data such as personally identifiable information, protected health information, intellectual property, and cryptographic secrets— all while retaining full control over it.

“This collaboration can lead to innovation, better customer service, and the development of transformational technologies,” said Kolga.

Vertex AI Vision

At Google Cloud Next today, the company released its Vertex AI Vision to extend the capabilities of Vertex AI to be more accessible to data practitioners and developers.

Google Cloud’s new end-to-end application development environment will allow users to easily build and deploy computer vision applications to understand and utilize the data.

The new end-to-end application development environment will help customers ingest, analyze, and store visual data. For example, streaming video in manufacturing plants to help ensure safety, or streams from store shelves to improve inventory analysis, or following traffic lights for management of busy intersections.

“Vertex AI Vision can reduce the time to create computer vision applications from weeks to hours at one-tenth the cost of current offerings,” said Google Cloud’s Kazmaier in a blog post.

To achieve these efficiencies, Vertex AI Vision provides a drag-and-drop interface and a library of pre-trained ML models for common tasks such as occupancy counting, product recognition, and object detection.

Delivery Readiness Index For Partners

Targeting Google Cloud channel partners, the company created a new Delivery Readiness Index (DRI) program to ensure partners have all the expertise and experience needed to successfully complete a customer project.

Google Cloud’s worldwide channel leader Kevin Ichhpurani (pictured) told CRN that his company will help partners understand a project better on a customer-by-customer basis and provide resources if needed.

“For example, they’re moving SAP on to GCP, or Teradata to BigQuery, ‘Are your actual teams, beyond certifications, do they have the experiential learning? Have they been there, done that already? Do they have the ability to execute successfully on a customer project?’” said Ichhpurani, corporate vice president of Global Ecosystem and Channels.

If a partner doesn’t have all skills necessary for a project, Google Cloud will provide additional training and enablement.

“If there’s gaps, we will put them through labs and provide enablement to ensure that customers successful,” said Ichhpurani.