At Google I/O, the global tech giant announced the launch of Vertex AI, a managed ML platform to develop end-to-end machine learning workflows. This new platform from Google Cloud aims to help MLOPs engineers build, deploy, and scale ML models faster.
Later, Google Cloud unveiled three new products—Dataplex, Datastream and Analytics Hub–at its inaugural Cloud Summit.
Google said the new products and services are designed to fully unify databases, analytics and AI in an open data cloud so that enterprises can predict outcomes and make informed choices on-the-go, and in real-time.
Tackling data silos
Data silos have become a significant challenge for enterprises of all shapes and sizes. Google Cloud’s latest announcement comes when businesses across the globe are working remotely.
On average, between 60%-73% of data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics, as cited by Forrester. According to Gartner, poor data quality cost organisations $9.7 million on average annually. IBM noted that businesses lose $3.1 trillion per year in the US alone due to poor data quality.
Today, many cloud service providers, including AWS, Microsoft and Google, have been helping enterprises utilise their data effectively. For instance, Microsoft offers multiple products in data science and machine learning, including Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services, Azure Databricks, among others. Similarly, AWS Marketplace offers data and analytics solutions.
Let’s look at Google Cloud’s latest products and services.
Dataplex
Dataplex is an intelligent data fabric that provides a way to manage, monitor centrally, and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to various analytics and data science tools.
It offers an integrated analytics experience, bringing together both Google Cloud and open-source tools so that businesses can rapidly curate, secure, integrate and analyse data at scale. With this, enterprises can now spend less time wrestling with infrastructure and more time focused on driving business outcomes using Google AI and ML capabilities.
Dataplex will simplify the existing analytics workflows with its unified data fabric and a single interface for policy management and governance across all analytics data, said Kumar Menon, SVP, data fabric and decision science technology, Equifax. “Its built-in data discovery and data quality features will ensure that our data scientists and analytics always have access to high-quality data that they can trust,” he added.
Datastream
Datastream helps move and synchronise data between heterogeneous database, storage and applications reliably to support real-time analytics, database replication and event-driven architectures.
Using this, enterprises can now seamlessly deliver change streams from Oracle and MySQL databases into Google Cloud services such as BigQuery, CloudSQL, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Spanner, saving time and resources, ensuring your data is accurate and updated.
Datastream provides an integrated solution for change data capture (CDC) replication use cases with custom sources and destinations (Source: Google Cloud)
Stewart Bond, director of data integration and intelligence software research at IDC, said the new CDC offering from Google Cloud is a differentiator for Google among hyperscale cloud service providers, where it supports replication of data from Oracle and MYSQL databases into the Google Cloud environment using a serverless cloud-native architecture. Further, this helps remove the burden of infrastructure management for organisations and provides elastic scalability to handle real-time workloads.
Analytics Hub
Analytics Hub allows access and sharing of valuable datasets and analytics assets (including BigQuery ML models, Looker Blocks, data quality recipes, etc.) across organisational boundaries. It is a fully managed service built on BigQuery to efficiently and securely create a data-sharing ecosystem.
In addition to this, Google Cloud also announced updates to BigQuery, Dataflow, Looker, and Spanner technologies.
