From March 8-10 2017, Netwyn had the privilege to represent Toronto at Google’s annual Cloud conference: GoogleNext in San Francisco. We attended the conference both as partners and users of the Google Platform (GCP). We were pleased by all of the new and exciting announcements and developments. It’s always a great opportunity to see how Google is evolving its Cloud services. Hearing about Google’s own experiences in running some of the world’s largest and most reliable data centers helped create a better understanding of how this company is geared towards providing the best tools for not only collaboration, but for innovation. We came away with interesting insights and perspectives from all of their knowledgeable keynotes.
In this post, we’ll highlight all of the key announcements (bare with us, there were many).
Some Background on Google Next
The Google Next conferences are always exciting; a combination of keynotes from Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google’s enterprise collaboration platform G Suite. Both of these are cloud platform, so why are the considered separate entities? They differ in their target and purpose. G Suite, for example, is software as a service (SaaS) and is a suite of cloud-based applications aimed at enterprise information flow like documents, email, calendars etc. GCP, on the other hand, is a full Cloud service for developing applications using IaaS or Infrastructure as a service and PaaS or Platform as a Service tooling.
Key Focus Areas: Machine Learning, Security and Collaboration
Security
Google has always had a finger on the pulse of its audience in terms of trust and security with its Cloud Platform and plans of continually investing heavily on security. During the conference, they introduced Titan; a purpose-built chip used to establish root trust on hardware for both machines and peripherals in Cloud Infrastructure. They also announced an Identity Aware Proxy to act in place of a VPN for accessing GCP resources.
Machine Learning
Judging on the heavy focus on this next topic, we think it’s safe to say – for Google at least – 2017 is the year for Machine Learning and AI. Google made their general purpose machine learning service available to the public. Why should people care about this? This is targeted for organizations that aim to put more production workloads on the service. For years, Google has had the ability to process data at scale and has been doing so using Machine Learning internally. That real-world application seems to be fueling their Cloud efforts through data analytic tools like: CMLE and BigQuery.
“Democratising artificial intelligence is important. We need to lower the barriers and make these tools available the largest possible community of developers, enterprises,” – Dr. Fei Fei Li, Chief Scientist for AI and Machine Learning for Google
JamBoard: This Year’s Must-Have Collaboration Tool
While this tool is not really cloud related, it touches on Google’s dedication to making teams work more efficiently, collaborating together in real time. Jamboard is a touchscreen monitor that acts like a whiteboard with deep integration in Google Hangouts and the rest of G Suite.
Netwyn is a certified implementation partner for G Suite. Contact us if you have any questions about how G Suite might fit your business’ IT infrastructure.