Google Cloud Next OnAir Week 1: Industry Insights, BigQuery Omni, Confidential VMs & More

SADA Says | Cloud Computing Blog

By SADA Says | Cloud Computing Blog

Google Cloud Next OnAir ‘20 kicked off on July 14th with a variety of informative sessions and a number of exciting announcements to help businesses solve their biggest challenges. The free nine-week digital event features breakout sessions, digital demos, learning and development opportunities and a chance to connect with IT professionals, developers, executives and Google Cloud experts. Every Tuesday, a new topic is highlighted, and every Thursday, SADA provides post-session recaps and commentary from our executives and cloud experts to help you navigate your cloud journey. 

Week 1 of Next OnAir was geared towards the theme of Industry Insights, and Google Cloud executives focused on their transformational efforts across industries working with customers and ecosystem partners. SADA’s executives and cloud experts found the following sessions to be particularly compelling and provided some enlightening post-session insights and commentary that you won’t want to miss: 

Week 1 SADA Says Post-Session Recaps

Tony Safoian

Opening Keynote

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian shares insights on how businesses can leverage cloud technology to build for the future and adapt to complexities, challenges, and opportunities.

#SADASays: Post-Keynote Commentary with Tony Safoian, CEO and Simon Margolis, Director of Cloud Adoption 

Heather Sheston

Re-imagining Public Sector Modernization in Response to COVID-19 and Beyond

#SADASays: Post-Session Commentary with Heather Sheston, Client Partner Executive, Public Sector 

Michael Ames

Reimagining Healthcare in the Era of COVID-19

Aashima Gupta, Industry Strategy Solutions Lead at Google Cloud, discusses how they’re supporting the healthcare and life sciences industry during the era of COVID-19.

#SADASays: Post-Session Commentary with Michael Ames, Sr. Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences 

Opening Keynotes

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, kicked off the event with a keynote that addressed the challenges we’re all facing due to the current pandemic. As week one was industry focused, Pichai delved into how Google Cloud is empowering healthcare providers with telehealth solutions, helping retailers meet consumer demands, and arming educators and students with online learning tools. With the sudden increase in remote work, businesses have had to quickly adjust and accelerate their digital transformation efforts to enable collaboration and flexibility. Pichai stated, “The pandemic has reaffirmed that work is not defined by a physical place – it can happen anywhere.” 

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, highlighted the company’s mission to help organizations meet their challenges head on with their three main capabilities:  

  • Their global scale distributed infrastructure, including cutting-edge compute, storage and networking
  • Their digital transformation platform that enables organizations to manage data at scale, develop and modernize applications, understand and analyze data, collaborate with people and take advantage of AI capabilities 
  • Their suite of industry-specific solutions that deliver new digital capabilities in healthcare, retail, media and entertainment, and other industries

Major Announcements

Although the format of this year’s event was different, there was no shortage of the exciting announcements and updates that we see each year at Next. Some of the major announcements that came out of the first week include: 

  • Infrastructure Enhancements: Google Cloud announced new capabilities in compute with expanded availability of its Bare Metal solution; in storage with its high scale file solutions; and in new networking with enhancements to its CDN, Cloud Armor, and Network Intelligence Center solutions. The company also announced exciting new machine learning-powered capabilities to make their infrastructure significantly easier for organizations to use.
  • Multi-Cloud Application Modernization: The introduction of new capabilities that bring Anthos to bare metal hybrid environments, and to other clouds, including Microsoft Azure and AWS, give enterprises even more ways to enjoy the benefits of a modern cloud application stack. Google Cloud announced that it will continue to build tools that enable businesses to migrate and modernize a wide array of enterprise workloads to Google Cloud. 
  • Analytics for Multi-Cloud: One of the biggest announcements is the introduction of BigQuery Omni, a new multi-cloud analytics solution that is powered by Anthos. BigQuery Omni will extend Google Cloud’s analytics platform to other public clouds, enabling organizations to use BigQuery’s familiar interface to break down data silos and create actionable business insights, all from a single pane of glass. In addition, there will be new capabilities that make analytics much simpler, including new natural language interfaces and enhancements to Looker, Google Cloud’s enterprise analytics offering.
  • More Control Over Data: Confidential VMs, the first product in Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio, enables businesses to run workloads in Google Cloud while ensuring data is encrypted, not only at rest and in transit, but while it’s being processed as well. This is a welcome development for customers in highly regulated industries, as it helps remove cloud adoption barriers.  
  • More Compliance Controls: The newly announced Assured Workloads for Government will enable government agencies and the enterprises that serve them to automatically apply controls to their workloads. This new capability will make it easier for these organizations to comply with things like data location and personnel access requirements. 
  • Industry-Specific Solutions: Google Cloud announced new capabilities to help organizations harness 5G as a business services platform. The company’s Global Mobile Edge Cloud strategy will deliver a portfolio and marketplace of 5G solutions that are built in conjunction with telecom companies; an open cloud platform to develop these network-centric applications; and a global distributed edge for optimizing the deployment of these solutions.

On Tuesday, July 21st, Next OnAir will be focused on Productivity & Collaboration. In a time where remote work is at an all-time high, be sure to tune in to learn how to change the way teams get things done with solutions designed for humans and built for impact.

Tony Safoian

#SADASays With Tony Safoian and Nicky Parseghian – Post-Keynote Commentary

Join SADA CEO, Tony Safoian and Nicky Parseghian, Practice Director, G Suite, as they recap the Week 2 keynote, Helpful and Human: G Suite’s Vision for Your Future Workspace.

Veronica Raulin

#SADASays With Veronica Raulin & Kelly Wright – Post-Session Commentary

Listen in to Veronica Raulin, Head of Change Management, & Kelly Wright, Head of Engineering, G Suite, for their take on Introducing G Suite Essentials: The Simplest Way for Teams to Securely Work Together from Week 2 of Google Next OnAir.

Victoria Mejia-Dai

#SADASays With Tony Safoian and Victoria Mejia-Dai – Post-Session Commentary

Join Tony Safoian, SADA CEO, and Victoria Mejia-Dai, Executive Assistant, as they review Teamwork From Anywhere: G Suite’s Vision for Content Collaboration from Week 2 of Google Cloud Next OnAir.

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