As the latest move to catch up with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing market, Google Cloud recently took the latest step beyond its own data center. In this process, it will focus on the two most important trends shaping the future of cloud computing-which will even determine the future direction of the entire IT world to a large extent.
Google’s huge data center has become a symbol of the information age. The consumer services it provides have covered billions of users, and they serve as a platform for this search company to enter the cloud computing world-a market that may one day be even larger than the advertising business.
The first focus is multi-cloud. As the name suggests, this technology requires the management of multiple different public cloud resources to handle computing tasks. For customers, this can reduce the risk of dependency caused by using a single cloud computing provider. As far as Google is concerned, it can open up a way to improve its strength in this market that it has been overdue too.
At this time, although this search company ranked third in the cloud computing market, it was far from the top two. Google Cloud Platform has become one of the company’s most promising businesses: Jefferies analysts estimate that revenue from this business will surge 56% this year to reach 10.4 billion U.S. dollars. But it is still far below Amazon AWS’s 61 billion US dollars and Microsoft Azure’s 37 billion US dollars.
Google’s latest move was announced at its annual cloud computing conference last week. They released a data warehousing service at the conference that not only can use the data stored in its own cloud computing server, but also can use multiple different Data in cloud services. If the customer has stored most of the data in Amazon S3, Google can still use this data to use it in its own services.
Breaking down such barriers to cloud computing can turn data storage into a regular commodity – or more precisely, it can prevent customers from being tied to other high-value services of a cloud service provider because of storage services.
This also highlights Google’s best breakthrough point in the cloud computing war. The search giant has always liked to advertise the advantages of its IT infrastructure in terms of efficiency and security. But its real leadership lies in high-value services such as data analysis and artificial intelligence, which have been carefully polished in the huge consumer service.
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Another major trend that Google highlighted last week is to move cloud computing closer to its customers. This means no longer concentrating computing resources in large data centers, but using smaller facilities to handle part of the work locally-creating so-called distributed cloud computing.
Although the same software and unified interface are used to control these widely distributed computing resources, customers still prefer to store data locally and value its faster storage speed. As the amount of data that needs to be processed increases, the trend of pushing computing resources to the edge of the network will become more and more obvious.
AWS and Microsoft were the first to discover this concept, and they respectively launched Outposts and Azure Stack services. However, it is estimated that cloud computing still only accounts for 5% to 10% of the global IT market: this slow-moving revolution is still at a relatively early stage, and the three giants still have a lot of time to build huge businesses around this concept.
Migrating data storage and processing to a place closer to customers can open up a space for smaller local operators, which is the so-called edge computing market. The future computing market may no longer be dominated by giants, but can support the development of more diversified local enterprises. But the software used in coordinating these scattered networks will still come from a few leading companies.
Since Google has always shown extremely high technical confidence (some call it arrogance), these trends will form a great departure from its philosophy. Its early cloud computing strategy was to use the most cutting-edge technology and believed that customers would come to the door voluntarily, but it did not work. Therefore, it decided to adapt to a more diverse IT world, acknowledging that customers already rely on multiple different suppliers. This may open up a new development path for it.
Google has always been an innovation engine-we now see them starting to look more outside. Gartner analyst Ed Anderson (Ed Anderson) said. In the coming weeks, Microsoft and Amazon will undoubtedly also release more news on these aspects at their annual cloud computing conferences. As they set up a battle in the cloud computing market, this will at least attract some technology giants to fight fiercely.