Google Cloud on Wednesday announced a wide variety of new security and management tools meant to provide its customers with even more options in regards to how they run their businesses, having also vowed to be different from its rivals and continue innovating in the segment going forward. While it announced over 20 functionalities in total, the company highlighted three newly supported use cases that it believes do a good job at illustrating how its offerings are unique and deliver unprecedented capabilities, with the scenarios being focused on extremely high levels of data control, risk visibility, and general transparency surrounding the manner in which Google Cloud interacts with its clients’ information.
The Alphabet-owned company claims its cloud platform has been built with security in mind from the ground up, pointing to its proprietary solutions such as the Titan chip, end-to-end encryption, and flexibility in regards to custom security solutions which Google Cloud clients are able to deploy. VPC Service Controls is a new addition to the platform meant to further enhance its security, providing consumers with what’s effectively an invisible barrier protecting data from leaving cloud apps, having been primarily designed as a tool to combat information exfiltration and prevent hacks. Cloud Security Command Center is another such new feature that’s currently available in alpha, with Google describing it as the ultimate tool for gaining actionable insights into potential data risks that can identify threats before any damage has been done. Google is also seeking to improve its own transparency through a combination of Access Transparency and Cloud Audit logs that will allow its clients to keep track of what the company’s administrators are doing and allow them to restrict their jurisdiction only to those activities with entirely valid business justifications such as recovering systems following an outage.
As the competition between Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services heats up, all three major cloud service providers are seeking to innovate in the segment and convince enterprise clients their solution is the safest long-term bet which can ensure perfect scalability and optimal performance. As far as actual customers are concerned, an increasing number of them are now embracing multi-cloud solutions due to fears of vendor lock-ins, with that shift also being partially prompted by mergers and acquisitions, according to some industry watchers.