Naturally, when attending an event titled “Google Cloud Next”, a lot of excitement and anticipation is built around seeing what cutting-edge products and service offerings are coming next in meeting forecasted industry trends.
As an Account Manager, I am always on the lookout for the newest solutions to support my clients’ digital transformations and empower them to be change leaders in their respective markets.
I was clearly most excited to attend the “Top 10 Cloud Technology Predictions” session in which ten Google Cloud Experts on the cutting edge of AI/ML, data and analytics, and modern cloud infrastructure shared their bold predictions for where they see the cloud is headed over the next three years to meet evolving industry and consumer demands.
Google’s Top 10 Cloud Predictions to be true by 2025
Neuroinclusive design
“Developers who start with neuroinclusive design will see a 5x growth in user adoption in the first two years”.
Neuroinclusive design is designed for cognitive and sensory accessibility. As the world shifts to a more virtual environment, it is imperative companies place value on the neurodiversity of their personnel and implement inclusive digital practices for internal and external collaboration. Neurodiversity explains how people experience, interpret and process the world around them, and impacts how we all work together. With up to 20% of the World population being neurodistinct, we need to create an equitable workplace for all personnel to contribute and perform at their best. Google Workspace’s neuroinclusive design not only raises accessibility for the neurodistinct, but also improves performance and collaboration for everyone. Enhancements in Google Meet featuring; an automatic light adjuster, noise cancellation, the hand raise function, and closed captioning help promote participation and structure for all attendees. The team also encouraged meeting facilitators to design presentations with simplicity and clarity, remove distractions, avoid really bright colors, use intuitive patterns, and to be thoughtful of the vibe being set to avoid pressure points. Offering simpler experiences with fewer distractions, neuroinclusive design in our collaboration platforms will improve performance for all types of thinkers.
Curated Open Source
“By the end of 2025, 4 out of 5 enterprise developers will use some form of curated open source”.
Open source is everywhere, it is integrated into infrastructures, powering electrical grids, power supplies, most cloud environments, and proprietary software. It’s here to stay but everything it empowers is exposed to cybersecurity risks and regulations. Google Cloud’s Curated Open Source with a layer of accountability allows developers to build secure apps faster by finding and fixing vulnerabilities automatically. The highly customizable Software Delivery Shield Cloud Workstation automatically detects changes, scans for vulnerabilities, and vets dependencies within Google databases before securely pushing code to production. This fully managed, end-to-end software supply chain security solution improves development speed without sacrificing protection from source to deployment.
Security
“90% Of SecOps workflows will be automated and managed as code.”
There are more cyber adversaries now than ever and SecOps teams are struggling to keep up with attackers. The existing process is inefficient; to pair adequate detection and response workflow, requires linear growth in people to keep up with the volume of threats and with over 700k unfulfilled cybersecurity jobs the issue will continue to persist. Utilizing Partners to launch Community Security Analytics (CSA) that complement native capabilities in the cloud, CSA will make security more agile and accessible through code by taking advantage of an API-first approach. APIs will automate risk assessments from ingest to analytics to response, supporting a Continuous Detection and Continuous Response (CR/CD) feedback loop. Within minutes, the terminal can scan across petabytes of data without infrastructure or human involvement. Once a rule is created, it can then perform “retro hunts” to flag risks in minutes that would have taken days to weeks before.
AI
“AI is going to be the primary driver for moving to a 4-day work week.”
Enterprise use of AI has exploded over the last few years and because of its potential to continue to improve employee productivity, it is reasonable to foresee comfortably completing 5 days of work in 4 days or less. Google Cloud Solutions like Contact Center AI (CCAI) and Vertex AI automate routine tasks and give workers the opportunity to be more efficient with their time.
- CCAI allows for 28% more conversations concurrently and with access to additional features like Translation Hub, which can process incoming requests from 135 languages within 35 seconds, customer service centers can save time while improving user experience producing 40% more customer conversions.
- Vertex AI makes AI research models and toolkits available for Enterprise use. The fully managed platform gives developers the ability to use their own custom models or build in existing trained ML models, integrate with BigQuery and other databases, and power external application SDKs. This flexibility and scalability unique to Google Cloud reduces code time and moves applications into production 5x faster.
Data and Analytics
“90% of data will be actionable in real time using ML.”
Recent surveys show that due to the operational burden of gathering data and making it accessible to the right users and tools, only ⅓ of all companies realize tangible value from their data. Google Cloud gives customers the ability to see, trust, and act on their data insights in real time. To see the data, Dataplex offers users an extensive data catalog unifying all data across an organization’s data lakes and warehouse. This means you no longer have to spend days looking for the right data and can instead spend time working with it and performing the necessary data quality and data lineage checks to ensure you can trust the data and then action it in real time using best-in-class analytics tools for both structured and unstructured data.
Databases
“The barriers between transactional and analytical workloads will disappear.”
Traditionally, transactional databases are best optimized for fast codes, reads and writes, whereas analytics databases are for analyzing large datasets. Most commerce applications require access to both datasets. Google Cloud’s Transactional and Analytics databases are built on highly scalable systems on Google’s integrated network of solutions that allow users to migrate existing data with improved speed (4x faster for transactional, 100x faster for analytical queries) quality and with minimal downtime creating easier to use data-driven applications on a unified platform.
Cloud Infrastructure
“Over half of cloud infrastructure decisions will be automated based on an organization’s usage pattern.”
Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Cloud Services have reimagined what’s possible for scale and performance. Google Cloud revealed their new world’s fastest supercomputer, TPU v4 Platform, which not only provides massive scalability to power high-performance applications, but also doubles performance at half the cost. The platform will apply automation and ML to determine balance points that best support workloads and will recommend, configure, and deliver the best option giving developers the freedom to focus on solution delivery.
Sustainability
“3 out of 4 developers will lead with sustainability as their primary development principle.”
While most organizations are moving in the right direction towards meeting their climate targets, 65% of executives want to improve their current posture and 36% don’t have tools to track progress towards their sustainability goals. Google Cloud Platform can provide companies with their carbon footprint at every stage of production and gives recommendations for best practices. The dashboard gives users visibility into the emissions measurements from Google data centers, by project, by region, and by product, which can then be exported to BigQuery for further analysis helping developers to build new apps in the greenest regions.
Multicloud
“Over half of all organizations using public cloud will freely switch their primary cloud as a result of public cloud availability.”
Most organizations are already on multicloud systems and in the years ahead many will use a multicloud strategy to switch from their first cloud to the next. Google Cloud has a unique management plane that meets customers where they are with their existing cloud infrastructure and can take them even further while minimizing transfer costs and supporting integration.
Business Applications
“Over half of business applications will be built by users who do not identify as professional developers today.”
It Is estimated that by 2025, 70% of new apps will use low-code or no-code technologies. Low-code and no-code tools enable business users to develop applications on their own and build powerful systems and solutions. Google’s Appsheet gives users a single place to store data and build apps and can connect to other apps and databases while still maintaining governance policy controls and appropriate administrative access restrictions. This not only gives business users direct control over customizing their internal applications but also reduces the number of external tools the company needs to maintain.
My prediction
Geared with the constantly evolving suite of innovative Google Cloud products and services, my SpringML team and I will continue to equip our commercial and public clients with the tools and solutions they need to unlock insights, create efficiencies, improve customer experiences, and reach potentials they didn’t know they could achieve.
How about yours? #GoogleCloudPredictions
