Google Cloud Next is an annual summit, held by Google, which celebrates the achievements of its customers and partners, and announces Google’s plans for future innovation. This year's summit took place recently and, as you can imagine, there were so many exciting things mentioned that we just had to shout about. We decided to pick the brains of each Cobry Department and have gathered what we believe were the show-stopping announcements. Firstly, we address the elephant that’s in everyone's rooms. The new world of work and how Google is supporting customers in sailing these changing seas. 

Fuelling collaboration in the future workplace 

As work was changing rapidly before our eyes, Google's focus was on providing solutions and tools to allow users to work from anywhere. Now that these are sturdily in place, thanks to Google Workspace, Google is turning its attention to Collaboration equity. 

Prior to the Coronavirus Pandemic, work, for most of us, meant travelling to a physical office location. During the pandemic, remote work became essential and we all had to familiarise ourselves with working at home and communicating virtually. Now, as we begin to move to post-pandemic, hybrid work is surfacing as a popular trend where organisations are implementing a mix of both in-office and remote work. 

Whilst this is an exciting new approach to work, it doesn’t come without its challenges. For example, team members may find it more difficult to participate in meetings to the same level of their colleagues, depending on whether they are there virtually or physically. 

In order to combat such disparities, Google has been working hard to develop innovative products which will allow employees to fully embrace new ways of working. For example, Companion Mode in Google Meet is a new feature which is designed to seamlessly connect virtual and in-person attendees by giving everyone advanced participation tools. 

The feature provides everyone, no matter their location, with interactive tools such as live captions, polls or hand raise, whilst leveraging the best video conferencing and audio capabilities. The idea is that colleagues in the same room together can connect visually and audibly to the meeting through use of a Google Meet kit. Meanwhile, enabling Companion Mode on their personal devices to connect and collaborate with remote colleagues. 

Empowering all users to build their own solutions

Continuing with the theme of the new working world, Google recognises that modern work requires employees to switch between contexts and tools more than ever before. Therefore, during Cloud Next, Google announced the brand new integration between AppSheet and Gmail. 

AppSheet is a no-code application development platform which tightly integrates with Google Workspace. It allows users to build apps and transform business processes. The beauty of AppSheet is that it is no-code. Meaning that you don’t need to have any development knowledge in order to create and deploy a valuable app. 

Now that AppSheet integrates with Gmail, Google is providing employees with even more opportunity to streamline processes, work more efficiently and regain time previously taken up by manual tasks. For example, users may create processes where budgets or holiday requests can be approved or create asset management systems directly from Gmail. This is an amazing new innovation which further enables organisations to customise their use of Google Workspace. Building a platform which satisfies their unique needs.

Making data sing, no matter the cloud

Each cloud has its own unique advantages. Understanding this, savvy customers have been adopting multi-cloud strategies in order to reap the benefits of each cloud. This, however, can cause some friction when users want to analyse data which sits across various clouds. Traditionally, to do this, you would have to move, or copy data from one cloud to another. Resulting in an extremely clunky and inefficient process. 

At Cloud Next, Google announced the general release of BigQuery Omni which will solve this problem for millions. Big Query Omni is a data analytics solution that enables you to access data across Google Cloud, AWS and Azure. This means that you will be able to gain critical business insights all from the same user interface. As well as use the same BigQuery APIs and standard SQL. In addition, since BigQuery Omni is powered by Anthos, you won’t have to manage the underlying infrastructure, you can just get straight to querying data. 

Data accessibility is pivotal for organisational decision making across organisations whose criticality will only become stronger as multi-cloud adoption increases. Therefore, development of BigQuery Omni by Google will provide customers with unparalleled support in gaining business insights and making transformative decisions. 

Building a more sustainable future, together

To round things off, we’ll take a look at a topic that is central to the culture and goals of Cobry - Sustainability. 

Google has already accomplished great sustainability feats, such as the use of 100% renewable energy and being carbon neutral. Now, it is pledging to use its unique position to help others do the same. It will do this by developing innovative solutions that will empower organisations all over the world to measure and reduce their environmental impact. During Cloud Next, Google announced its newest sustainability innovation - Carbon Footprint. 

Carbon Footprint is a product which provides customers with the gross carbon emissions associated with their use of Google Cloud. By logging into the GCP Admin Console, users can find such information and use it to measure, track and report on their own gross carbon emissions. Of course, net Google Cloud operational emissions will remain zero. With such strong reporting opportunities, organisations are able to demonstrate progress towards climate goals to employees, customers and boards. As well as uncover insight into how they can further develop sustainability efforts. 

This announcement is really just a drop in the ocean of all of the amazing sustainability initiatives that Google carries out. Nonetheless, a hugely exciting one as it provides customers the opportunity to understand their own emissions and do their part in the fight against climate change. 

So, as you can hopefully see, a lot to celebrate and a lot to look forward to this year with Google, and of course with Cobry! There’s nothing we love more than to help customers get the most out of cloud technology and apply it in a way that will positively impact business as well as the world around us. If you’d like to find out more about how we can support you in implementing the Google tools, please get in touch.