Google expands its cloud platform’s analytics and security capabilities

CLOUD

Google LLC’s cloud business today announced the general availability of several features that will help customers more easily analyze their data and protect it from cyberattacks.

Most of the features will be available as part of existing services in Google Cloud.

Google is updating BigQuery, its managed data warehouse, with a capability called Analytics Hub that was first previewed earlier this year. Analytics Hub enables organizations that use BigQuery to share business data with one another. Data shared through the tool is available in a centralized library designed to help workers easily find business records.

Google Cloud provides a service called Pub/Sub that customers can use to load data into BigQuery from external systems. In the past, companies had to create custom software workflows to load data into BigQuery. Google has added a pre-packaged software workflow to Pub/Sub that reduces the need for custom code and promises to lower cloud costs in the process. 

Google today also announced the general availability of its BigLake storage engine. The engine promises to help companies more easily manage data warehouses and data lakes, including on competing cloud platforms. BigLake provides features that can be used to secure business information, speed up analytics queries and perform a number of other tasks. 

“BigLake lets customers build secure, data lakes over open file formats,” Bruno Aziza, the head of data and analytics at Google Cloud, detailed in a blog post today. “And, because it provides consistent, fine-grained security controls for Google Cloud and open-source query engines, security only needs to be configured in one place to be enforced everywhere.”

Google also released several enhancements to its cloud platform’s suite of cybersecurity services as part of today’s update. The enhancements are rolling out for the Container Scanning API and Cloud Firewall services.

Google’s Container Scanning API service can check a company’s software containers for known software vulnerabilities. Thanks to today’s update, the tool is now capable of scanning code written in the Go programming language for security flaws. Google has also added the ability to detect vulnerabilities in Java code files processed using Maven, a popular open-source application development tool.

Google’s Cloud Firewall service, in turn, is receiving a feature called Tags that will make it easier to apply cybersecurity rules to cloud resources. The search giant is also adding a second capability called Network Firewall Policies. The capability will make it easier for administrators to manage a cloud environment’s firewall configuration settings.

Alongside the features that became generally available today, Google announced the preview of a new tool called Log Analytics. It’s part of Cloud Logging, an existing Google Cloud service that enables companies to collect data about potential errors in their cloud environments. With the newly added Log Analytics tool, companies can also analyze that data to find useful patterns.

According to Google, the tool enables customers to run analyses using SQL queries. A developer could, for example, run a query to determine the average latency of the requests sent to a cloud application. Companies can also combine data from Log Analytics with information in their BigQuery environments to carry out more advanced analyses. 

Image: Google