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A growing number of enterprises are adopting a multi-cloud, hybrid IT strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and to cut costs. One study suggests 86% already have a multi-cloud strategy and it’s decades of technological innovation that’s led us here.

Cloud started over ten years ago and was heralded the next big thing. It turned out to be the case, but vendors hoping to leapfrog the competition with unique service offerings quickly found they don’t hold the leverage. The end user does.

Suffice to say the rise of multi-cloud has been something of a marvel. The three big players in the market, AWS, Azure and Google, have a share not just because of standard competition, but because of enterprises adopting more than one platform.

Enterprises who adopt all three have access to each platform’s nuances and also mitigate the potential dangers of becoming dependant on one vendor. For enterprises to maintain leverage in the market they have to set themselves up to be able to migrate their services onto different vendors without prohibitive costs, or risk putting themselves at the mercy of price rises, service changes, outages and security issues that are beyond their control.

Google Cloud

A more recent trend as part of this push towards multi-cloud infrastructure has been the rise of GCP, in a market previously dominated in the UK by AWS and Azure. But if AWS is the gold standard for reliability and configurability, and Azure the gold standard for PaaS, where does that leave Google Cloud?

One of its biggest advantages is having enterprise-grade security at every level of the platform. This is hardwired into the systems with their private fibre network, where GCP traffic utilises Google’s private network (including its 60Tbps trans-Pacific cabling, as well as the upcoming trans-Atlantic “Dunant”) instead of running over public infrastructure; also guaranteeing N+2 redundancy between Google sites. This is taken all the way up the application layer with ISTIO to secure containers and microservices running on Kubernetes.

Crucially, Google offers high-performance, scalable virtual machines that make IaaS a piece of cake, reducing costs and improving business agility. A scalable solution with quick deployment is regarded as the gold standard, and Google Cloud fits the brief. Combining this with a unique range of value-added products like Spanner and Pub/Sub, and world class collaboration focussed cloud based applications, GCP is pushing its way to the front of many company’s cloud strategies.

The bottom line is Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are enterprise-grade powerhouses that will always be relevant. But Google Cloud is too. GCP is immensely capable and proven – HSBC are using Google’s offering to power their analytics and machine learning efforts. Leveraging all three, or Google and AWS or Google and Azure, will create a powerful multi-cloud strategy that benefits from all their features.

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