Google Cloud Next ‘19, London UK – Netpremacy’s highlights

 

The Netpremacy team took the annual pilgrimage to the sold-out Google Cloud Next UK conference for three, action-packed days at the ExCeL in London. 

Not only did we have one of the most prominent stands amongst Premier Partners attending, but we also attended several of the high profile workshops and talks from innovative leaders and customers presenting. 

As Google Cloud Premier Partners, we attended the Partner Summit where we were given a preview of the key announcements ahead of the main conference. Our main highlights from Google Cloud Next ‘19 are: 

Migrating, modernizing and managing infrastructure: Specifically; the introduction of Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP), which enables users to migrate their applications and IP addresses to Google’s Network. 

Accelerating app modernization: Google Cloud is not only enabling users to move applications to the cloud but to also modernise and connect applications. Google is allowing users to convert physical servers or virtual machines from a variety of sources directly into containers running in Anthos or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). 

Unlocking data insights: Google announced Cloud Data Fusion, a managed, cloud-native data ingestion, and integration service. It enables businesses to easily build and manage pipelines to cleanse, transform and blend data from a broad range of sources. Built on the open source project CDAP, the product’s open core ensures portability for users across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Explainable AI: To put AI and machine learning tools in reach of more businesses, Google announced increase interpretability of AI to help developers understand how their machine learning models reached certain outcomes. Explainable AI consists of tools and frameworks to deploy interpretable and inclusive machine learning models. 

Assistive features: Google Cloud is enabling users to create high-quality, error-free documents by bringing the Smart Compose feature to Google Docs, which uses AI to suggest complete sentences as you type. And now with the help of neural machine translation, Docs can help prevent even more spelling or grammatical errors in your work. 

Increase control and visibility: Google Cloud announced new capabilities for data encryption, network security, security analytics, and user protection designed to protect cloud workloads.

Key Messages from Google Cloud

Sustainability 

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud discussed how sustainability and renewable energy is at the heart of Google Cloud. Google matches 100% of the energy consumed by our global operations with renewable energy and maintains a commitment to carbon neutrality. That includes our data centers and Google Cloud. So when you choose Google Cloud Platform to run your computer, store your data and develop your applications, your digital footprint is offset with clean energy, which reduces your impact on the environment.

“When you move a workload to our cloud your moving to a workload that is built on the largest corporate renewable energy in the world.” – Thomas Kurian

Trust & Security

Google Cloud’s VP of engineering, Suzanne Frey announced new security features and highlighted the importance of trust within Google Cloud. The first announcement was an  External Key Manager, allowing customers to integrate their own third-party encryption keys with the Google Cloud key management service. Customers can keep their encryption keys completely outside of Google’s infrastructure, on their own premises or in a third-party key management service.

Frey also announced Key Access Justification, which works with the External Key Manager, providing a reason each time a key is accessed – forcing Google to request to decrypt customer data.

“Using these services together, you can deny Google any access to your data. As a result, you are the ultimate arbiter of access to your information.” – Suzanne Frey

Suzanne emphasised that Google is focused on full transparency to build trust with their customers. Her audience was ensured that there are no ‘back doors’ to data for any government and that your data is your data which is encrypted by default, and you can deny access to this data for any reason.  

Data Analytics in Action

One specific guest speaker drew the most crowds over the course of the event, England Football boss, Gareth Southgate, how discussed how he uses data to gain a competitive edge in football.  Gareth shared how data analysis is crucial to managing and training his squad. For example; within 12 hours of a match featuring one of his players, he could access data on their performance – wherever the game was played. Additionally, by analysing footage of thousands of penalty shootouts, he and his team work out the preferences of players, to improve England’s strategy for such crucial set-pieces.

This is an outstanding example of how powerful data is, and how it can be used to many different businesses’ advantage. Read the full press coverage here to find out more. 

Netpremacy Session: The importance of continued support after Google deployment

Our very own Director of Customer Success at Netpremacy, Martin Russell delivered a session at the Cloud Talk Theatre on ‘Going Google’ and getting the most from the cloud with customer success strategies. Martin discussed why it is key to have a clear vision and strategy underpinned with measured objectives. This is to ensure not only the success of the go-live but also maintaining the drive to ensure the solution delivers on the mission and objectives of the organisation, becoming an integral part of the business. Martin explained how to ensure that your G Suite rollout and adoption is a long term success.

Customer Success: DFS

It was a great moment to see our customer, Russell Harte from DFS discussing his Google Cloud journey so far at Google Cloud Next and to read their incredible achievements with the Cloud this year in this article:

From showroom to front room: DFS delivers smarter retail experiences with Google Cloud

Prize Draw: Chromebook Winners 

Over the course of the event, we gave visitors to our stand the opportunity to enter a prize draw to win a Chromebook C434 and were happy to crown our two lucky winners! A big thank you to our partner, ASUS who kindly provided us with the generous giveaway prizes. To find out more about the Chrome devices we offer – visit our Chrome page here. 

Live demos

Throughout the show, a number of our technical members of the team held short demos on our stand, read our previous blog to see some of the topics that we covered. 

Netpremacy are exhibiting at Google Cloud Next ‘19!

There were so many exciting and new announcements made over the two days of Google Cloud Next, as well as insightful customer stories. To see the full breakdown of key announcements made at Google Cloud Next ‘19, visit the Google blog here. 

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