Google Diversifies Its Cloud’s Enhanced Analytics and Security Features

Highlights –

• A feature called Analytics Hub, which was first revealed to the public earlier this year, is being added to Google’s managed data warehouse BigQuery.
• Google also revealed that its BigLake storage engine is now generally accessible.

Google LLC’s cloud business announced the general availability of several tools that will make it easier for users to examine their data and defend it against cyberattacks.

Most of the functionalities will be accessible as a component of Google Cloud’s already-available services.

A feature called Analytics Hub, which was first previewed earlier this year, is being added to Google’s managed data warehouse BigQuery. Analytics Hub allows organizations using BigQuery to exchange business data with one another. As data shared via the platform is accessible in a single library, employees can locate business records quickly.

Google Cloud’s service, Pub/Sub, can be used by customers to input data into BigQuery from external systems. Data loading into BigQuery in the past required businesses to develop customized software workflows. To cut down on the requirement for custom code and, thus, minimize cloud expenses, Google has introduced a pre-packaged software workflow to Pub/Sub.

Also, Google revealed that its BigLake storage engine is now generally accessible. The engine promises to make it easier for businesses to manage their data lakes and warehouses, including those hosted on competing cloud platforms. BigLake has capabilities that can be used to safeguard corporate data, expedite analytics queries, and complete a variety of other tasks.

In a blog post today, Bruno Aziza, Google Cloud’s head of data and analytics, wrote, “BigLake lets customers build secure, data lakes over open file formats. 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.”

As part of the upgrade today, Google also made several improvements to the cybersecurity services available through its cloud platform. The enhancements will be available for the Container Scanning API and Cloud Firewall services.

Google’s Container Scanning API service can scan an organization’s software containers for known vulnerabilities. With today’s update, the tool can scan the code written in the Go programming language and detect security flaws. The famous open-source application development tool Maven, which is used to process Java code files, has now been given the ability to identify vulnerabilities.

Tags will be added to Google’s Cloud Firewall service, a feature that will make it simpler to apply cybersecurity policies to cloud resources. The search engine giant is also adding a second function called Network Firewall Policies. This feature allows administrators to manage firewall configuration settings in a cloud environment easily.

Along with the features that became generally available today, Google also gave a glimpse of a brand-new program called Log Analytics. It’s a part of Cloud Logging, a current Google Cloud service that enables businesses to gather information about potential mistakes in their cloud settings. With the newly-added Log Analytics tool, companies can also examine that data with the help of useful patterns.

Google claims that the tool enables users to conduct analyses using SQL queries. For instance, a developer may run a query to find out how late the requests are on average when they are sent to a cloud service. Additionally, businesses can use information from their BigQuery settings and data from Log Analytics to perform more sophisticated analyses.