The cloud holds enormous promise for organizations looking to extract the most out of their data, at a lower cost, and with better performance and agility. However, the decision of selecting a cloud vendor is not an easy one, as each cloud provider has its own strengths and focus areas. A multi-cloud strategy is increasingly being favored by organizations, primarily because it allows them to leverage a mix of benefits offered by the different cloud providers and avoid the risk of vendor locking.
Most businesses rely data analytics for insights to drive their business decisions and gain competitive advantage. However, until recently, multi-cloud analytics was a formidable roadblock. Moving or copying data between clouds was the only available option for analytics, and the process entailed significant network egress costs and practical challenges of reporting lags and network capacity limitations, among others.
Enter BigQuery Omni, Google’s answer to the data warehousing problem. BigQuery Omni provides organizations with flexibility to analyze previously siloed data residing in multiple clouds and arrive at actionable insights to power their decision-making. BigQuery Omni allows seamless analytics on Google Cloud and AWS, and capabilities for Microsoft Azure are expected to be launched soon.
So, what makes BigQuery Omni different? The answer is – its unique ability to separate compute and storage. BigQuery Omni provides flexible storage in any cloud platform along with a resilient compute capability that runs on clusters where your data resides and executes standard SQL queries.
BigQuery Omni is powered by Anthos, Google Cloud’s hybrid and multi-cloud platform that allows for a secure, seamless connection between public clouds, providing a consistent development and operations experience and a fully managed infrastructure. It supports Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC and Parquet file formats, eliminating the need to format or transform data in the public cloud region, or of moving or copying raw data from the other public cloud to Google Cloud.
BigQuery Omni essentially creates an enterprise platform for analytics and reporting that spans across cloud platforms, by enabling reading and writing of data anywhere. It offers a unified analytics experience across Google Cloud and AWS (and soon on Azure) and works with common visualization tools like Looker so you can extract insights consistently across cloud platforms. In addition to querying from multiple data sources, it also allows you to store query results on Google Cloud or another cloud platform.
By moving the compute closer to the data, rather than bringing data to the compute, BigQuery Omni makes multi-cloud analytics cost-efficient and faster, unlocking previously unknown capabilities and offering organizations to store their data wherever it makes the most sense for them, without compromising on analytics.
This article delves into the emerging need for multi-cloud analytics, the BigQuery Omni differentiator, and the many benefits of using this platform.