Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Technologies change from time to time. Some will eventually become obsolete as time passes, while new technologies will emerge to meet the modern requirements of the current landscape. However, there are also those technologies that manage to adapt and evolve, improving accordingly to keep up with the changing times.

As such, it is important to know where your technologies stand. For the cloud, which was first conceived in the 1970s (at least an early and primitive version of it) and continuously evolved with the emergence of the Internet, it still has a long way to go. However, its growth and relevance have certainly accelerated, especially in recent years. In fact, Gartner projects that the cloud will make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market by 2024. Today, we see various services offered in the cloud, from infrastructure to platform and software – and the list is growing.

There are many cloud providers out there, offering the basics of the cloud environment along with their own unique features. However, we can say that they are all similar in the essence of the services they are providing. That is why another way to compare these cloud providers is to see where they stood in the past and what their visions are in the future.

Like any other technologies, the cloud has changed over time and it is essential for a customer to regularly check what has improved, is being improved and will be improved in the future to get a clearer and bigger picture on which provider they should partner with.

Let us take Google Cloud, one of the world’s leading cloud providers, for example.

Google has been a household name with its ubiquitous service over the Internet, especially its search engine that literally became a word in the dictionary. With this premise, Google launched the App Engine in 2008, their very first step to realise what is known today as the Google Cloud Platform.

The App Engine, a developer tool, allowed users to run their web applications on Google infrastructure. At that time, applications had to be written in Python and were limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day and 10GB bandwidth per day. The services offered included dynamic web serving, persistent storage and APIs for authenticating users and sending an email, with additional features introduced over time.

In 2010, Google announced its cloud storage and App Engine for Business, with added management and support features tailored specifically for the enterprise. Three years later, the Google Cloud Platform name was formally adopted.

Since the launch of App Engine, Google has subsequently released various additions in the Google Cloud Platform to meet modern requirements and keep up with the changing digital environment. These include:

• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) components known as the Google Compute Engine, which allows organisations to run virtual machines in Google’s data centres (2013).
• Manage Virtual Machines where you can build your application (or components of it) using virtual machines running in Google Compute Engine while benefiting from the auto-management and services that Google App Engine provides (2014).
• Container support on Google Cloud Platform through Google Container Engine (which later became Google Kubernetes Engine) to integrate with Docker and Kubernetes (2014).
• Google’s initiative to utilise AI in its Google Cloud Platform in realising machine-learning capabilities (2017).
• And one of Google’s latest releases, the Google Anthos that enables building and managing modern applications across hybrid and multi-cloud environments (2019).

These are just some steps Google Cloud Platform has taken to meet the changing requirements of the digital landscape. Today, the platform has a plethora of solutions and products under its suite, including application modernisation, digital transformation, productivity and collaboration, security and smart analytics.

After all these years, Google Cloud Platform remains highly relevant in the market. It is deployed globally in 24 regions, 73 zones and 144 network edge locations and available in over 200 countries and territories – with upcoming expansions over the next few years.

When comparing cloud providers, businesses need to ask a few essential questions:

• Does the cloud provider have a proven reputation for things like reliability, availability, performance and security?
• Will the cloud provider and its services still be around 5, or even 10 years in the future?
• Does the cloud provider continuously improve its offerings and capabilities for its customers? What are its plans or roadmap over the next few years?
• How competitive is the pricing?
• What makes the cloud provider different?

Most importantly, you need to know if your organisation has the capability and resources to take the cloud journey on your own or choose a partner who can ensure a smooth and successful migration.

Rackspace Technology is the Google Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP) partner that can help you achieve more with the cloud – for your people, your business and your customers – today and into the future. To find out how Rackspace can offer you proactive support and always-on expertise (with over 400 Google Cloud Certifications and 2500+ Cloud Engineers across Linux and Windows) so you can maximise your investment in Google Cloud, click here.

About Rackspace Technology:

Google Cloud trusts Rackspace Technology to provide managed services for a variety of workloads because of our experience managing clouds and our results-obsessed focus on our customers. In addition to receiving the prestigious Google Cloud Managed Services Provider (MSP) designation, Rackspace Technology has won year-over-year partner of the year awards for migration and infrastructure services. We consistently deliver high-quality expertise and end-to-end support to our customers, and we’ll do the same for you.

https://www.rackspace.com/cloud/google-cloud

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