Google Cloud forms Data Cloud Alliance for digital transformation
Google Cloud and other tech providers have formed an initiative to eliminate data lock-in and ensure access to data across storage, analytics, and database providers.
Google Cloud and several data, analytics, storage, and database providers in the tech industry have announced they are forming a new initiative to give global businesses more seamless access and insights into the data required for digital transformation.
As founding members of the Data Cloud Alliance, Google Cloud, Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Starburst aim to make data more portable and accessible across disparate business systems, platforms, and environments.
"Data is the common foundation for all digital transformations," says Google Cloud VP and GM of Databases, Data Analytics and Business Intelligence, Gerrit Kazmaier.
"By committing to open data standards, access, and integration between the most popular data platforms and applications today, we believe we can significantly accelerate business transformations and close the data to value gap."
He says businesses face growing pressures to digitally transform and reach consumers in new ways, launch entirely new digital companies, and meet increasingly complex governance and compliance requirements. Data is essential to digital transformation.
Consumer interaction, such as searches, e-commerce transactions, online comments, clicks, and up votes, creates more data every minute. The proliferation of data and the many software and cloud-based applications used to analyse and manage it means businesses need common digital data standards and a commitment to open data to use data to digitally transform effectively.
"The Data Cloud Alliance is committed to accelerating the adoption of data analytics, AI, and machine learning best practices across industries through common industry data models, open standards, and integrated processes," says Kazmaier.
"Members of the alliance will work together to help reduce customer challenges and complexity with data governance, data privacy, data loss prevention, and global compliance. For the betterment of customers' data clouds, the alliance will commit to solving skills gaps through skill development for practitioners in modern data and analytics technologies."
Data Cloud Alliance members will provide infrastructure, APIs, and integration support to ensure data portability and accessibility between multiple platforms and products across various environments on-premises, in public or private cloud, or a hybrid model. Each Alliance member will collaborate on new, common industry data models, processes, and platform integrations to increase data portability and reduce the complexity associated with data governance and global compliance.
"As enterprises accelerate their journeys to cloud and modernise their data stacks, they need to be equipped with the necessary skills, freedom of technology choice, and data portability to ensure their data analytics strategies are future-proofed," says Confluent SVP of Engineering, Chad Verbowski.
"We're excited to join the Data Cloud Alliance to contribute our data streaming expertise and help ensure access to data is never the barrier to innovation."
David Meyer, SVP of Products at Databricks, says, "Databricks is excited to partner with Google Cloud to foster data sharing based on open standards like Delta Lake. The Data Cloud Alliance reinforces our commitment to open data sharing and the open data lakehouse paradigm, empowering data teams to collaborate more effectively.
