Google Cloud: Storage Portfolio Review

Google Cloud is one of the leading public cloud storage providers for enterprises that offer IT organizations and developers efficient, durable, and available cloud object storage. 

Cloud storage is a service by Google Cloud that provides unified storage, where objects stored are grouped into buckets and can be individually assigned to storage classes. Users can access their data via a web browser or command-line interface and can also choose the geographic location in which the data lives.

See below to learn all about enterprise storage by Google Cloud:

See more: The Cloud Storage Market

Google Cloud and the cloud storage market

The cloud storage market value was worth $70.19 billion in 2021, and it is expected to be worth $376.37 billion by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% from 2022 to 2029. 

Google Cloud is one of the leaders in the cloud storage market, with 10% of the market share. It reported revenue of $4.047 billion in the first quarter of 2021, an increase of 46% from $2.78 billion the year prior.

“We’re very pleased with the ongoing momentum in Google Cloud, with revenues of $4.0 billion in the quarter reflecting strength and opportunity in both GCP and Workspace,” said Ruth Porat, CFO, Google and Alphabet.

Google Cloud storage features

Google Cloud offers a broad storage feature set that provides an efficient way to store and manage data:

• Turbo replication: designed to deliver a 15-minute recovery point objective (RPO) using dual region storage. It offers a shorter and more predictable RPO and helps to reduce data loss exposure.
• Object life cycle management: allows defining a life cycle configuration that triggers data deletion or transition to a cheaper storage class. When an object meets a condition or criteria, cloud storage automatically performs a specific action.
• Object versioning: supports the retrieval of objects and allows users to continue to store old copies of objects that are deleted or replaced.
• Retention policies: allow for the definition of minimum retention periods and ensure all current and future objects cannot be deleted or replaced until reaching the defined age.
• Object hold: allows placing a hold on an object to prevent its deletion and protect individual objects.
• Encryption keys: encrypt object data with customer-supplied encryption keys stored by the Cloud Key Management Service and managed by the user. 

Google Cloud storage also has many other features: including uniform bucket-level access; requester pays; bucket lock; pub/sub notifications; cloud audit logs; and object- and bucket-level permissions.

Google Cloud storage differentiators

• Google-grade cybersecurity: offers data protection advantages developed from within Google Cloud.
• Big data analytics: supports digital transformations and accelerates time to storage insights.
• Global network: fast, consistent, and scalable performance through advanced software-defined networking (SDN) and edge caching services, supporting choices where data resides geographically.
• Cost-effective: pay-per-use charges in one-second increments

See more: Cloud Storage Security Best Practices

Google Cloud storage use cases

“Our infrastructure needs to support hundreds of thousands of concurrent connections per second, as well as our data warehouse, and we saw that Google has the capability to handle our needs. At the same time, we were very excited by its focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence.” -Jacques Erasmus, CIO, King

“We rely heavily on the Google Cloud team. … They unblock us on nearly a weekly basis with support on difficult technical questions, which has been pivotal for us.” -David Jorgensen, head of business intelligence, Zulily

“The combination of Looker and Google BigQuery is powerful, allowing us to get data-hungry analysts essential information much faster. Because we choose to pay by the query, it’s also flexible and cost-effective — plus storage is cheap, so we can just put data in and query what we need.” -Sam Chase, tech lead in data operations, Blue Apron

User reviews of Google Cloud storage 

Google Cloud storage receives mostly positive reviews from several user review sites.

At GetApp, users rate Google Cloud storage at 4.8 out of 5, with the likelihood to recommend 9.04 out of 10. And users at G2 rate Google Cloud storage at 4.5 out of 5..

Users at Gartner Peer Reviews rate Google Cloud storage at 4.8 out of 5.0, with a 97% recommendation score. It is also rated well in several other categories:

• Evaluation and contracting: 4.6 out of 5
• Planning and transition: 4.6 out of 5
• Delivery and execution: 4.6 out of 5
• Service capabilities: 4.6 out of 5

Google Cloud storage pricing

Google Cloud storage service pricing is based on a pay-as-you-use model, which considers criteria such as the amount of data stored, duration, number of operations performed on data, and network resources used.

Google offers four storage pricing models:

• Standard storage starts at $.02 per GB per month
• Nearline storage starts at $.01 per GB per month
• Coldline storage starts at $.004 per GB per month
• Archive storage starts at $.0012 per GB per month

Companies can purchase storage without a minimum assessment fee for primary or infrequently accessed structured and unstructured datasets.

For long-term and infrequently accessed cold storage, there are charges for retrieving data and the early deletion of data. 

See more: AWS: Cloud Storage Portfolio Review