Google kicked off its reimagined Google Cloud Next even this week. The event is now entirely online, and will be going on for the next nine weeks, until September 8. The event features over 200 sessions and ways to connect with Google engineers, including 1:1 time.

“As we’re all navigating through unprecedented times, bringing together our global cloud community feels more important than ever—to collaborate around some of today’s biggest and most important challenges. Companies around the world are turning to Google as their cloud provider of choice because of the innovative technology we have created to help companies with their digital transformation. So, whatever you’re solving for right now, we’re here to support your journey ahead,” Alison Wagonfeld, chief marketing officer at Google Cloud, wrote in a post.

Here are a few of the announcements the company made during the first day of the event:

Customer to Community platform
Google Cloud’s new Customer to Community (C2C) platform will bring together IT leaders, developers, and cloud professionals. The company hopes this will facilitate a community for customers to learn, connect, and share knowledge. 

Key benefits of C2C are the ability to make connections with other customers, expanded access to Google Cloud experts, and exclusive access to Google Cloud product roadmaps. 

More information is available here.

Computing with Confidential VMs
Confidential Computing encrypts data that is in-use. This allows it to keep data encrypted in memory and in other locations outside of CPUs. 

Confidential VMs is the first product that will be available in the Confidential Computing portfolio, and it is currently in beta. Google Cloud believes this solution will deliver breakthrough confidentiality, enhanced innovation, and confidentiality for lift-and-shift workloads. 

“Confidential Computing can help you transform the way your organization processes data in the cloud while preserving confidentiality and privacy. Among other benefits, organizations will be able to collaborate with each other without compromising the confidentiality of data sets. This collaboration, in turn, can lead to the development of more transformational technologies and ideas—imagine, for example, being able to more quickly build vaccines and cure diseases as a result of this secure collaboration,” Google Cloud wrote in a post.

More information is available here

BigQuery Omni
BigQuery Omni is a multi-cloud analytics solution that can be used across Google Cloud, AWS, and soon Microsoft Azure. 

BigQuery Omni runs on Google Anthos, which means that users will not have to manage its underlying infrastructure. 

The solution works by separating compute and storage. Previously, users would need to store data in Google Cloud in order to use BigQuery. With BigQuery Omni, teams can now run analytics on data stored in Google Cloud, AWS, or Azure without having to copy or move data. 

More information is available here