Google Cloud unveiled BigQuery Omni during its virtual Google Cloud Next ’20 event on Tuesday. The multicloud analytics solution allows consumers to use BigQuery across data stored in Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure, according to a press release. 

SEE: Top cloud providers in 2020: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players (TechRepublic)

“For our customers, data is no longer one room in the house—it’s the foundation. However, moving data across different clouds is both cumbersome and expensive,” said Debanjan Saha, general manager and vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, in the release. 

“With BigQuery Omni, customers will get a multicloud analytics solution that enables them to gain critical data insights, in one unified experience,” Saha said. “We continue to invest in multicloud in an effort to democratize access to the best technologies for our customers, no matter what cloud provider they’re using today.”

BigQuery is Google’s serverless cloud data warehouse that is able to analyze petabytes of data, run analytics, and produce insights for business. Before this latest announcement, in order to run BigQuery, the user’s data had to be stored in Google Cloud.

However, BigQuery Omni allows users to query data across public clouds without any cross-cloud movement or copying of data, according to the release. 

This capability is especially critical with how popular public cloud usage has become. A recent Gartner survey on public cloud adoption found that more than 80% of respondents said they use more than one cloud service provider. 

“85% of respondents to 451 Research’s Voice of the Enterprise Data & Analytics, Data Platforms 1H20 survey agreed that the ability to run the same database on multiple cloud/datacenter environments is an important consideration when selecting a new data platform,” said Matt Aslett, research director of data, artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics at 451 Research, in the release.

“As hybrid and multicloud adoption has become the norm, enterprises are increasingly looking for data products that provide a consistent experience and  lower complexity of using multiple clouds, while enabling the ongoing use of existing infrastructure investments,” Aslett said.

How BigQuery Omni works 

Powered by Anthos, BigQuery Ombi allows users to query data without the pain of managing underlying infrastructure. Anthos is a hybrid and multicloud application platform that facilitates smooth operations and consistent development of cloud and on-premises environments, while also ensuring secure connection between public clouds, according to the release. 

One of the biggest obstacles for businesses is the cost of moving data between cloud providers, said Saha in a blog post.  

“BigQuery Omni represents a new way of analyzing data stored in multiple public clouds, which is made possible by BigQuery’s separation of compute and storage,” Saha said in the post. “By decoupling these two, BigQuery provides  scalable storage that can reside in Google Cloud or other public clouds, and stateless resilient compute that executes standard SQL queries.”

To use the tool, customers simply launch the BigQuery UI on Google Cloud, select the public cloud region where the data is located, and run their query. No reformatting or  transforming of data is necessary, with BigQuery Omni supporting Avro, CSV, JSON, ORC, and Parquet, per the post. 

BigQuery Omni is now available in Private Alpha for AWS S3, with Azure support coming soon. Companies interested in testing out BigQuery Omni can fill out a form to get started.   

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