Beyond, Beyond Corp
By the time I first started working with GCP in the enterprise, I had several years’ project experience with AWS. This was shortly after Google had launched a region locally (in Australia) in late 2017. At this time, Google was still emphasizing the Beyond Corp/Zero Trust model heavily in their sales approach with larger customers. I am a firm believer in this networking/security model, however this go to market approach was in stark contrast to AWS and Azure’s approach which was to offer a high trust extension to customer’s existing data centers and on-premise infrastructure. The other majors who were selling an almost exclusively IaaS centric model were rapidly making inroads in the enterprise cloud market.
After some introspection, I concluded that while the Beyond Corp model is sound, it requires a leap of faith that many enterprises were not and may still not be ready to take. Mainstream enterprise including banks, telcos, retailers, insurers, etc are still working out what cloud means to their business and to their existing technology estates. The IaaS model is simple and easy to understand and offers enterprises a relatively straightforward entry in the cloud market.
The Shift…
Over the last few years I have noticed a shift in Google’s marketing approach - from Beyond Corp to high trust networking and hybrid cloud extensibility, I can put this down to two reasons:
- GCP is far better equipped now to adopt a high trust extension networking/security model
- Most (non tech focused) Enterprise's are more ready to consume this model…
The upward curve in Google’s enterprise maturity as a cloud provider over the last two years has been nothing short of exponential. With rapid advancements in Google’s private networking support, hybrid connectivity options, enterprise directory federation and numerous other security controls, as well as their leadership in cloud native and hybrid cloud computing technologies such as Anthos – Google has never been better placed to take the fight up to AWS and Azure.
In many ways by staying somewhat reserved in the IaaS race while the other two majors battled it out, Google has had the advantage of taking the best bits from the other providers (and avoiding the pitfalls made by them as well).
This, along with Google’s :
- best in class PaaS and data stacks; and
- innovation in cloud native and hybrid cloud, mutli-cloud enablement; and
- leadership in AI/ML; and
- superior network, edge and front end technologies
now puts the Google Cloud Platform in a strong position relative to it’s competitors.
By no means am I suggesting that Beyond Corp as an Enterprise security model is not relevant anymore, as I think it definitely has a place in the cloud adoption landscape, but the enterprise/high trust model is needed as well to ultimately be successful in this hotly contested market.
As far as enterprise cloud adoption, GCP has never been more ready for the enterprise!
Thanks for sharing and agnostically agree with your perspective. Another major driver that could influence further growth for GCP adoption is the shift in talent pool demand. A majority of organizations are still spending a good amount of investment in training their resources to be skilled on AWS (and Azure isn’t too far behind). This measure is also true for independent certifications. But, as increasing demand for hybrid solutions (solutions that leverage services across multi clouds... regardless of public or private) continues to gain steam, the demand for a more diversified cloud skills pool may help hurl GCP more to the forefront, especially in the areas of ML, AI or anything related to Big Data management, analysis or synthesis.