Is Google Cloud Going to Make a Push Into Enterprises?

Google has built out a massive public cloud over the past several years. For a long time Google marketed their cloud system toward developers, as other cloud service providers had before it. Now, Google wishes to make a push into the lucrative corporate market. They have already landed accounts, such as Snapchat, that use their cloud service to great success. However, more serious enterprises are hesitant to believe that the search and ad company has evolved to the point that they can place such a serious aspect of their company within Google’s cloud.

Lydia Leong, a Gartner cloud analyst, suggests that Google’s has already amassed a sales force and enterprise-focused support features that rival that of AWS and Microsoft Azure. When competing with the likes of Amazon, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat, VMware, and more, that support will come in handy. The biggest problem Google faces is perception; CIOs are not assured that Google’s public system will work in a hybrid solution, and Google needs to prove that it can.

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Google does allow other providers to ‘peer’ with their network. This is a situation where two large entities share traffic on a semi-equal basis. This is not the same as a hybrid solution. Google would need to allow companies to connect to its cloud provider via a physical link in a colocation. Google owns and operates its own data centers, and doesn’t share the locations of these centers. They would need to grant access to these sites to allow for non-VPN hybrid solutions. Since VPNs are limited and can lead to performance issues, this poses a problem. Google can offer a Virtual Private Computing (VPC) option that would allow for customers to carve out an area of the bigger, public cloud for their own private use. This would require companies to build structures themselves, a deed that many companies cannot afford.

There are still several wish list capabilities Google needs before it can make a serious push to enterprises. Disaster recovery, media encoding, and enterprise application usability are all things that Google has to work on. But the company is beginning to think about moving into enterprise. As is often the case with google, expect them to succeed.

Read the original article at GigaOm.

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