From electrifying transportation to shifting the grid to renewable energy, environmental sustainability is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. A critical but often forgotten goal is the development of sustainable agricultural practices, especially given increasing water shortages and soil degradation around the world.

Lucent Bio was born to solve some of these threats to humanity’s ability to feed itself. It delivers crop nutrition solutions that accelerate the transition to sustainable agriculture. Lucent Bio developed novel technology for bioactive crop nutrition products, including its flagship product—Soileos®—which boosts nutrient density in crops, regenerates soil, avoids polluting agro-ecosystems, and enables the circular economy. Soileos is a plant-based product that is made by upcycling food processing co-products such as lentil and pea hulls into bioactive nutrients that then create the next harvest.

As a start-up, Lucent Bio has used Google Workspace since day one to drive collaboration, streamline operations, and scale. As an organization, it is also closely aligned with Google’s sustainability goals. Google is carbon-neutral for its operations and has made a public commitment with detailed plans to run on carbon-free energy by 2030, meaning clean power every hour of every day.

Google Workspace has been an invaluable resource to fuel collaboration between the engineers at the Lucent Bio pilot plant, the scientists at the research lab and greenhouse, and on-field agronomists as they conduct trials on Soileos across North America. Without the use of Google Workspace during the COVID 19 pandemic, Lucent Bio would not have been able to achieve their current scale.

“In just 18 months, Lucent Bio has been able to scale manufacturing from 1 kg to 1,000 kg of product per day. This year, we’re poised to take the next big step to 20,000 kg per day. During this scale-up process, we went through several iterations of improvements, resulting in a completely zero-waste manufacturing process—a hugely difficult but impressive achievement in line with our mission to accelerate the transformation of agriculture to sustainability. Every step of the way, Google Workspace has been an essential part of our innovation and growth strategy.”
Michael Riedijk, CEO Lucent Bio

Google Workspace runs on the cleanest cloud in the industry. It helps teams of all sizes, and across all industries, connect, create, and collaborate from anywhere. Workspace recently launched AI-generated summaries in Spaces, which help distributed teams stay focused while quickly catching up on chat messages they might have missed. Innovations like these keep the scientists at Lucent Bio collaborating as they build a more sustainable future for agriculture.

You can find more about Google’s commitment to sustainability here, including our goal to become not just carbon-neutral, but carbon-free by 2030, efforts to combat deforestation, and how we’re supporting clean energy.

As organizations expand their use of cloud computing services, more of their sensitive data inevitably moves to and lives in the cloud. Much of this sensitive data is unstructured and can be challenging to secure. Despite this potential challenge, the usefulness of cloud for data storage and processing is too big for most organizations to ignore and has in turn led to data sprawl, where their sensitive data is spread over many resources, both in the cloud and on-premise. Addressing data sprawl requires solutions that can discover, manage, and secure sensitive data, especially unstructured data, as it spreads.

To help organizations confidently move their sensitive data to the cloud, Google Cloud works diligently to earn and maintain customer trust. Control and transparency are pillars of our approach to offering a trusted cloud. Therefore, we’ve been expanding our capabilities to act on unstructured data as sprawl increases.

Given the importance of these capabilities to our strategy, we are happy to announce today that Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021 report, and rated Google Cloud highest in the current offering category among the providers evaluated.

The report evaluates the 11 most significant providers with platform solutions to secure and protect unstructured data, spanning from cloud providers to data security-focused vendors. The report notes that “Google offers breadth and depth with built-in data security in the cloud. Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, and BeyondCorp Enterprise have underlying data security products and features for protecting customer data.”

Google Cloud tools focused on protecting unstructured data were developed and battle-tested internally at Google to alleviate some of our own data security challenges. This brings the best of Google security to the organizations utilizing Google Cloud and our security tools. The report highlights that “Google productizes capabilities originally developed to secure its own business, and brings a disciplined approach to product enhancements for enterprise requirements. It serves a wide range of enterprise and mid-market, with a focus on emphasizing data protection needs by industry. ”

Google Cloud’s data security strategy focuses on meeting customers wherever they are in their cloud migration journey. The report highlights that “Google further enables a Zero Trust approach with third-party integrations through its BeyondCorp Alliance of partners in device management, endpoint security and gateways.”

Google Cloud received the highest possible score in sixteen criteria, in total receiving the most 5 out of 5 ratings among all vendors assessed. These criteria include: Data Intelligence, Access Control, Deletion, Obfuscation-Scope, Obfuscation-Key Management, Deployment, Security and Risk, APIs and Integration, Data Security Platform Vision, Data Security Execution Roadmap, Performance, Planned Enhancements, Zero Trust Enabling Partner Ecosystem, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Installed Base, and Revenue. 

Notably, Google Cloud received the highest possible score in the Obfuscation criteria. Obfuscation can help protect sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII), which is critical to many enterprise workflows. Cloud DLP helps customers inspect and mask this sensitive data with techniques like redaction, bucketing, and tokenization, which help strike the balance between risk and utility. This is especially crucial when dealing with unstructured or free-text workloads, in which it can be challenging to know what data to redact. More than 150 detectors combine to power Cloud DLP’s masking, which can be deployed in data migrations and business workloads like real-time data collection and processing. For Obfuscation specifically, the report mentioned that Google “takes a broad view of DLP, which includes in-line redaction of sensitive elements in unstructured data and DLP APIs that extend support to additional data types like images or other media.”

We are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ Unstructured Data Security Platforms Q2 2021 report, and look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on ways to make your digital transformation journey safer as we work to become your most trusted Cloud.

A copy of the full report can be viewed here.

For the fourth consecutive year, Gartner has positioned Google as a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services (formerly titled as Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service upto 2014 Infrastructure as a Service, or (IaaS).

With our customers and communities adjusting to new ways of working and doing business, Google Cloud has remained focused on building services and platforms that help you be more resilient and derive even more value from your cloud infrastructure. We believe Gartner’s analysis and recognition gives our customers the confidence needed to choose Google as the platform for customer-centric innovation. Here are just a few recent examples.

Ready for the most demanding, mission-critical workloads

Our enterprise-ready cloud provides you the uptime, performance, and scale to run even your most demanding workloads. Examples of recent launches: 

• The largest single-node GPU-enabled VM in the industry with up to 16 NVIDIA A100 instances so that our customers can run their ML workloads 
• The only cloud to support scale-out out 96TB SAP HANA so that customers can confidently bring their most critical workloads to GCP
• Strategic partnerships with leading partners like SAP 
• Several regions and an expanded global network footprint including new subsea cables, Firmina, Dunant, Blue and Raman
• High bandwidth 50/75/100Gbps networking for VMs
• Persistent Disk Extreme (block storage) with 120K IOPS 
• Filestore High Scale scale-out NFS for HPC

Saves you money

Save money with a transparent and innovative approach to pricing and intelligent recommendations. In the past year, we’ve launched several innovations to help you save costs:

• Tau VMs, which offer the best price-performance among leading clouds for scale-out workloads 
• Machine-learning-driven predictive auto-scaling for VMs and GKE Autopilot, enabling infrastructure to scale up and down as needed with minimal waste 
• Standard network tier which routes traffic over the internet for cost optimization 

Open

We have a long history of leadership in open technologies—from projects like Kubernetes, the industry standard in container orchestration and interoperability, to TensorFlow, a platform to help anyone develop and train machine learning models. Here are a few recent improvements we’ve made to ensure your cloud is an open cloud: 

• Extended Anthos to bare metal and Microsoft Azure to support customers who want a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud posture. 
• Announced a new network dataplane for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Anthos that supports eBPF, an open-source Linux kernel technology optimized for Kubernetes. 
• Google Kubernetes Engine (based on the Kubernetes standard) received the top overall score based on 2021 Gartner Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine.

Secure

Google Cloud’s trusted infrastructure uses layers of security to protect your data with advanced technologies and operations, keeping your organization secure and compliant. For example, we offer:

• Confidential VMs and Confidential GKE with in-memory encryption and encryption keys controlled by you, with a single checkbox
• Enhanced security for Cloud Run
• Strong support against DDoS attacks. In 2017, our infrastructure absorbed the largest-known DDoS attack at 2.5Tbps with no impact to customers. 

Sustainable

Google Cloud helps customers transform their business sustainably. We operate the cleanest cloud in the industry to make sure your digital footprint doesn’t leave a carbon one. Here are a few proof points:

• Google has been carbon neutral since 2007, and for the past four years has matched 100% of the electricity we consume globally with wind and solar purchases. Everything you run on Google Cloud is net carbon neutral. 
• We continue to innovate towards greater energy efficiency in our data centers, and compared with five years ago, now deliver around seven times as much computing power with the same amount of electrical power.
• Recently we announced new features to help customers reduce the carbon footprint of their applications and infrastructure, including a region picker to help with architecture decisions, and low carbon indicators in the Google Cloud Console.  

Supporting our customers

Most importantly, our field organizations and partner organizations work with a singular focus to ensure customer success. This has made Google Cloud the fastest growing hyperscaler, with a rapidly expanding customer base across all geos and industries.

Since launching Customer Care last year, we consolidated and simplified the post-sales engagement with customers, increased the support channels, created an API to allow programmatic case creation, and combined product specific support into a single package for all of Google Cloud. Enterprises with Customer Care continue to report high levels of satisfaction with their focused technical account managers (TAMs), helping them get the most business value out of Google Cloud.

We are committed to sustaining and accelerating the pace of customer-centric innovation. You can download a complimentary copy of the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services on our website. 

Join us to learn much more about Google Cloud at the upcoming Google Cloud Next ‘21 digital conference.  

^{Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services,  Raj Bala | Bob Gill | Dennis Smith | Kevin Ji | David Wright, 27 July 2021
Gartner, Solution Scorecard for Google Kubernetes Engine,  Tony Iams | Traverse Clayton | Megan Bain, 12 April 2021
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.}