The Race to Dominate Big Data Cloud Storage

Big data is gold and the sky’s the limit as the race to dominate big data cloud storage heats up with Google introducing the beta-release of Cloud Bigtable. Although the innovation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices continues to evolve, the constant growth of data is ever present and continues to grow exponentially. There is also a need to replicate big data to create new apps for smart watches and other IoT devices yet to be developed. But managing and querying such a large volume of structured and unstructured data can be a time consuming task that requires considerable machine throughput.

Cloud Bigtable is a scalable noSQL database solution for managing terabytes and petabytes of data in the cloud. While Cloud Bigtable is now being offered to the public, Google has been using it for the past decade in a number of its most powerful enterprise applications including Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube as well as its flagship Search product, to name a few. The impressive speed and handling of such large amounts of critical data for web, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications could make Google a major contender in the competitive big data cloud storage landscape already dominated by Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

It could be a tough battle. Both Azure and AWS are already well entrenched in a highly competitive market with a large existing customer base and offer noSQL cloud database solutions. Clients are generally not too keen on moving a sophisticated cloud infrastructure to another system.

Where Google has an advantage, however, is on cost. Google has so much unused data storage capacity that it can afford to offer it up at extremely attractive rates. And if its speed, reliability and ease-of-use hold up it may give Bigtable the edge it needs to move full speed ahead in the cloud storage market.

photo credit: Tristan Schmurr via photopin (license)