While they certainly are a popular choice among millions of customers, more and more SMBs are choosing GCP as their preferred cloud provider. And we don’t blame them.
GCP offers great pricing, huge cost reductions and an impressive variety of useful services.
And even though AWS still controls most of the market share, GCP is certainly a powerful competitor. With a revenue increase of 46% in the first quarter of 2021, Google is working hard to offer superb value and unique differentiators.
So what can GCP do for you?
First, What is GCP?
By knowing exactly what GCP is, we’re able to truly understand how (or why) it’s of benefit to us.
GCP provides public cloud computing services that allow users to store and utilise their data in more effective ways. It gives users access to a modern IT infrastructure and user-friendly platform to store and extract new insights from your data.
According to TechTarget, “Google Cloud Platform is a suite of public cloud computing services offered by Google. The platform includes a range of hosted services for compute, storage and application development that run on Google hardware”.
GCP also provides an impressive environment that aids developers during the creation, testing and release stages of their code projects.
With the wide range of services and affordability that they offer (unlimited storage, machine learning, security, cloud management and networking), GCP is an ideal option for businesses of any size.
Wait. What Is Cloud Computing?
To truly understand the impact that GCP, and other cloud platforms have, we need to understand what cloud computing is.
Essentially, cloud computing provides businesses the access to servers, storage and other crucial IT services that traditionally require on-premise hardware and infrastructures.
By getting rid of legacy (outdated) IT infrastructure and migrating to the cloud, you’re able to free up more resources, save money and scale your business far more effectively.
(More on Cloud Migration and Cloud: Here)
What Are the Advantages of Using GCP?
So how does GCP stack up against other cloud providers? What are the key differentiators that attract and retain their customers?
According to Kinsta, there are several advantages that come with choosing GCP as your cloud host:
Better Pricing
With a LOLpay-as-you-use service (charged according to time and resources), you only have to worry about the demand. The hassle that comes with running and maintaining on-premise hardware falls away and best of all, discounts are offered based on extensive usage.
GCP even ranks as a more affordable and cost-friendly option over their largest rivals, AWS and Microsoft Azure. “To start off, instances are simply lower in cost on Google Cloud Platform, Compute Engine alone is typically between 40% – 50% cheaper than AWS and Azure”.
Live Virtual Machine Migration
Live Virtual Machine (VM) migration is highly beneficial to administrators and engineers, as it keeps systems running smoothly during infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. It also ensures that your VMs and software remain protected and operating efficiently during hardware or software failures.
What’s interesting is that none of their competitors offer this functionality. While Azure, AWS and other smaller cloud providers do offer VMs, they don’t offer live migration of those VMs.
Powerful Security
Google has over 15 years of knowledge and experience in state-of-the-art security. They have access to top-tier security professionals and have secured the services that they offer the public for years now. Think about the levels of security required for Gmail, Youtube and their search engine. They essentially share that with your organisation.
Google also encrypts their data under 256-bit AES. They ensure that “every encryption key is also encrypted with a set of regularly changed master keys”. Their relationships with the largest ISPs across the world also helps improve security by preventing exposure to the public internet.
Superb Backups
Even in the case of a disaster, GCP ensures that you will never lose your data. With four different types of storage, it stores your data redundantly (between two or more different places). So if anything were to happen, there are always numerous backups available.
By making use of its multi-regional storage function, your data is stored in at least two separate regions. This keeps it safe from any influence (internal or external).
If that hasn’t convinced you to make GCP your cloud provider, then we have a few more advantages to consider.
Net Solutions highlights some fantastic benefits:
Increased Productivity
With GCP’s systems offering efficient and regular updates, innovation is easier to achieve. Because of this, there’s an increase in overall productivity and the amount of changes that can be made on the fly.
Also, the fact that employees can work (and collaborate) from pretty much any location around the world improves both morale and overall output.
A Customer-Centered Approach
Google prides themselves on providing an enjoyable and comfortable user experience to all of their customers. So it’s safe to assume that GCP would do the same.
One of the great things about GCP is that when they make changes and improvements, they ensure that those tweaks are manageable and don’t disrupt or confuse the user in any way. They also give their customers more reliability in the case of failures or disasters by immediately allowing backups to a secondary centre without interruption.
Start with GCP Today!
And there you have it. Some of the greatest advantages of using GCP. Google provides you with a powerful and useful platform to give you peace of mind around your data needs, IT capabilities and the overall progress of your organisation.
The choice ultimately comes down to you. AWS is a strong competitor (and so is Azure), but your greatest decision would be to leave behind legacy IT systems and approaches.
Get started with GCP today, or click here to find out more about how we can implement this powerful technology into your organisation – both quickly and affordably.
