UPDATED 12:00 EDT / DECEMBER 12 2019

CLOUD

Google debuts Transfer Service for speeding on-premises data to the cloud

One of the major barriers for companies looking to switch their information technology infrastructure to the cloud is that they first have to move all of their data to the same platform, and doing so can be a very a complex and time-consuming task.

That explains why Google LLC is so keen to help. The company today announced beta availability of a new “Transfer Service” for customers that want to move large amounts of their data from their on-premises storage to Google’s cloud.

Transfer Service, the company explained in a blog post announcing the new service, is a managed solution that lets companies move all that data without needing to write their own software or invest in an off-the-shelf solution.

Google said Transfer Service is meant to make accomplishing such large-scale data transfers easier. The service provides a high-speed connection to Google’s cloud, enabling customers to transfer “billions of files” and “multiple petabytes of data” quickly and safely. The service comes with safeguards intended to ensure that in-progress data transfers can be restarted in the event that any problems show up.

Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Scott Sinclair said in comments provided by Google that the new service should appeal to enterprises looking to migrate to Google’s cloud, because using custom or off the shelf software to achieve this is can be a “slippery slope” where the costs are difficult to anticipate.

“With Transfer Service for on-premises data (beta), enterprises can optimize for TCO and reduce the friction that often comes with data transfers,” Sinclair said. “This solution is a great fit for enterprises moving data for business-critical use cases like archive and disaster recovery, lift and shift, and analytics and machine learning.”

As far as Google is concerned, it’s vital for the company to provide a service that makes it easy for customers to get their data into its cloud, said Holger Mueller, an analyst with Constellation Research Inc. He said this is because Google wants its cloud to be seen as the best place for running artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads, and that these demand massive quantities of data.

“One of the dirty secrets of the cloud is that the data transfer tools needed to power such next-generation applications are slow, expensive, hard to monitor and often a showstopper,” Mueller said. “We will see how well Google addresses these challenges with its new offering in a few months.”

Google said using the Transfer Service is easy, requiring companies to install and run the on-premises software, then head to the Google Cloud Console and submit the required directories to Cloud Storage.

“When transferring data, the service will parallelize your transfer across many agents, and then coordinate these agents to transfer your data over a secure internet connection to Cloud Storage,” Google detailed. “Transfer Service for on-premises data also features a fully self-service GUI with detailed transfer logs so that you can create, monitor, and manage transfer jobs with confidence.”

Google said Transfer Service for on-premises data is available in beta starting today.

Image: Google

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