More customers asking for Google’s Data Boundary, says Cloud Experience boss

Interview Google’s President of Customer Experience, Hayete Gallot, offered some words of comfort to developers who are looking nervously at the rise of AI assistants while also laying out her vision for cloud sovereignty.

The default is to go public cloud, and then you can ask for data boundary. It used to be very niche, now we’re seeing more demand

Gallot was talking to The Register at Google’s Cloud Summit in London. She was speaking after the company’s customers were wheeled out to extol the virtues of the company’s products, particularly in terms of cloud computing and AI. One key takeaway was that Proof Of Concept (POC) projects, which might have once fizzled into unmet expectations, were now increasingly succeeding.

Gallot says, “I think we’re seeing much more successful POCs because people got much more mature about picking the scenarios they go after.”

“Two years ago, I had people show up in a room … and they had 150 plus scenarios because ‘AI is, like, powerful’.”

But those people lacked a framework to assess the business case. Simply throwing AI at a wall of ideas and seeing where it sticks rarely generates the desired outcome (assuming the outcome is even defined beyond a vague desire to increase productivity and save money).

“Fast-forward two years later, people are much more capable of, first of all, understanding what questions they need to clean up, and filter out, and triage all the scenarios they’re going after.”

And second, users can get to a POC that could lead to more than just attractive presentations. Gallot notes that POCs didn’t fail or get blocked because “the scenario was not interesting or it was not exciting.” More often than not, it was down to security, scalability, or cost. But as users become increasingly savvy about how AI can be used, and the tools continue to evolve, Gallot reckons that more POCs will be successful.

Gallot does not, however, think the rise of AI assistants will mean developers will go away. Instead, some skills will change, but others will not. Rather like learning a new language. “To actually create the right prompt,” she says, “means you have the right critical thinking and you can ask the right questions.”

A former engineer herself (“I learned Fortran!” she laughs), Gallot reckons the critical thinking skills that developers must possess will always be necessary. “We knew how to write stuff,” she says, citing examples such as Pascal, “now it’s prompts, but you still need to think about what is it that you’re writing? And what is the question you want to ask? And what is it you want to prompt for? And I think that that critical thinking needs to exist.”

Going sovereign

Gallot also acknowledges the changes in the world that have driven the cloud sovereignty conversation. “The default,” she says, “is to go public cloud, and then you can ask for data boundary. It used to be very niche, now we’re seeing more demand.”

Google Cloud Data Boundary – as it discussed in May – means a customer can choose where their data is stored, with administrative access controlled, logged, and auditable.

The increase in demand and enquiries has, according to Gallot, jumped 10x, which highlights the concern felt by customers over where their data is and who might be looking at it.

“You have the public cloud with data boundary,” she explains, “that’s where you control where your data is processed, stored, and your keys. You then have “Dedicated,” where we basically build a solution that a trusted partner locally can operate.

“And then you have the air-gap.”

Google Cloud air-gapped can run entirely on a user’s hardware without being connected to the Google mothership. “The air-gap”, says Gallot, “is completely disconnected and open source.” Its disconnected nature means it cannot be accessed or remotely shut down by Google.

And access is the issue.

In July, Microsoft admitted that it could not guarantee data sovereignty to customers in the event the US administration demanded access to information held on its servers.

Google’s approach is to rely on encryption. “From a Cloud Act perspective, the Government may send us a request to access the data. If the customer owns the encryption, which we give them the opportunity to do, we notify the customer. The customer is in full control.

“You have to understand the managing of encryption keys. Not every customer has the capability internally to know how to run this, so it’s a give-and-take. But we are seeing more demand for that for sure.”

The idea of someone being able to get their hands on their data, even when encrypted, will still leave some customers slightly nauseous. While Google’s Dedicated plan will go some way to assuage those worries, with dedicated infrastructure and independent operations delivered by a local partner on isolated infrastructure, ensuring there is no connectivity whatsoever via Google Cloud air-gapped is the only way to ensure that there is no way data goes places it shouldn’t. At least in the Google Cloud world. ®

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