The news from Google LLC at its annual Google Cloud Next conference this week centered around its Distributed Cloud and new features for generative artificial intelligence and expanded cross-networking.

Among the enhancements announced in Las Vegas during the event was an ability to train AI models on data from cloud or on-premises repositories in a secure, fully managed environment.

“The best place to run AI is clearly in our public cloud regions, but there are reasons why sometimes customers can’t use those regions,” said Sachin Gupta (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Infrastructure and Solutions Group at Google Cloud. “That could be because there’s a regulatory need, there’s a compliance need, survivability or latency driven need that forces the deployment on-premises or at the edge. That’s why we introduced Google Distributed Cloud.”

Gupta spoke with theCUBE Research analysts Savannah Peterson and Rob Strechay at Google Cloud Next 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Google’s latest announcements in cross-cloud networking and its public sector business. (* Disclosure below.)

Google Cloud supports distributed application development

Google Cloud’s focus has been on cross-cloud networking, opening up the web data plane to facilitate customizations and services that can be added to workloads securely, according to Gupta.

“Cross-Cloud Network is really about how we help you build distributed applications,” he said. “It’s how you can connect every single one of your locations into our backbone, leverage the power of our backbone, but bring your security stack of choice. We have a technology called Private Service Connect that allows you to have a proxy in front of your Google Cloud services and applications. Now we extend that to other clouds or applications or services running on-premises.”

One of Google’s key customers in the Cross-Cloud Network is the telecom giant Orange S.A. Google is working with Orange to manage data and AI needs in 26 countries where the telecom firm does business.

“They need to apply AI to that data, they need to enhance the customer experience,” Gupta said. “Orange is in the business of infrastructure, but telecom infrastructure and mobile infrastructure, they don’t want to worry about cloud infrastructure. We’re giving them Google Distributed Cloud in each of those 26 countries to provide services easily.”

Announcements from the first day of Google Cloud Next also included the news that Google Public Sector had received authorization from the U.S. government to host secret and top secret classified data. The authorization opened new avenues of business for Google within the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense.

“This is shifting gears to our Google Distributed Cloud product, which has now received authorization to operate in top secret and secret use cases with the U.S. government,” Gupta said. “It’s our fundamentals in zero trust and building the platform from the ground up with zero-trust framework in mind.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Google Cloud Next 2024:

(* Disclosure: Google sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE