Google LLC today announced the availability of a new cloud service in private alpha test mode that lets customers analyze data stored in multiple public clouds without needing to move it first.

The new service is called BigQuery Omni, which essentially brings the capabilities of Google’s BigQuery data warehouse and analytics tool to additional cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services and soon Microsoft Azure.

Google BigQuery is a popular, fully managed serverless data warehouse that enables rapid Structured Query Language queries and interactive analysis of massive datasets. It’s an extremely powerful tool, but up until now it was able to work only with data that’s stored within Google Cloud.

Of course, that makes things difficult because the vast majority of enterprises don’t just use Google to store their data. In fact, more than 80% of organizations are using multiple public cloud platforms, according to a recent survey by Gartner Inc. But moving data among different clouds can be expensive, not to mention difficult, which means many companies struggle analyze it effectively.

BigQuery Omni is meant to address this problem by helping customers break down silos and get actionable insights from their data no matter where it resides, without having to pay expensive fees to move it from platform to platform, Google said.

“While competitors will require you to move or copy your data from one public cloud to another, where you might incur egress costs, this is not the case with BigQuery Omni,” said Debanjan Saha, general manager and vice president of engineering for data analytics at Google Cloud. “The same BigQuery interface on Google Cloud will let you query the data that you have stored in Google Cloud, AWS and Azure without any cross-cloud movement or copies of data.”

BigQuery Omni is powered by Google’s Anthos service, which is a hybrid and multicloud application platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for cloud and on-premises environments. In this case, Anthos helps to provide a secure and seamless connection between Google Cloud and other public clouds, so customers can securely run analytics with a fully managed infrastructure.

“Our Anthos hybrid and multi-cloud application platform allowed us to build, deploy, and manage the BigQuery query engine (Dremel) on multiple clouds,” Saha said.

The service is also made possible by BigQuery’s separation of compute and storage, Saha said. Because these are decoupled, BigQuery can provide scalable storage that’s able to reside in Google Cloud or other public cloud services. BigQuery’s stateless resilient compute can then execute standard SQL queries on the data held within that storage.

It means customers can be much more flexible when it comes to performing analytics on their data.

“For example, you can use BigQuery Omni to query Google Analytics 360 Ads data that’s stored in Google Cloud, and also query logs data from your e-commerce platform and applications that are stored in AWS S3,” Saha said. “Then, using Looker, you can build a dashboard that allows you to visualize your audience behavior and purchases alongside your advertising spend.”

Analyst Matt Aslett of 451 Research Inc. said he expects BigQuery Omni to be well received, as more than 85% of enterprises indicated in a recent survey that being able to run the same database in multiple cloud environments is a key consideration when it comes to selecting a new data platform.

“As hybrid and multicloud adoption has become the norm, enterprises are increasingly looking for data products that provide a consistent experience and lower complexity of using multiple clouds, while enabling the ongoing use of existing infrastructure investments,” Aslett said. “The launch of BigQuery Omni demonstrates Google Cloud’s strategy to help customers operate multicloud environments.”

Google said BigQuery Omni is available now in Private Alpha for Amazon S3 and will add support for Microsoft Azure soon.

Image: Google