Securely exchange data and analytics assets at scale with Analytics Hub, now available in preview
Nikhil Gaekwad
Product Management Lead
Now more than ever, organizations rely on real-time and accurate data analytics solutions to drive innovation and achieve operational excellence. With the help of AI and machine learning, companies combine data from various sources to derive actionable insights, forecast outcomes and make more informed decisions. Many organizations are also looking for new ways to monetize their data assets and provide users with secure access to data outside their ecosystem.
However, with security threats and privacy regulations on the rise, companies find it difficult to securely share or exchange data with partners, customers, or other organizations. Traditional data sharing techniques such as batch ETL pipelines or FTP downloads are costly to maintain, do not scale well, and cause fragmented or stale data.
To help organizations overcome these data sharing challenges, we are excited today to announce the preview of Analytics Hub. This new fully-managed service enables you to efficiently and securely exchange valuable data and analytics assets across organizational boundaries. Analytics Hub is built on top of BigQuery, Google’s petabyte-scale, serverless cloud data warehouse. BigQuery’s unique architecture enables you to share data at scale without making multiple copies of your data. Data is always live and can be consumed in real-time using the built-in streaming capabilities. With BigQuery, you can also leverage the built-in machine learning, geospatial, and advanced analytics capabilities or take advantage of the native business intelligence support with tools like Looker, Google Sheets, and Data Studio.
Data sharing is not new to BigQuery. In fact, we have had cross-organizational, in-place data sharing capabilities since 2010. As of November 2021, we see over 4,500 different organizations sharing over 250 petabytes of data per week in BigQuery. Analytics Hub makes data sharing even easier, enabling organizations to realize the full potential of their shared data.
Here is what some of our early adopters have to say:
“As external data becomes more critical to organizations across industries, the need for a unified experience between data integration and analytics has never been more important. We are proud to be working with Google Cloud to power the launch of Analytics Hub, feeding hundreds of pre-engineered data pipelines from hundreds of external datasets,” said Dan Lynn, SVP Product at Crux. “The sharing capabilities that Analytics Hub delivers will significantly enhance the data mobility requirements of practitioners, and the Crux data integration platform stands ready to quickly integrate any external data source and deliver on behalf of Google Cloud and its clients.”
"GCP has enabled Universal Film to transform towards an agile and experimental approach to our data science and analytics efforts underscored with high availability and security. The addition of Analytics Hub, when combined with BigQuery, has facilitated a rapid scale out of our data driven outputs across marketing teams globally and a streamlined data sharing process with our data partners - all with minimal DataOps overhead " said Chris Massey, SVP Global Data Strategy & Transformation at NBC Universal.
“Data and analytics can change the world – from helping companies navigate the complexities of today’s ever-changing business environment, to identifying ways we can all contribute to a more sustainable future. We are excited at the prospect of integrating our depth and breadth of data into Google Cloud’s Analytics Hub – giving more customers around the world access to the trusted data they need to identify risks before they happen, and uncover opportunities for future growth” said Gary Kotovets, Chief Data Officer at Dun & Bradstreet.
"Neustar serves 70% of Fortune 100 brands, offering identity resolution, audience targeting, and measurement for the most sophisticated marketing operations. Our partnership with Google delivers advanced capabilities directly to our shared customers via Analytics Hub” said Ryan Engle, VP of Product Management at Neustar, a TransUnion company.
“To realise the transition towards a more sustainable, net-zero future, it’s crucial for investors and businesses to have access to comparable and reliable sustainability information. Google Cloud’s cutting-edge infrastructure enables ESG Book to offer a digitised and streamlined approach to ESG data and unlock both value and actionable, real-time insights. We are excited to be collaborating with Google Cloud and leverage its market-leading Analytics Hub.” said Dr Daniel Klier, CEO at ESG Book (Arabesque).
Secure data exchanges
Analytics Hub makes it easy for organizations to govern and distribute their data centrally. As a data publisher, you can create secure data exchanges and publish listings that contain the datasets you want to deliver to your subscribers. By default, exchanges are completely private. Only the users or groups you provision can view or subscribe to the listings. You also have the ability to make your exchange public - providing all Google Cloud customers access to view or subscribe to your listings. You can easily create multiple exchanges to meet your data sharing needs.
As a data subscriber, Analytics Hub provides a seamless experience for you to browse and search through all the listings across all exchanges that you have access to. Once you find the dataset of interest, you subscribe to the listing. This will create a read-only linked dataset within your project where you can query or perform analytics on the data. The linked dataset is not a copy of the data; it is just a symbolic link to the shared dataset and stays in sync with any changes made by the data publisher.
Bootstrapping our data ecosystem
Organizations have increasingly started to consume data from third-party sources and complement them with internal data to derive new insights. With Analytics Hub, we want to make it easy for you to discover and subscribe datasets to trusted valuable sources. On day one, you can subscribe to:
Public datasets: Easy access to hundreds of public datasets managed by Google that include data about weather and climate, cryptocurrency, healthcare and life sciences, and transportation.
Google datasets: Unique, freely-available first-party datasets from Google. An example of this is the Google Trends dataset that allows users to measure interest in a particular topic or search term across Google Search, from around the United States, down to the city-level, and now also available for 50 international markets.
Commercial datasets: In partnership with Crux Informatics, we have onboarded commercial providers across finance, geospatial, retail, etc. who have brought all their data into BigQuery. We are excited to feature business data and insights from our recent strategic agreement with Dun & Bradstreet.
Next steps
Get started with Analytics Hub today by using this guide, starting a free trial with BigQuery, or contacting the Google Cloud sales team. Stay tuned for future feature updates such as usage metrics for publishers, parametrized datasets, privacy-safe queries, commercialization management, and much more.
