We made it. In a little more than a week, we’ll enter 2021 and leave the craziness of 2020 behind us. While the year posed many challenges to the world of cloud computing, it powered a whole new way to work across various industries.
This includes organizations that previously hadn’t considered remote work as a possibility. More looked to the cloud for an accessible, secure and reliable way to work and connect with employees who quickly turned spare rooms into home offices. Many organizations got a crash course in cloud migration 101.
With the introduction of better collaboration and productivity tools, including Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) and Google Meet, it was simple to keep workers working and collaborating in the cloud, no matter where in the world they were. In fact, the benefits of moving to the cloud were hard to ignore in a year where remote work became the norm for most organizations.
Enhanced collaboration tools weren’t the only innovations that drove better cloud computing in 2020. From better data access to tools to enhance interoperability in healthcare settings, 2020 featured some great new cloud solutions.
We surveyed Onix experts across our practice areas to see what caught their attention in 2020. Here are some of their thoughts about what drove better cloud computing in an unprecedented year.
What Was Your Favorite Cloud Innovation in 2020?
Sunnie Southern, Vice President, Health & Life Sciences Practice
It is an understatement to say that this year has been filled with massive changes and challenges in healthcare. One of the biggest challenges we faced is the need to make healthcare information accessible to the people that need it, when they need it, from wherever they are. In healthcare, we call that challenge “interoperability”.
Onix’s Health and Life Sciences (HLS) team has specialized expertise in helping organizations solve interoperability challenges. One of our favorite tools is Google’s Cloud Healthcare API that went GA in April. Learn more about our work to accelerate the deployment of the Healthcare API in this blog post.
Brian Brauchler, Technical Support Manager
Our partner BetterCloud’s new Discovery tool is a big leap forward in uncovering security risks in the form of 'shadow IT'. You can read more about it here.
Michael Sliwka, Customer Engineer
I really like Google Cloud’s BigQuery GIS (Geographic Information Systems). It allows you to analyze and visualize location data to help answer questions such as, "Where should I open my next location?" using BigQuery's Public Datasets.
Trevor Warren, Data Architect
BigQuery’s column-level security caught my eye. It allows for a lot of flexibility when you’re designing data warehouses by letting the table’s schema naturally increase in width. You don’t have to worry about dataset-level security inheritance; rather you can pick and choose what columns each role has permission to access.
Kevin Verde, Manager, Collaboration and Productivity Solutions
If I have to choose one, I’ll go with Google's next-level database platform, Google Tables. From the Area 120 labs, Google Tables is like spreadsheets but better.
