Google Cloud has been named a Leader in the Forrester Wave: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021 report, the company has today announced.

Forrester also rated Google Cloud highest in the current offering category among the providers evaluated, which includes 11 companies with platform solutions to protect unstructured data — spanning from cloud providers to cybersecurity-centric vendors.

Google Cloud was also awarded the highest possible score in sixteen criteria — receiving the most 5 out of 5 ratings of any vendor.

According to the Forrester report, “Google offers breadth and depth with built-in data security in the cloud. Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, and BeyondCorp Enterprise have underlying data security products and features for protecting customer data.

The report also commends Google Cloud's focus on protecting unstructured data. “Google productises capabilities originally developed to secure its own business, and brings a disciplined approach to product enhancements for enterprise requirements,” the report said.

“It serves a wide range of enterprise and mid-market, with a focus on emphasising data protection needs by industry.

Forrester also mentions the company's aim to secure endpoints through zero trust technology: “Google further enables a zero trust approach with third-party integrations through its BeyondCorp Alliance of partners in device management, endpoint security and gateways.

Notably, Google Cloud received the highest possible score in the Obfuscation criteria of Forrester's report. Obfuscation can help protect sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII), which is critical to many enterprise workflows.

Cloud DLP helps customers inspect and mask this sensitive data using techniques like redaction, bucketing, and tokenisation, which help strike a balance between risk and utility. This is especially crucial when dealing with unstructured or free-text workloads, in which it can be challenging to know what data to redact.

For Obfuscation specifically, the report mentioned that Google “takes a broad view of DLP, which includes in-line redaction of sensitive elements in unstructured data and DLP APIs that extend support to additional data types like images or other media.

Google Cloud's announcement of its showing in the Forrester Wave comes only a few days after its launch of a brand new managed machine learning (ML) platform — Vertex AI.

The platform allows users to accelerate the deployment of AI models and requires almost 80% fewer lines of code to train a model, Google says. It also enables users to implement machine learning operations (MLOps) to build ML projects throughout the entire development lifecycle.

The search giant says Vertex AI unifies the Google Cloud services responsible for building ML, simplifying the process of building, training and deploying ML models.