Top 5 Stories of the Week: Google’s Cloud Innovations Amid a Cloud Spending Slowdown

Coverage of Google’s latest innovations and industry-leading predictions dominated coverage this week as the tech giant announced new strides in artificial intelligence (AI), computing vision, open source, cloud and the future of passwords — or lack thereof with the new rollout of password authentication .

At the Google Next 2022 event, the company introduced several tools and technologies to help companies navigate a rapidly evolving technology world, including the new Vertex AI Vision service, OpenXLA Project and unstructured data support, and Apache Spark on BigQuery to help just to name a few.

The company predicts that low-code, no-code solutions will continue to drive innovation across all industries, detailed the impact of multicloud across the enterprise, advocated greater automation in workflows, and even hinted at a four-day workweek future, thanks to AI .

In further cloud news, a new report published the findings that 81% of IT teams have been asked by C-level executives to slow or halt their cloud spending as financial markets remain volatile.

As the economy continues to take a turn, creativity among enterprise tech stacks could be a key to keeping innovation flowing when budgets aren’t. JetBlue is a player that is currently demonstrating the effectiveness of this concept. The commercial airline has detailed how it uses a unique combination of features from Snowflake and Fivetran to customize its management of structured and unstructured data.

Here’s more of our top five tech stories of the week:

1. Report: 81% of IT teams focused on reducing or stopping cloud spend with C-suite

   According to a new study from Wanclouds, 81% of IT leaders say their C-suite has instructed them to reduce or not take on additional cloud spend as costs skyrocket and market headwinds worsen.

   As organizations continue with the digital transformations they started at the start of the pandemic, multicloud adoption is becoming increasingly impractical and costs difficult to manage in hybrid environments.

   Cloud spend visibility and tracking is also challenged by the adoption of hybrid and multicloud infrastructure, which can be complex to manage.

2. Google introduces passwordless authentication in Chrome and Android with passkeys

   Google has announced that it is bringing passkeys to Chrome and Android so that users can create and use passkeys to sign in to Android devices. Users can store and use passkeys on their phones and computers to log in without a password.

   The announcement comes after Apple, Google and Microsoft pledged to expand support for the passwordless login standard created by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium in March this year.

3. How JetBlue’s integrated use of Snowflake and Fivetran is a model for the modern data stack

   Commercial airline JetBlue uses the integrated Snowflake data stack to gain insights into its customer service and operations.

   The company’s firm grip on the vast amounts of data it holds is critical to the airline. The data team turns information into insight using a combination of Snowflake’s Data Cloud and Fivetran’s data integration service.

   This combination represents the modern data stack. Data management is a complex challenge and information comes from multiple directions and numerous sources. Any attempt to turn both structured and unstructured data into actionable insights thus requires a broad set of techniques and technologies.

4. Google’s Top 10 Cloud Technology Predictions

   At the Cloud Next event, Google unveiled a series of fixes and updates to its product and services suite to support developers and technical decision-makers at all levels. The focus was on delivering the most open, extensible and powerful data cloud, but the company didn’t just showcase its product innovations. It also gave a glimpse of where we were going.

   Among some of the top announcements, some predictions emerged, including about widespread adoption of open source and neuro-inclusive design.

5. Google reveals what’s next for Cloud AI

   Google made it clear that it wants to be the preferred target of companies for AI and machine learning (ML) workloads.

   It announced a range of services this week, including the new Vertex AI Vision service, a computer vision-as-a-service capability. Google also hopes to make it easier for businesses to build specific types of applications that take advantage of AI, and that’s where the new AI Agents service fits in. aims to bring together different machine learning frameworks.