Manjul Sahay, Group Product Manager at Google Cloud Storage, presented on Storage Intelligence with Google Cloud, focusing on helping customers, both enterprises and startups, manage their storage effectively for AI applications. These customers often face challenges in managing storage at scale for security, cost, and operational efficiency, particularly with small and new teams. A key problem is the exponential growth of storage due to the influx of new data and AI-generated content, making object storage management increasingly complex.

The presentation highlighted the difficulties in managing object storage, which often involves billions or trillions of objects spread across multiple buckets and projects. Many customers resort to building custom management tools, leading to significant expenditure on management, sometimes 13% to 24% of the total spend. Google Cloud aims to address this by providing storage intelligence to help customers manage storage, meet them in multi-cloud environments, and reduce or eliminate storage management challenges.

Google Cloud introduced Storage Intelligence to address storage management challenges, offering a unified platform with features like datasets, which provides a metadata repository in BigQuery. Also offered is the ability to identify public objects and batch operations to act on billions of objects, as well as features like bucket migration, all designed to streamline storage management. With a free trial offered, early adopters like Anthropic and Spotify are already experiencing benefits in managing and optimizing their storage infrastructure.

Presented by Manjul Sahay, Group Product Manager, Google Cloud Storage, Google Cloud. Recorded live in Santa Clara, California, on April 22, 2025, as part of AI Infrastructure Field Day. Watch the entire presentation at https://techfieldday.com/appearance/google-cloud-presents-at-ai-infrastructure-field-day-2/ or https://techfieldday.com/event/aiifd2/ for more information.