Data is only as powerful as the way you use it. Its true impact comes when everyone has access to the correct information at the right time to act intelligently.

With the mission of accelerating data-powered innovation for its customers, Google Cloud has made putting data first its mission. With this mindset, Google realized that it held a treasure trove of data from various organizations across the company. These robust catalogs of data are now available for public or commercial use and are available in a unified view as Google Cloud datasets solutions.

What Google Datasets Really Are

Let’s start with an example. 

Understanding customer needs is imperative when you’re the world’s largest home improvement retailer with approximately 500,000 associates across 2,200 stores. Just as important is arming each of your employees with the knowledge they need to ensure it is delivering what customers want. This was the challenge Home Depot had when it turned to Google for help. 

Using a combination of Cloud SQL, Spanner, and Bigtable for their operational use cases and AI to help locate goods using their mobile apps for in-store navigation, the company provided employees with the visibility they needed. The retailer believes this data-driven approach made each of its employees smarter. Now, imagine if Home Depot coupled its internal data with a readily available dataset on the Google Cloud Platform like U.S. residential real estate data from House Canary. The company could quickly cross-tab retail sales to ZIP codes forecasted to have home prices appreciate 3% or more in the next year?

Datasets are pre-built solutions designed to increase the value of a company’s data assets by augmenting analytics and artificial intelligence programs. Google’s featured datasets are extensive and include things like Google Trends, community mobility reports, weather details, Census Bureau boundary files, and loads more.

Leaders Want the Data

Staying ahead of the competition is not easy, particularly in this world of digital disruption. Every organization must deal with threats from alternatives with improved technologies, augmented business models, refined value chains, and new user experiences. That’s how business works, and these head-to-head environments have proliferated across retail, healthcare, financial services, transportation, automotive, media and entertainment, and manufacturing, among other industries.

Industry analyst firm Deloitte speaks of digital disruption changing the face of business. The firm attests that companies that don’t adapt risk irrelevance. Today’s business leaders find innovation in their use of data to drive real transformation and value creation.

Digital innovators are building their data clouds with an open, intelligent, and trusted platform, and they are augmenting those with public datasets from Google.

Augment Your In-house Data

With over 200 datasets representing more than 20 petabytes of data, Google’s Public Datasets program hosts all types of in-demand data, from convenient geographic and census data to high impact datasets for COVID-19 to weather and climate data from providers like NOAA. The best part is that the procurement, pipeline building and maintenance, and hosting are all taken care of, so you can dive straight into enriching your analyses or AI projects. 

To get started with Google Datasets, head to the Marketplace in the Google Cloud console, where you can explore all the datasets, their metadata and see example queries. Once you find a dataset you’re interested in, click to view the dataset, where you can start analyzing it alongside your data.

If you’re new to datasets, BigQuery, or cloud data in general, WALTLabs.io can help. Contact us for a no-obligation assessment. We’ll help you strengthen your analytics, drive new insights, and show you how Google Cloud Public Datasets can help your business.