In today’s world, organizations view data sharing to be a critical component of their overall data strategy. Businesses are striving to unlock new insights and make more informed decisions by sharing and consuming data from partners, customers, and other sources. There are many organizations also looking to generate new revenue streams by monetizing their data assets. However, existing technologies used to exchange data pose many challenges for customers. Traditional data sharing techniques such as FTP, email, and APIs are expensive to maintain and often result in multiple copies of stale data, especially when sharing in scale. Organizations are looking for ways to make data sharing more reliable and consistent.

We recently announced the general availability of Analytics Hub. This fully-managed service enables organizations to securely exchange data and analytics assets within or across organizational boundaries. Backed by the unique architecture of BigQuery, customers can now share real-time data at scale without moving the data, leading to tremendous cost savings for their data management. As part of this launch, we have added functionality for both data providers and subscribers to realize the full potential of shared data, including:

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Regional support: Analytics Hub service is now available in all the supported regions in BigQuery.
Subscription Management: Data providers can now easily view and manage subscriptions for all their shared datasets in a single view.
Governance & Access: Administrators can now monitor the usage of Analytics Hub through Audit Logging and Information Schema, while enforcing VPC Service Controls to securely share data.
Search & Discovery: We have revamped the search experience with filter facets to help subscribers quickly find relevant listings
Data Ecosystem: We added hundreds of new public and commercial listings in Analytics Hub across industries such as finance, geospatial, climate, retail, and more to help organizations consume data from third-party sources. We have also added first-party data from Google including Google Trends, Google’s Diversity Annual Report, Google Cloud Release Notes, Carbon-Free Energy Data for GCP Data Centers, COVID-19 Open Data: Vaccination Search Insights.

Analytics Hub uses a publish-and-subscribe model to distribute data at scale. As a data provider, you can create secure data exchanges and publish listings that contain the datasets you want to share. Exchanges enable you to control the users or groups that can view or subscribe to the listings. By default, exchanges are private in Analytics Hub. However, if you have public or commercial datasets that you want to make available for all Google Cloud customers, you can also request to make an exchange public. Organizations can create hundreds of exchanges to meet their data sharing needs.

Analytics Hub also provides a seamless experience to browse and search listings across all exchanges. As a data subscriber, you can easily find the dataset of interest (1) and request access or subscribe to listings that you have access to (2). By subscribing to a listing, Analytics Hub creates a read-only linked dataset within your project that you can query (3). A linked dataset is not a copy of the data; it is just a symbolic link to the shared dataset that stays in sync with any changes made to the source.

Over a one-week period in September 2022, BigQuery saw more than 6,000 organizations sharing over 275 petabytes of data across organizational boundaries. Many of these customers also used Analytics Hub in preview to share data at scale in various scenarios. Some of these use cases include:

Internal data sharing – Customers can create exchanges for various business functions or geographics to share data internally within an organization. For example, an organization can set up a marketing exchange to publish all the latest channel performance, customer profiles, product performance, etc.

Collaboration across organizations – When sharing data across organizational boundaries, customers can create private exchanges with each partner or business (B2B). A common example is a retailer sharing sales data with each of their suppliers.

Monetizing data assets – Data providers can also monetize their datasets and distribute the data through commercial exchanges. Today, commercial providers use an offline entitlement and billing process and provision access to the data using Analytics Hub.

Enriching insights with third-party data – Customers can discover new insights or gain a competitive advantage by leveraging external or third-party data. Analytics Hub and its rich data ecosystem provide easy access to analytics-ready public and commercial datasets. An example of a popular dataset on the platform has been Google Trends.

Here is what some of our customers and partners had to say:

“Analytics Hub allows data scientists to discover and subscribe to new data assets in the cloud with ease,” said Kimberly Bloomston, SVP of Product at LiveRamp. “With the addition of this offering, LiveRamp now fully supports GCP with a complete suite of native solutions that unlock greater accuracy, partner connectivity and audience activation for marketing and advertising. This expanded partnership provides a must-have analytic infrastructure that excels at unlocking more value from data while respecting strict global privacy regulations.”

“Securely sharing data with partners and clients is always a challenge. The questions of ownership, billing and security are not straightforward for any organization. Analytics Hub, with its publish/subscribe model, provides answers to these questions baked right into the platform.” said Jono MacDougall , Principal Software Engineer at Ravelin.

“One of our key driving factors for BigQuery adoption is availability of Analytics Hub (AH). In a prior model sharing and receiving data as flat files was laborious, inefficient and expensive. We changed that significantly with an early adoption of Analytics Hub, introducing its capabilities to our customers and partners who are also primarily on GCP, enabling multi-way data exchange between these entities and are on our way to monetizing the valuable insights we learn along the way.” said Raj Chandrasekaran, CTO at True Fit.

Next steps

Get started with Analytics Hub today by using this guide, starting a free trial with BigQuery, or contacting the Google Cloud sales team. Stay tuned for updates to our product with features such as usage metrics for providers, approval workflows, privacy-safe queries though data clean rooms, commercialization workflows, and much more.

By: Nikhil Gaekwad (Product Management Lead, Google Cloud)
Source: Google Cloud Blog