Google makes $3m investment to improve cloud data portability

Google has committed $3 million over the next five years, as well as hundreds of hours of its engineers' time, to improve data portability in the cloud.

People want the ability to use multiple online services without worrying about losing their contacts, emails, images, and other data if they close an account or transfer to a new provider, the search giant said.

However, data migration can be difficult for people without high-speed internet, unlimited mobile data plans, or extra storage on personal devices.

Therefore, Google is announcing new investments and continued collaboration with industry partners that will simplify data portability across online services in the future.

In 2018, Google joined hands with Apple, Microsoft, Meta, and Twitter to launch the Data Transfer Project (DTP), which also aimed to simplify data portability. Google's new investment builds on that project.

The DTP intends to establish an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that individuals across the web can move their data between service providers at any time.

DTP differs from traditional file transfer techniques in that it does not need a reliable internet connection, or require users to first download their data to external storage. Instead, the service can simply authorise a copy of the data to be securely transferred to a new provider.

This makes it much easier for customers to test new services without having to worry about running out of storage.

The DTP uses services' existing APIs and authorisation procedures to access the data. It's then transferred into a common format and subsequently back into the new service's API, using service-specific adapters.

DTP is open-source, meaning that any firm or organisation can use it instead of having to develop custom data transfer solutions.

Google is now aiming to improve DTP's open-source libraries, to enable more firms to join the project and to facilitate even more types of data transfer.

The company is also promising to continue improving its own tools, like Google Takeout.

'On average we see 8.2 million exports per month with Google Takeout, and in 2021, more than 400 billion files were exported, which has doubled since 2019,' it said.

Finally, Google will work with researchers and organisations to build industry-wide data portability and interoperability standards and guidelines.

The company outlined three important principles that it feels should be followed under data portability standards: putting people first; requiring exportability on platforms that allow people to import their data; and prioritising security and privacy.

These are the same concepts Google used to build Google Takeout and launch the DTP.