Google has launched a service specifically for storing large amounts of data online, potentially permitting organizations to execute data analysis as a cloud service called Google Cloud Bigtable.

Google Cloud Bigtable, now available in beta, is a fast, fully managed, massively scalable NoSQL database service that is perfect for web, mobile, and Internet, in applications that require terabytes to petabytes of data. It assures users that speed, scale, or cost efficiency will not be sacrificed as applications grow. Google's director of product management for the Google Cloud Platform Tom Kershaw said that the Google Cloud Bigtable "is based on technology that Google has been running internally for many years, so it is not a brand new thing," according to PCWorld.

Bigtable powers a number of Google's core services, including Google Search, Gmail, and Google Analytics.

Data-intensive industries could benefit from the Bigtable services, such as digital advertising firms, and companies in the finance, telecommunications, energy and biomedical fields. An example of the service's potential is that finance companies could store petabytes of trading data to analyze for emerging trends - as the service can also be used to store sensor data from an Internet-of-things monitoring system.

Customers can read and write data using the API (application programming interface) for Apache HBase. This is an open-source implementation of the Bigtable architecture for storing data across a number of servers. Consequently, Bigtable can be integrated with all the current applications in the Hadoop ecosystem.

Aside from Bigtable, Google also offers Cloud Datastore – a high-availability NoSQL datastore for developers on its App Engine platform. Although the Datastore is based on the Bigtable, the Datastore is geared towards read-heavy workload for web and mobile apps.

"Cloud Bigtable is much the opposite - is designed for larger companies and enterprises where extensive data processing is required, and where workloads are more complex. For example, if an organization needs to stream data into, run analytics on and serve data out of a single database at scale - Cloud Bigtable is the right system. Many of our customers will start out on Cloud Datastore to build prototypes and get moving quickly, and then evolve towards services like Cloud Bigtable as they grow and their data processing needs become more complex," Google Cloud Platform product manager Cory O'Conner said on TechCrunch.