Google added a new big storage option for data-needy customers and helped form a new data initiative focused on helping enterprises migrate their storage needs to the cloud.

The data storage option is Google’s new BigLake platform that ties together data lakes and warehouses to extend the reach of the cloud giant’s BigQuery platform. This allows users to manage data that is sitting in multiple cloud platforms as a single copy of data.

(And this is not to be confused with a “data lakehouse.”)

Sudhir Hasbe, director of product management at Google Cloud, explained in a press briefing that customers can unify the “data warehouse and lakes to analyze data without worrying about the underlying storage formats or systems. … The biggest advantage is that you don’t have to duplicate your data across two different environments and create data silos.”

He added that users can also take advantage of the analytics capabilities from a data warehouse and tie it into the deeper storage capabilities of a data lake.

“You get the richness of the governance and management that you want in your environment in a vastly changing regulatory environment, and all you want to make sure you can store all the data and manage it and govern it really well,” Hasbe said.

Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of databases, data analytics, and business intelligence at Google Cloud, added that this also breaks down the distinction between data lakes and data warehouses, which “was never useful. It was a technical necessity because … data volumes just kept growing and it was becoming too complicated and cost prohibitive to manage them in traditional data storage technologies.”

Google also rolled out new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning integrations with its Vertex AI platform designed to make it easier for data scientists to share data across platforms.

In addition, Google is also offering “incentive funding” alongside tooling, resources, and guidance to help enterprises migrate their data from on-premises environments into Google’s Cloud ecosystem.

The new data group is the Data Cloud Alliance, which includes co-founders Accenture, Confluent, Databricks, Dataiku, Deloitte, Elastic, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, Redis, and Starburst. Those members are working together to make it easier for enterprises to adopt data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning best practices to help manage data across an organization.

Those members are pledging to provide infrastructure, APIs, and integration support for data portability and accessibility between platforms and different environments. They will also work on new, common industry data models, processes, and integration plans to support data sharing, reduce complexity, and provide for data governance and global compliance.