Google Cloud executives today claimed the company’s cloud, related tools, and services outperform the competition despite an unrequited desire to surpass public cloud leaders Amazon and Microsoft on financial terms.

“Looking at our networking and data center investments alone, we have the largest network with the lowest latency of any cloud provider,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during his keynote at Google Cloud Next 2021. “We now have 28 regions with plans for 10 more, and it’s all connected by 19 subsea cables.”

The exec noted that scale combined with benefits enterprises can gain through Google’s expansive set of consumer applications and its arsenal of security tools and services place Google ahead of the pack. 

“We offer comprehensive security that helps organizations, including ours, protect what matters. Security is foundational to everything we do,” he said, adding that Google is a “pioneer” in zero-trust computing with deep experience running the model at scale.

“On its own, any one of these pillars would be helpful to customers. Put together, they can be transformative, which is the mission of Google Cloud,” Pichai said. 

Despite progress in cybersecurity, large scale data breaches remain common, and Google responded recently with a pledge to invest $10 billion during the next five years to strengthen cybersecurity. This includes an expansion of zero-trust programs, efforts to secure the software supply chain, and enhance open source security, Pichai said.

Microsoft also followed up on a White House meeting of tech giants with President Joe Biden with plans to spend $20 billion over the same period to advance its own security products and services.

Security is one of the main reasons customers choose Google’s open cloud infrastructure over its competitors, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian. “As more digital users access more data from more locations, the risk of cybersecurity breaches is accelerating. By pioneering new approaches to security, Google keeps more people safe online than anyone else in the world,” he said.

“We're experiencing great momentum with our open infrastructure cloud. Many of the most demanding and technically advanced customers in the world disproportionately choose us,” Kurian added.

Google’s strengths in security, combined with migration tools, new serverless and container capabilities, managed services, and network performance underpin the determining factors that lead enterprises to pick Google, he said.

“Our network offers three times the throughput of other cloud providers,” Kurian said. “We remain and were the very first and only cloud provider with a clear multicloud strategy. We provide you with a consistent developer experience built on open source to write once and deploy anywhere.”

That multicloud play is also leading an increasing number of customers to migrate SAP and VMware workloads to Google Cloud, according to Kurian. “In just the last year, we’ve added three times the number of SAP customers as the prior year, and we’re accelerating,” he said. 

Google’s Data Cloud remains another key differentiator for the No. 3 cloud provider, according to Kurian. He noted that BigQuery, Google’s data warehouse, helps more than 3,000 organizations analyze more than 200 petabytes of data each week. Spanner, a managed relational database, serves more than 1 billion requests per second and provides a 99.999% service-level agreement, he added.

“We help organizations unify their data across multiple clouds and silos, combining structured and unstructured data, and making data every employee’s superpower,” Kurian said.

Finally, Pichai highlighted the continued pace of innovation at Google, claiming the company released more than 1,500 products and features during the last year. “That’s about four a day,” he said.

Google continue to lag behind its larger rivals in terms of sheer cloud revenues, though it did post the largest growth rate during the second quarter of this year.