Security and flexibility

There is no definite pattern that you need to follow when choosing your storage and database options. Different database and storage options can be used together—and often are—to complete tasks that have different priorities; the cloud gives you that flexibility.

That said, some services are more flexible than others. For instance, GCS—despite supporting only unstructured data—can be used for a large number of tasks due to its low cost, high scalability, low latency, and reliability. The only task you shouldn't use GCS for is querying your data. Instead, you can use GCS with a relational database that is capable of rich queries, such as Cloud SQL or Cloud Spanner.

Finally, there is data security. While data storage in the cloud is still safer than most on-premises solutions, there are still steps you should take to ensure the safety of your data. For starters, all of the data stored in Google Cloud is encrypted by default...