Dive Brief:

• Google launched the Google Transfer Appliance on Tuesday, a hardware that allows Google cloud customers to physically ship large amounts of data to Google, according to Fortune and a Google blog.

• Google is offering two options: a smaller appliance that holds 100 TB of raw data or a larger one that handles 480 TB of raw data. Companies have 25 days to load up the device and return it to Google.

• The new device is expected to save companies with a lot of data an enormous amount of time. Transferring 10 PB of data to the cloud can take a company between three and 34 years depending on available bandwidth, according to the Google blog.

Dive Insight:

As the cloud matures, and "low hanging fruit" customers complete their cloud migrations, companies that need more help and are less digitally native will make up more of Google’s customer base. Older companies tend to have large amounts of data and fewer options for how to handle it. This can be a major barrier for companies that want the benefits of the cloud but struggle with migration.

Amazon introduced a similar service last November. Called Snowmobile, Amazon’s tool is actually a secure data truck that carries up to 100 PB of data to Amazon Web Services data centers.

Google is trying to catch up to cloud leaders Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft, offering several new types of services that appeal to enterprise customers. Last month, Google announced a new partnership with Nutanix that will allow Nutanix customers to more easily move critical workloads to Google's cloud.

Under the partnership, Nutanix and Google customers will be able to deploy and manage both cloud-based and traditional enterprise applications in one public cloud service. AWS and Microsoft already offer solutions to help companies move on-premise infrastructures to the cloud.