Google Cloud

A cloud-native data platform is infrastructure built specifically for cloud environments (like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Databricks) rather than adapted from on-premise systems, giving you elastic scaling and pay-for-what-you-use pricing. You likely need one if your team is manually pulling reports from multiple tools, your spreadsheets take hours to update, or you're making decisions on data that's more than a day old.

A data warehouse (like Snowflake or BigQuery) stores structured, query-ready data; a data lake stores raw, often unstructured data at lower cost; a data platform is the full system (warehouse, lake, pipelines, and transformation layer) working together. Most growing businesses need a warehouse-centric platform, not a full data lake, unless they're handling large volumes of unstructured data like logs or media.

The right cloud provider depends on your existing stack, team familiarity, and specific tooling needs more than any inherent technical superiority between them. We work primarily with Google Cloud (BigQuery, Looker) and Snowflake, and can advise on which fits your situation rather than defaulting to one platform.