Google is a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026
Google Cloud is named a Leader in Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026, achieving top scores in 23 of 30 criteria, including AI, security, and Kubernetes services.
Google Cloud has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026, securing the highest score in the ‘current offering’ category among 10 major providers. The evaluation assessed 30 criteria, with Google Cloud earning the top possible score in 23, spanning vision, innovation, AI development, database services, analytics, containers, Kubernetes, modernization, and security. The report highlights Google Cloud’s integrated platform approach as a key differentiator in the agentic era.
Forrester’s evaluation underscores Google Cloud’s strengths in container and Kubernetes services, serverless computing, and operations management, noting no significant capability gaps. Recent enhancements to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and operations tooling enable organizations to scale autonomous agents alongside traditional workloads on a single platform. Updates include GKE Agent Sandbox for secure agent execution, GKE Pod Snapshots to reduce idle compute costs by up to 90%, and GKE Inference Gateway to improve inference performance.
Google Cloud’s Agentic Data Cloud unifies transactional and analytical systems to provide real-time context for autonomous workflows, addressing latency and governance challenges. The platform received top scores in database, analytics, data integration, and governance services. Recent capabilities introduced include SAP BDC Connect for BigQuery for zero-copy data sharing with SAP systems, Knowledge Catalog for mapping business meaning across data estates, and Lakehouse federation for accessing live data from Iceberg and BigQuery via PostgreSQL.
The recognition validates Google Cloud’s decades-long investment in full-stack co-design, from silicon to systems to models. Forrester notes Google Cloud’s platform is well-suited for enterprises seeking rapid innovation and a broad AI-enabled cloud solution. The company’s infrastructure supports diverse workloads, from AI research labs to global financial systems, offering performance, scale, security, and a unified data foundation.