Our forecast is calling for plenty of clouds in this new year—not the kind that bring rain and snow, but the ones that bring data analytics, storage and lots more. We’re already off to a brisk start in 2019—here are a few highlights from January, in case you missed them.

New year, new skills: Cloud training and certification is here.

Cloud technology is changing the way that businesses work, letting them do even more at a faster pace. However, there’s usually one thing missing: The knowledge to run these cloud systems and create new ways to use them. So we’ve announced four new certifications, plus a bunch of new courses and labs in five languages, so that more people can learn Google Cloud skills. How will you grow your cloud career?

Sheets just got a data boost.

Performing data analysis in Google’s BigQuery can yield lots of interesting insights—but not all of us are data scientists. We want to make it easier for anyone to analyze their data, so we created the BigQuery data connector. The connector helps you import large datasets from BigQuery into Sheets so you can create reports or analyze data in a familiar spreadsheet interface. Great for sales, marketing or other departments. Here’s what it looks like.

Hardware chips make fast, clear web images possible.

If you’ve played high-resolution games or enjoyed crisp graphics on a web page, there might have been a GPU powering those experiences. A GPU, or graphics processing unit, is a type of hardware processor that’s faster than the usual computer CPU, and can handle more intense graphics rendering jobs. New NVIDIA GPUs are in beta (only from Google Cloud!) and can power machine learning jobs.  Read more about this cool type of hardware.

Security trends keep IT on their toes.

Google’s security experts laid out some of what to expect this year in software security. You may see more use of tools like hardware security keys to prevent phishing, and more deployment of zero-trust architectures that increase flexibility while also enhancing security. See the entire list of 2019 security trends.

The first step to the cloud is often getting your existing apps there first.

There are plenty of great products and services available in Google Cloud—but for many of you, you'll want to start by moving some of your existing apps to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). That’s a big process, though, so planning and prioritizing will go a long way toward migration success. This checklist offers guidance on how you can decide which virtual machines (VMs) are the best candidates for migration. More on that decision-making here.

For all of what we covered in January, check out the Google Cloud blog.