Google Cloud named a Leader in Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026

Forrester Research evaluated 10 major public cloud providers across 30 criteria in The Forrester Wave: Public Cloud Platforms, Q3 2026. Google Cloud was named a Leader and received the highest score in the "current offering" category. The report awarded Google the highest possible score in 23 of the 30 criteria it assessed.

Forrester's findings, quoted in the Google Cloud summary, say: "Google Cloud's vision is to enable the 'agentic enterprise,' and AI already permeates its platform, positioning the company to push further up the tech stack toward business users who increasingly shape AI adoption in the enterprise. Google Cloud is a good fit for enterprises seeking rapid technology innovation and a broad AI-enabled cloud platform."

Why Google highlights integrated infrastructure

Product capabilities and recent updates for agentic workloads

Google Cloud lists several specific platform capabilities and recent enhancements intended to help enterprises scale autonomous agents alongside traditional workloads on Kubernetes and serverless platforms:

• Sandboxed agent execution: GKE Agent Sandbox (GA) and Cloud Run Sandboxes (preview) provide lightweight, gVisor-isolated boundaries to run untrusted agent code. Google claims these sandboxes can provision in under a second and scale to high sandbox-per-second rates per cluster.

• Suspend/resume for containers: GKE Pod Snapshots serialize container RAM state to Google Cloud Storage so idle agent sessions can be suspended and resumed quickly. Google reports suspension in ~100 ms and resume in ~280 ms, and up to 90% reduction in idle compute costs.

• Predictive routing for inference: GKE Inference Gateway uses a continuously trained ML model to make real-time routing decisions, which Google says can cut time-to-first-token (TTFT) up to 70% and double cache-hit rates.

• Data and governance: Google promotes an Agentic Data Cloud concept that unifies transaction processing and analytics into a single system intended to provide real-time context for agents. Forrester gave Google 5/5 scores in Database services, Analytics services, Data integration services, and Data Governance services.

Google received the highest possible score in many named categories, including:

• Vision and innovation
• AI development services
• Database and analytics services
• Containers and Kubernetes services
• Modernization services
• Security services
• Serverless/FaaS services and Operations management services

How Google frames this for enterprises

Google's messaging is practical: enterprise teams should be able to run agentic workloads on the same proven platform they use for microservices, transactional databases, and real-time inference. The platform updates and the data strategy are presented as steps to reduce latency, cut idle costs, and give agents real-time enterprise context without building a separate AI-only infrastructure.

Forrester's evaluation places Google Cloud at the front of this particular market ranking, and Google uses the result to underline its roadmap: integrated hardware-to-model stacks, Kubernetes-first orchestration for mixed workloads, and an emphasis on data platforms that feed agents with real-time context.