Some of these visualizations could help Google's Cloud customers better serve their own users. Understanding customers' usage patterns to the point where they can be more accurately predicted would help companies manage traffic load and improve user experience. And Talbott notes that having a better grasp on where in the world customers are could help providers improve their services as well. Talbott told Engadget that Google Cloud was looking into whether it could surface these sorts of insights for its customers on an ongoing basis in the future.

Other information that came out of the data visualizations, while not necessarily useful for service enhancements, was surprising to Talbott. The team looked at how correlated digital traffic was country to country and in some cases, there were patterns you might anticipate. Countries near each other operating in the same time zones often had similar storage traffic patterns, for example.

But there were also some unexpected correlations. Talbott said Italy's and South Africa's traffic was highly correlated, as was that of a Caribbean country and Canada. He called these correlated pairs "digital buddies" and said uncovering them was a surprising and rather interesting part of the project. "What makes companies and users in South Africa act similarly as they access their data to those in Italy?" he said, though Google doesn't have a good answer to that question yet.

In the video above, you can see how storage traffic changes throughout the day for different countries, and this is where the data can get a little mesmerizing. Bubbles move up or down depending on the data direction with their size representing the amount of data. "Looking at Cloud Storage requests over time showed us a distinct pattern, the pattern gave us a way to correlate countries, and each correlation gave us an insight into connections around the globe," said the team. Talbott added that while parts of this type of work may be useful for those using the service, it can also just be really pretty. "You can make storage beautiful when you look at it in different ways," he said, "and in doing so you can really generate some thought provoking insights for your customers."