If your business runs on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you likely already appreciate the value of keeping your data secure, scalable, and fully under your control. What you might not realize is that most Packaged Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) force you to copy your data outside of GCP and into a vendor-controlled environment where you lose visibility, governance, and efficiency.
That’s where a Composable CDP changes the game. Unlike Packaged CDPs, a Composable CDP is built to live inside your GCP environment, leveraging your existing cloud infrastructure while maintaining full ownership of your data. If you want a CDP that truly harnesses GCP’s power and operates within your cloud, composability isn’t just an option—it’s more like a necessity.
The Benefits: Why GCP + Composability = Ideal Architecture
By deploying a composable CDP on GCP, businesses retain full ownership of their data while unlocking real-time personalizations, AI-driven analytics, and seamless integrations—all within their own cloud. The result is faster innovation, stronger governance, and a future-proof architecture.
The benefits?
- Security – No unnecessary data movement outside your controlled environment.
- Compliance – Fine-tuned access controls via GCP’s Identity and Access Management (IAM).
- Cost efficiency – No vendor markup on storage or compute—just GCP’s native pricing.
- Scalability – Direct integration with GCP’s services means no bottlenecks.
One Cloud to Rule Them All
Keeping all your customer data and analytics in your own cloud means avoiding reliance on a third-party SaaS provider to export your data into their ecosystem before generating insights. With a Composable CDP, everything runs directly within your existing data warehouse—enabling zero-copy data access and eliminating unnecessary duplication.
GCP is uniquely well-suited for this approach. Unlike traditional Packaged CDPs, which rely on extracting your data and locking it into a vendor’s black box, a GCP-run Composable CDP takes advantage of Google’s native infrastructure for CDP analytics—without having to extract the data first. Just like a Composable CDP, Google’s cloud is modular, allowing you to choose best-of-breed tools (BigQuery for warehousing, Vertex AI for machine learning, Pub/Sub for event streaming etc.) and integrate them seamlessly under your own governance.
Traditional Packaged CDPs Just No Longer Cut It
Most CDPs are built as monolithic SaaS platforms, forcing you to move your data into their environment—away from your governed, cost-optimized GCP infrastructure. This creates three critical problems:
- Loss of Control – When your data lives in a vendor’s system, you lose visibility into how it’s processed, who accesses it, and how compliance is enforced. If you’re already plugged into GCP, this means that Google’s granular IAM and audit logging essentially become irrelevant.
- Unnecessary Costs – SaaS CDPs charge premiums for storage and compute, even though you’ve already invested in BigQuery and GCP’s scalable resources. Worse, you pay to move data out of your cloud and into theirs.
- Reinforced Silos – Ironically, while CDPs promise data unification, they often become yet another silo. Your data is trapped in a proprietary system, requiring additional ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes to sync back to your data warehouse.
A Composable CDP avoids these pitfalls by running natively on GCP, treating your existing data stack—not a vendor’s platform—as the single source of truth.
Enter the Composable CDP
A Composable CDP represents the next evolution in customer data management—a modular, cloud-native architecture that replaces rigid, all-in-one solutions with a customizable stack tailored to your business needs. Unlike Packaged CDPs that force you into a vendor’s predefined workflows (and their associated costs), a Composable CDP lets you selectively integrate top-tier services already in your GCP environment.
A Composable CDP on GCP leverages services like BigQuery—Google’s serverless, petabyte-scale data warehouse—as its foundation. Instead of syncing customer data to an external platform, your CDP runs natively in BigQuery, where you can analyze terabytes of behavioral, transactional, and demographic data in seconds. For example, a retailer could unify online/offline purchase histories in BigQuery, then activate that data in real time via Pub/Sub—all without costly ETL pipelines to a third-party CDP.
The architecture delivers three transformative advantages:
- True data ownership – Your data never leaves GCP’s encrypted ecosystem, avoiding compliance risks from cross-border transfers.
- From insights to action – Native integration with GCP’s data streaming services means insights trigger actions instantly (e.g., cart abandonment messages within seconds).
- Future-proof compliance – Fine-grained access controls and audit logs are inherited from GCP IAM, simplifying adherence to regulations like GDPR.
By treating your cloud as the CDP—rather than bolting on another SaaS layer—you gain both flexibility and precision where traditional platforms impose constraints.
Why Composability + GCP = Ideal Architecture
By now, it should be becoming clear that a Composable CDP isn’t just an alternative to traditional platforms—it’s the natural evolution of customer data management for GCP-centric organizations. The architecture thrives on seamless integration with native GCP services, turning the Google platform’s tools into active components of your CDP rather than disconnected silos.
With your CDP built directly on GCP, you can easily tap into Google’s most advanced AI capabilities—including Vertex AI for model development and deployment, and Gemini for generative intelligence. Whether you’re building predictive audiences, automating personalization, or surfacing real-time insights, these tools are available where your data already lives—no copying, no lag, no closed-loop systems.
This approach delivers unmatched scalability and cost efficiency by leveraging infrastructure you’re already paying for, eliminating the redundant storage and processing fees of SaaS CDPs. Critically, it ensures IT teams retain full control—not just over data, but over access policies, privacy safeguards, and compliance workflows. Where packaged CDPs force tradeoffs between functionality and governance, composability on GCP makes them mutually reinforcing.
The Bottom Line
Aside from vastly improving efficiency and future-proofing business operations, leveraging the power of a Composable CDP on GCP is an almost guaranteed way of boosting revenue. The reason, quite simply, is that by unlocking real-time insights, automating audience targeting, and driving meaningful engagement across multiple marketing and operational functions, it is inevitable that fewer conversion opportunities slip away.
For example, by partnering with Syntasa and implementing a Composable CDP within their GCP environment, one of the UK’s leading electronics retailers recently generated a £23M revenue uplift in AI-Driven Product Recommendations and over £30M in additional revenue by improving marketing effectiveness and enabling dynamic retargeting.
These numbers might seem exceptional but they are not unusual; indeed, they are the natural consequence of implementing Syntasa’s Composable CDP on GCP.
FAQ: Composable CDPs on GCP
Q: Isn’t this just building a CDP from scratch?
A: No—a Composable CDP uses your existing GCP services as building blocks. Think of it as configuring (not coding) with pre-built connectors for tools like BigQuery and Looker.
Q: How does this work with real-time data?
A: GCP’s Pub/Sub streams events directly to your analytics and activation tools (e.g., sending abandoned cart alerts within seconds), avoiding SaaS CDP processing delays.
Q: What about compliance?
A: Your data never leaves GCP, so you inherit its certifications (HIPAA, GDPR). Fine-grained access controls are managed via IAM, not a vendor’s opaque permissions system.
The Only CDP That Truly Belongs on GCP
If you want a CDP that lives natively in Google Cloud—without data leaks, vendor lock-in, or redundant costs—the answer is clear: composable is the only architecture designed for GCP’s strengths.
Ready to see it in action? Explore how Syntasa’s Composable CDP leverages your GCP investments to deliver faster insights, ironclad governance, and measurable cost savings—all within your own cloud.