Colab Enterprise is Google Cloud’s managed notebook environment, which since GA in 2024 has replaced the previous Vertex AI Workbench Managed Notebooks as the recommended option for interactive data science work in Google Cloud. It combines the familiar Colab interface with enterprise-grade security and governance features.
What is Colab Enterprise?
Unlike self-hosted JupyterHub or classic VM-based notebooks, Colab Enterprise requires no management of the underlying infrastructure. Google handles patching, scaling, and availability of compute resources. Notebooks can be shared and collaboratively edited like Google Docs, with fine-grained IAM permissions at the notebook level. GPU and TPU runtimes are available at the click of a button without manual setup.
The integration with BigQuery is particularly relevant for data science teams: notebooks can run BigQuery queries directly and load results into DataFrames without moving data through external APIs. Vertex AI integrations enable training and deploying models directly from the notebook. VPC Service Controls restrict data access to authorized networks, making Colab Enterprise suitable for regulated industries and handling sensitive data.
Colab Enterprise complements Vertex AI Workbench User-Managed Notebooks, which remains available for teams that need full control over VM configuration. For most data science workflows, Colab Enterprise is the recommended choice as it eliminates infrastructure overhead and makes team collaboration significantly easier.
Integration with innFactory
As a Google Cloud partner, innFactory supports migration from existing notebook environments to Colab Enterprise and the setup of secure ML development environments in Google Cloud.
Contact us for consultation on Colab Enterprise and your ML development workflow.
