Google Cloud is proud to support our customers with the cleanest cloud in the industry. For the past four years, we’ve matched 100% of our electricity use with renewable energy purchases, and we were the first company of our size to commit going even further by running on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030.  As we work to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy, we help you take immediate action to decarbonize your digital applications and infrastructure. We’re also working with our customers across every industry to develop new solutions for the unique climate change challenges that organizations face. Today, we’re excited to expand our portfolio of carbon-free solutions and announce new partnerships that will help every company build a more sustainable future. 

First, we’re launching Carbon Footprint, a new product that provides customers with the gross carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage. Now available to every GCP user for free in the Cloud Console, this tool helps you measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of your cloud usage. Of course, the net operational emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage is still zero. With growing requirements for Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, companies are looking for ways to show their employees, boards and customers their progress against climate targets. Using Carbon Footprint, you have access to the gross energy related emissions data you need for internal carbon inventories and external carbon disclosures, with one click. 

Built in collaboration with customers like Atos, Etsy, HSBC, L’Oréal, Salesforce, Thoughtworks and Twitter, our Carbon Footprint reporting introduces a new standard of transparency to support you in meeting your climate goals. You can monitor your gross cloud emissions over time, by project, by product and by region, giving IT teams and developers metrics that can help them reduce their carbon footprint. Our detailed calculation methodology is published so that auditors and reporting teams can verify that their cloud emissions data meets GHG Protocol guidance.

“The power of knowledge combined with the power of technology innovation plays a vital role in proactively responding to the climate crisis we are facing. With Google Carbon Footprint reporting, Atos feeds emissions data in our Decarbonization Data Platform, demonstrating potential emissions reductions from the Google Cloud Platform to our customers. This reporting opens up new levels of emissions transparency, trajectory planning, and data insight to support our customers in meeting, and potentially accelerating towards, their climate goals.”—Nourdine Bihmane, Head of Decarbonization Business Line, Atos

“The capability to measure and understand the environmental footprint of our Public Cloud usage is among the key axis of our sustainable tech roadmap. With Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we are now able to directly follow the impact of our sustainable infrastructure approach and architecture principles.”—Hervé DUMAS, Sustainability IT Director, L’Oreal

While digital infrastructure emissions are just one part of your environmental footprint, accurately accounting for IT carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against the carbon reduction targets required to avert the worst consequences of climate change. To help you account for emissions beyond our cloud and across your organization, we’re excited to partner with Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, integrating our Google Cloud Platform emissions data into their carbon accounting platform. 

“As we face unprecedented climate challenges, companies across the globe need to embed sustainability into the core of their business in order to meet growing customer and stakeholder expectations, and reduce their environmental impact. Together, Google Cloud and Salesforce Sustainability Cloud can help our joint customers accelerate their path to Net Zero, leveraging data-driven insights and visualizations to track and reduce their carbon emissions to drive sustainable change.”—Ari Alexander, GM of Salesforce Sustainability Cloud. 

From information to action

With the gross energy-related emissions footprint of data associated with your Google Cloud usage now available, we’re committed to providing tools to not only measure your carbon footprint, but help you reduce it. We recently launched low-carbon region icons to help you choose cleaner regions to locate your Google Cloud resources. New users who see the icons are over 50% more likely to choose clean regions over others, ensuring their applications emit less carbon over time. 

For current Google Cloud users, we’re pleased to announce that Active Assist Recommender will include a new sustainability impact category, extending its original core pillars of cost, performance, security, and manageability. Starting with the Unattended Project Recommender, you’ll soon be able to estimate the gross carbon emissions you’ll save by removing your idle resources. Unattended Project Recommender uses machine learning to identify, with a high degree of confidence, projects that are likely abandoned based on API and networking activity, billing, usage of cloud services, and other signals, and provides actionable recommendations on how to remediate those abandoned projects. By deleting these projects, not only can you reduce costs and mitigate security risks, but you can also reduce your carbon emissions. In August, Active Assist analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across our platform, and over 600,000 gross kgCo2e was associated with projects that it recommended for cleanup or reclamation. If customers deleted these projects they would significantly reduce future gross carbon emissions. Check out this blog to learn more about Active Assist.

Solutions for climate resilience 

Many of our customers face difficult questions about how their business impacts the natural environment today, and how it will be affected by climate change in the future. Answering these questions requires rich datasets about the planet, better analytics tools and smarter models to predict potential outcomes. For over a decade Google Earth Engine has supported scientists and developers with hyperscale computing power and the world’s largest catalog of satellite image data. Today, we are delighted to announce the preview of Earth Engine as part of Google Cloud Platform. Now, you can access Earth Engine and combine it with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery. By extending Earth Engine’s powerful platform to enterprises through Google Cloud, we are bringing the best of Google together. 

Over the past year we’ve worked with a number of organizations to use Earth Engine technology with tools like BigQuery and the Cloud AI Platform to develop new solutions for responsible commodity sourcing, sustainable land management and carbon emissions reduction. Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, thus  helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. This new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability.

As we work with our customers to accelerate their sustainability initiatives, earth observation data is proving critical to effectively plan for the long-term impacts of climate change. To extend our geospatial and sustainability use cases we’re also expanding our partnerships with CARTO, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet to bring their data and core applications to Google Cloud.

These partners will each make their existing platforms and datasets available globally on Google Cloud, giving you low-latency and reliable access to critical data and applications that will inform your sustainability initiatives. By integrating water availability, agricultural data, weather risks, and extensive daily satellite imagery into Earth Engine and BigQuery, you can achieve more ambitious goals for the sustainability of your business and our planet.

Committing to help you meet your climate goals

With each of these tools, we’re working to reduce the barriers you face in adopting more sustainable technology practices. We understand that building more sustainable applications and infrastructure is not easy. You face competing priorities, technical challenges, and the perception that climate action is costly. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, we are making a sustainability pledge to you: teams across Google Cloud are committing to eliminating the barriers you face in building a more sustainable digital future for your organization, and will help you take action today to realize your climate goals. We’ll do this in a number of ways: 

1. In digital transformation projects and workshops, sustainability teams will always have a seat at the planning table, so we can work together on using cloud technology to build a more sustainable future. 
2. We’re putting low-carbon signals natively into our products to help developers choose more sustainable options early in their application development. 
3. We’ll ensure carbon impact is measured consistently with other key performance indicators. Leveraging the social cost of carbon, the ROI models and value assessments you conduct with Google Cloud will project your emissions impact too. 
4. We’ll be transparent about our carbon impact, by publishing third-party reviewed reports and methodologies, so you can trust the data for your own reports and disclosures. 
5. We’ll continue to work with the industry on best practices, including educational resources like Sustainable IT – Decoded, a new masterclass created in partnership with Intel, that shares the expertise of sustainability thought leaders. 

For the next decade we need to work together to avert the worst consequences of climate change. We’ve made tremendous progress in building technology that helps everyone do more for the planet, and we’re excited to see what you do with it. Visit this page to learn more about Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts.

Blockchain technology is yielding tremendous innovation and value creation for consumers and businesses around the world. As the technology becomes more mainstream, companies need scalable, secure, and sustainable infrastructure on which to grow their businesses and support their networks. We believe Google Cloud can play an important role in this evolution.

Building on our existing work with blockchain developers, exchanges, and other companies in this space, we are announcing today a new, dedicated Digital Assets Team within Google Cloud to support our customers’ needs in building, transacting, storing value, and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms. This new team will enable our customers to accelerate their efforts in this emerging space and help underpin the blockchain ecosystems of tomorrow. 

What We’re Doing Today (and Into the Future)

Blockchain and distributed-ledger-based companies like Hedera, Theta Labs, and Dapper Labs have already chosen to build on top of Google Cloud for scalability, flexibility, and security. Moving forward, Google Cloud’s Digital Assets Team will undertake a number of short- and long-term initiatives to support companies in the digital assets/blockchain ecosystem, including:

• Providing dedicated node hosting/remote procedure call (RPC) nodes for developers, allowing users to deploy blockchain validators on Google Cloud via a single click (“click to deploy”).
• Participating in node validation and on-chain governance with select partners.
• Helping developers and users host their nodes on the cleanest cloud in the industry, supporting their environmental, social, and governance initiatives.
• Supporting on-chain governance via participation from Google Cloud executives and senior engineers.
• Hosting several public BigQuery datasets on our Marketplace, including full blockchain transaction history for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Litecoin, Zcash, Theta, Hedera Hashgraph, Band Protocol, Polygon, XRP, and Dogecoin.
• Driving co-development and integration into Google’s robust partner ecosystem, including participating in the Google Cloud Marketplace.
• Embracing joint go-to-market initiatives with our ecosystem partners where Google Cloud can be the connective tissue between traditional enterprise and blockchain technologies.

As we build out our team, we’re also exploring opportunities in the future to enable Google Cloud customers to make and receive payments using cryptocurrencies.

Why Partner with Google Cloud

Our customers in this space—both traditional firms seeking to implement blockchain strategies and blockchain-native companies, such as exchanges, app providers, and decentralized platforms—are choosing Google Cloud for three key reasons:

• First, their businesses and their developer ecosystems can build on the industry’s cleanest cloud. Growing in a sustainable manner is top-of-mind for many businesses, but is particularly relevant in the blockchain space, where the ability to run and scale sustainably is critical. Google is carbon neutral today, and we’ve announced our goal to run on carbon-free energy, 24/7 at all of our data centers by 2030. We’ve also rolled out the ability for customers to choose a Google Cloud region in which to run based on carbon footprint data.
• Second, developers building on blockchain-based platforms can benefit from Google’s world-class developer platform. Google Cloud infrastructure ensures that developers can speed up the delivery of software and data on the blockchain, delivering fast access to applications for users. 
• Third, Google Cloud technologies and services will ensure that blockchain-based companies can scale securely and reliably. Google can ensure that data, applications, games, or digital assets like NFTs will be delivered on a stable, secure, and trusted global network.

Google Cloud’s Approach to Blockchain and Digital Assets

Blockchains and digital assets are changing the way the world stores and moves its information —as well as value. As an infrastructure provider, Google Cloud views the evolution of blockchain technology and decentralized networks today as analogous to the rise of open source and the internet 10-15 years ago. Just as open source developments were integral to the early days of the internet, blockchain is yielding innovation and value creation for consumers and businesses. As the technology becomes more mainstream, companies will need scalable, secure infrastructure on which to grow their businesses and support their networks.

As such, we’re applying Google Cloud technology to the blockchain market with the following principles:

• Consistent with Google Cloud’s core business: We are specialists in data-powered innovation with leading infrastructure, industry solutions, and other cutting-edge technology. We pursue blockchain projects and partnerships that align with our mission and our expertise.
• User trust and governance: Blockchain networks raise novel questions concerning legal compliance and user privacy. We will maintain our commitment to our users through a robust focus on privacy and user trust, as well as an uncompromising focus on compliance with applicable laws.
• Network-agnostic: Google’s infrastructure will seek to preserve optionality of networks for the benefit of users. 

We’re inspired by the work already done in the digital assets space by our customers, and we look forward to providing the infrastructure and technologies to support what’s possible with blockchain technologies in the future. If you’re eager to learn more about Google Cloud’s new Digital Assets Team, please reach out to your Google Cloud sales representative or partner manager.

After three migrations to different cloud providers, the company managed to migrate with no system outages for the first time, supported by partner Sky.One.

Results

• Migrated four SAP environments and four servers in just one month with no system outages
• Zero unavailability periods since migrating
• Less time spent worrying about operational issues increases the focus on business

50% savings on monthly cloud costs

Rossi Residencial, one of Brazil’s largest construction companies and real-estate developers, with around 150 employees, hundreds of business and engineering partners, and nationwide service, has used SAP solutions for financial management since 1999. Taxes, accessory obligations, accounting requirements, and other processes are managed through the system in an integrated and automated manner, which provides the business with crucial support.

Over the past few years, the company has begun to promote independent, sustainable business units to focus on strategic locations and products. This prompted its technology team to adapt as well, and they saw the cloud as an opportunity to add flexibility to SAP’s management.

“If I need to open a new branch or break ground on a project, the entire system core is already in the cloud and I don’t have to worry about local infrastructure,” explains Eduardo Araújo, Rossi’s IT Manager. “It also means our operational costs are significantly reduced.”

A few years ago, the company started working with the ECC component in the EHP 8 version, using modules such as FI (financial accounting), CO (controlling), MM (materials management) and TRM (treasury and risk management). But the dollar’s high exchange rate in 2020 increased costs with their then provider too much. The team was also not satisfied with the provider’s service, leading it to look for a new provider and a partner to support migration.

An essential requirement the new provider had to offer was high availability and scalability. Potential partners had to perform migration in a short time window (as the contract with the other service was about to expire) and be familiar with the previous provider to ensure the operation’s success. After spending some time searching, the company chose Google Cloud and Sky.One for the project.

“Out of the cloud options we researched, Google Cloud offered us the best financial conditions and a solution that truly catered to us. And out of the many partners we contacted, Sky.One offered the best work planning and service.”—Eduardo Araújo, IT Manager, Rossi Residencial

First migration with no system outages

The tight migration deadline meant the company would not have the time to install every app in Google Cloud from scratch, so Rossi asked the Sky.One team to mirror its entire previous architecture, that is, migrate the virtual machines from the company’s four SAP environments and four servers from other apps directly to Google Cloud.

After mapping the source structure in detail along with Rossi, the partner was able to complete migration planning in a month. “If you map before migrating and thus understand the customer’s environment well, you are able to prepare the destination so it has every integration and its respective access,” says Ricardo Nunes, Solution Expert at Sky.One.

The tool chosen to move the environments was Migrate for Compute Engine (previously known as Velostrata), which streamlines, facilitates and reduces risks for app migration to Google Cloud. Sky.One selected an expert in this solution to conduct the process, which was also supported by Google Cloud experts to make any needed adjustments.

The process took just a month to complete. The environments were successfully migrated with zero impact on operations, an unprecedented feat for the company. Now SAP environments run in a new infrastructure consisting of Compute Engine, a service for creating and running VMs, and Cloud Storage for data storage.

“This is the first time, after three previous migrations to private and public clouds, that our users have not felt any impact and we didn’t have system outages. It was a six-hands project that worked very well.”—Eduardo Araújo, IT Manager, Rossi Residencial

Flexibility to deal with every business need

Since the migration, Rossi has not suffered system outages or handled related user requests and incidents. Performance has remained high even after the team resized the VMs. The flexibility to add or subtract resources based on the company’s demands proved crucial. “Rossi operates in a segment with elasticity. In any given year, we can have two/three projects or ten. That’s why it’s important to have that resource in the cloud,” says Araújo.

Since the company does not operate 24/7, another benefit from migrating was the ability to schedule when to switch on and off servers, bringing cost savings. Furthermore, billing in reais at a fixed exchange rate with dollars led to a 50% cost reduction versus the previous provider.

The ease of integration between Google Cloud and SAP’s tools pleasantly surprised the team. “We were worried about potential incompatibilities, and we didn’t know if we would be able to work like before. Today we can work even better than before,” says the IT manager. According to Sky.One, the fine adaptation between the solutions becomes noticeable right after migration.

“Google Cloud’s solutions support all SAP migration steps, but after migrating we noticed that daily operations had become even more tightly integrated.”—Ricardo Nunes, Solution Expert, Sky.One

The cloud’s stability and security have streamlined the IT team’s daily routine. They no longer have to go to the company outside business hours to perform updates or repairs. Currently, employees can work remotely with peace of mind and maintain business continuity throughout Brazil.

With more time to focus on business needs instead of operational issues, the team is contemplating the addition of new Google Cloud tools. Rossi’s next challenge is to bolster its business operations and customer service even further using data analytics and AI solutions, making the most of its broad database.

B2B marketplace IndiaMART aims to help businesses escape the restrictions of traditional supply chains. By providing access to a digital platform optimized for access from desktops and mobile devices, businesses can improve their operations and generate more revenue. IndiaMART’s suite of services includes web storefront, enquiry support, priority listings, premium number services, a lead management system, and payment facilitation.

IndiaMART also provides “behavior-based matchmaking” that identifies the supplier best equipped to meet buyer needs by product or service, category and location. IndiaMART then matches the designated suppliers with the buyers. Finally, IndiaMART operates as a “horizontal marketplace”—enabling suppliers to market to a large number of potential buyers—presenting a compelling offering for both groups.

Amarinder S. Dhaliwal, Chief Product Officer of IndiaMART, says once IndiaMART grew to a certain size, it benefited from a network effect—as more buyers used the marketplace, more suppliers came on board, prompting yet more buyers to access the service and so on. Suppliers becoming buyers and using IndiaMART to purchase products is another growth driver. “There is not just a network effect, but a community effect as well, as a supplier becomes a buyer,” says Dhaliwal. “This increases affinity, and supplier and buyer ‘lock-in’ to the marketplace increases multifold.”

Positioned to address challenges

IndiaMART’s proactive approach positioned the business well to address the challenges presented by new trends and market conditions. Traffic from mobile devices to its business-to-business marketplace has grown from about 30% to 75% over the last four years.

“Mobile traffic has grown at a compound annual growth rate of almost 100% over the same period,” says Dhaliwal. “The proliferation of smartphones and other mobile devices has brought a considerable number of new users onto the internet and these users look for value—the right price from the right supplier,” he adds. “Furthermore, they can connect at any time and from any location they can access a network.”

The mobility revolution also challenged IndiaMART to provide a user interface and experience optimized for devices of various types and sizes—and that incorporated screens much smaller than the screens incorporated in desktops. The organization also had to help users overcome issues such as inconsistent network coverage and quality—particularly in remote areas.

Becoming a mobile-first organization

IndiaMART is responding by becoming, for buyers, a “mobile-first” organization that meets the group’s technical and user experience requirements.

IndiaMART is also adapting its marketplace to support two key trends:
• Buyers using long, conversational sentences to conduct online searches rather than simply typing in keywords
• Non English-users—the vast majority of people in India—stepping up their use of the marketplace

“We expect that, within a few years, we will have more non-English users than English users on IndiaMART,” says Dhaliwal.

IndiaMART is also benefiting from Indian government measures to reform taxation and stimulate the digital economy. “There has been a huge focus on areas such as digital payments and the digitization of identity,” says Dhaliwal. “We have embraced elements of this agenda by implementing a digital payment platform and are continuing to look at ways of providing new digital services to suppliers.

“Meanwhile, the Indian government’s recent implementation of GST allows us to validate suppliers’ businesses and bring more qualified, more verified suppliers on our platform—improving the experience for buyers and suppliers.”

Speed and reliability an issue

IndiaMART had started operations with servers, storage, networking, and associated systems co-located in a data center in the United States. However, as buyers and suppliers increasingly used mobile devices—over occasionally unreliable networks—to access the marketplace, access speeds and reliability became an issue. With most requests traveling between India and the United States, network latency was unacceptably high. Furthermore, business growth meant IndiaMART needed an environment that could scale to meet demand for the next five to 10 years.

IndiaMART opted for a multi-cloud architecture and established criteria for cloud providers to win its business. “We required an infrastructure that could scale and meet our demand for fast response time without putting our business at risk,” says Dhaliwal. “This meant taking a phased rather than one-shot approach to the migration. We also needed to minimize any wasteful duplication of infrastructure and reduce latency. In addition, as we scaled, we needed to protect our systems, transactions and information, including the details of buyers and suppliers.”

Google Cloud team’s high-quality support

The organization performed proof of concept with the three largest multinational cloud services providers and found Google Cloud was best positioned to act as the cornerstone of its multi-cloud architecture. “The Google Cloud team gave us considerable support in helping us run a proof of concept of its services,” says Dhaliwal.

“The proof of concept also illustrated that Google Cloud was superior to the other cloud services we looked at.

“We could run our marketplace across multiple geo-locations under a single IP address, avoiding duplication, and users in India could connect to Google Cloud via the closest access point, with their traffic passing quickly across the Google network.

“In addition, Google Cloud’s load balancing service would enable encryption between load balancing layers and back ends to ensure security, while all communication would move across Google’s own protected network.”

Being one of India’s early users of G Suite, the organization was also familiar with Google Cloud applications and services.

IndiaMART then opted to work with the Google Cloud team and a certified partner on a step-by-step implementation that minimized any risk of disruption.

Deep engagement from Google

“We engaged very deeply with both Google and the partner to complete this migration,” says Dhaliwal. “The Google team worked very hard to understand our requirements and provide a solution that catered to our needs and could be deployed in a phased manner.” The team ran workshops and technical sessions with IndiaMART and, at a Google Summit, connected the marketplace provider to Google experts in databases and infrastructure.

“These discussions really helped us formulate a strategy moving forward,” says Dhaliwal.

Based on input from Google and its own evaluation, IndiaMART developed an architecture comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Google Cloud’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering; Cloud Load Balancing to support cloud resources distributed across multiple locations; Cloud Pub/Sub to provide enterprise messaging; and Cloud Dataflow to transform and enrich data.

Cloud Armor works with Cloud Load Balancing to defend against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; and Geocoding API helps the organization convert geographic coordinates into readable addresses and vice versa. Cloud AutoML allows IndiaMART to train machine learning models to meet its requirements. With Geocoding API, IndiaMART can matchmake buyers and suppliers based on location—providing a high quality experience for both parties. Finally, AutoML Translation allows the organization to create a custom machine learning model that converts product names from English into Hindi and other languages, effectively opening up new markets for buyers and suppliers.

Phase one complete

IndiaMART has completed phase one of the migration that involved moving its web properties across to Google Cloud. The organization is now experimenting with moving its APIs and databases to the service and anticipates completing the exercise over the coming year.

Average page load time down

The initial phase of the project has already delivered considerable benefits to IndiaMART. The organization has cut average page loading time from five seconds to three seconds, and Dhaliwal attributes close to one second of that reduction to the move to Google Cloud. “With Google Cloud, buyers and suppliers can access our marketplace much faster than previously,” says Dhaliwal. “This impacts positively on engagement, time spent on our marketplace, and the user’s entire journey with us.”

DDoS attack repelled

Google Cloud’s security features have already passed their first test. As IndiaMART undertook stage one of the migration, the business experienced a DDoS attack that generated request loads more than 400 times greater than normal. “Because we were on Google Cloud infrastructure, we could develop a solution to combat this severe DDoS attack,” says Sunil Parolia, Sr. VP at IndiaMART. “From a security perspective, this really justified our decision to go with Google Cloud.”

Google Cloud is also helping deliver the availability required by IndiaMART and the scalability to support growing demand. “As the number of people in India who access the internet grows from about 500 million to 700-800 million over the next couple of years, we will continue to build our traffic and be the dominant business-to-business platform,” says Dhaliwal. “On the supplier side, we expect to see more and more businesses come onto our marketplace—ranging from small-to-medium businesses up to larger brands. Google Cloud will enable us to accommodate this traffic without compromising the experience we provide.”