More and more startups are choosing to build their business on Google Cloud, and if yours is one of them — welcome! And even though Google Cloud is easy to use, there’s still a lot to learn, starting with how to create and activate your account, and how to create projects, folders, and organizations as part of Google Cloud’s resource hierarchy. If you prefer, you can also watch our video on how to get started with Google Cloud.

Once you’ve mastered those concepts, you’re ready to learn how to get the most out of your investment in Google Cloud. In this blog, we’ll show you how to manage and monitor your cloud resources with Google Cloud’s  operations suite, administer your billing with Cloud Billing, and improve the support you receive with Google Cloud Customer Care. Whether you’re new to Google Cloud or an experienced user, these services will help improve your experience. 

Let’s get started!

Improve the performance and reliability of your applications with the operations suite

Sometimes you want to check how your deployment is behaving, or if there is something happening with your server, database, or application that is affecting your customers. With so many tools to check, finding and solving the issue can become overwhelming very quickly. This is where Google Cloud’s operations suite comes in. 

This suite of products for integrated monitoring, logging, and tracing managed services for applications and systems running on Google Cloud and beyond. It can help you visualize and monitor incidents with dashboards and Metrics Explorer, manage and analyze log data in real-time all in one place with Cloud Logging, visualize metrics at scale with Cloud Monitoring, manage latency with Cloud Trace, and perform performance and cost management with Cloud Profiler.

Learn more about the operations suite in the video below:

Manage budgets and alerts with Cloud Billing

Google Cloud billing management is easier than you might think. Google Cloud charges for compute resources monthly on a consumption basis, which is different from the traditional upfront purchase model. With the right tools and resources, you can more easily manage your costs and optimize your use of Google Cloud resources.

One of the most important things to do is to set up billing and alerts. This will help you avoid unexpected charges and ensure that you are only paying for the resources you use. You can also use budgets and alerts to track your costs and help ensure that you are staying within your budget.

You can also view your costs through console billing reports, monthly invoices or build customized dashboards on BigQuery, Google Data Studio, or a BI tool of your preference. This allows you to see where your costs come from and identify areas where you can save money. You can also use cost management to optimize your use of Google Cloud resources and get the most out of your investment.

Finally, Google Cloud offers a variety of discounts and optimization options. These can help you save money on your overall costs. For example, you can get a discount if you commit to using Google Cloud for a certain period of time. You can also save money by using preemptible VMs, which are VMs that are available at a lower price but can be terminated at any time.

Google Cloud Customer Care

To meet customer needs and deliver a better experience, we’ve reenvisioned our Customer Care portfolio, a scalable set of offerings built with your needs at the center, so you can simplify and streamline your support experience. 

Choose from the core offerings:

• Basic – the support tier you receive when you sign up on Google Cloud. You can use this at no cost but support is offered for billing issues only.
• Standard – simple, flexible way to ensure that your workloads run smoothly on Google Cloud. Standard enables you to receive technical help from Google experts with a four hour response time and 8 hours response time during 5 days a week availability.
• Enhanced – rapid response times and additional services to boost your productivity and help you run in Google Cloud efficiently. There is both case and phone support for technical issues, with a one-hour response time. There is 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues. You can also have add-ons or value-add services like Technical Account Adviser Service and Event management.
• Premium – the highest value support offering, supplying incredibly fast response times, a named Technical Account Manager, Customer Aware support and additional services. There is case and phone support for technical issues and also third-party technology support, with a 15-minute response time and a 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues.

Watch the video to find out how to purchase support, create support cases and learn more about support.

Supercharge your growth with the Google for Startups Cloud Program

Growing a startup requires technology that can keep up with and enhance your ideas. The Google for Startups Cloud Program provides the tech you need to help develop better software and deliver innovative experiences with confidence. At the same time, you’ll help boost your team’s capabilities with expert cloud guidance, Google Cloud credits, training opportunities, and more.

The program has two tiers:

• Start: for pre-seed startups that have not yet received equity funding. Get up to $2,000 USD in Google Cloud credit that’s valid for two years toward Google Cloud services and even toward a Cloud Customer Care plan with unlimited access to technical support, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, and more.
• Scale: for seed to series A startups with verified equity funding. Get Google Cloud and Firebase costs covered up to $100,000 USD a year for your first two years, unlimited access to technical support when credits are applied to a Cloud Customer Care plan, partnerships with Google Cloud Startup Customer Engineers and a dedicated Startup Success Manager, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, co-marketing for select startups, and more. 

Once enrolled, Google startup experts will recommend Google products and services that can help your startup grow in the cloud. Learn more about the Google for Startups program, eligibility criteria, credit usage and migration incentives in the our Startup Programs video linked down below.

That’s a wrap!

Let’s recap: The operations suite includes tools to monitor incidents, analyze log data in real-time, manage latency, and more. Cloud Billing offers billing management tools and resources to help you save costs and make the most of your resources. If you need help, Cloud Customer Care services are available to streamline your support experience. Also, if you’re a startup, don’t forget to check the Google for Startups Cloud Program!

The Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups series has many detailed videos and handbooks to support you on all steps of your startup growth journey. Check out our full playlist on the Google Cloud Tech channel and website. Don’t forget to subscribe to stay up to date.

See you in the cloud!

When you choose to run your business on Google Cloud you benefit from the same planet-scale infrastructure that powers Google’s products such as Maps, YouTube, and Workspace. 

We have picked 10 ways in which Google Cloud Infrastructure services outshine alternatives in the market in how they simplify your operations, save money, and secure your data. 

1. Custom Machine Types means no wasted resources

Compute Engine offers predefined machine types that you can use when you create a VM instance. A predefined machine type has a preset number of vCPUs and a preset amount of memory; each type is billed at a set price as described on the Compute Engine pricing page. 

If predefined machine types don’t meet your needs, you can create a VM instance with a custom number of vCPUs and custom amount of memory, effectively building a custom machine type. Custom machine types are available only for general-purpose machine families. When you create a custom machine type, you are deploying a custom machine type from the E2, N2, N2D, or N1 machine family on GCP.  No other leading cloud vendor offers custom machine types so extensively.

Custom machine types are a good idea for workloads that aren’t a good fit for the predefined machine types and for workloads that require more processing power or memory but don’t need all of the upgrades provided by the next machine type level. This translates into lower operating costs.   They are also useful for controlling software licensing costs that are based on the number of underlying compute cores. 

Jeremy Lloyd, Infrastructure and Application Modernization Lead at Appsbroker, a Google partner: 

“Custom machine types coupled with Google’s StratoZone data center discovery tool provides Appsbroker with the flexibility we need to provide cost efficient virtual machines matched to a virtual machine’s actual utilization. As a result, we are able to keep our customers’ operating costs low while still providing the ability to scale as needed.”

2. Compute Engine Virtual Machines are optimized for scale-out workloads 

For scale-out workloads, T2D, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and leapfrogs VMs for scale-out workloads of any leading public cloud provider today, both in terms of performance and price-performance. Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any leading public cloud vendor (source). The x86 compatibility provided by these AMD EPYC processor-based VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture. Sign up here  if you are interested in trying out T2D instances in Preview. 

For SAP HANA, Google Cloud has demonstrated with SAP how we can run the world’s largest scale-out HANA system in the public cloud (96TB).   With such innovation, you are covered as your business grows exponentially.

3. Largest single node GPU-enabled VM

Google is the only public cloud provider to offer up to 16 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in a single VM, making it possible to train very large AI models. Users can start with one NVIDIA A100 GPU and scale to 16 GPUs without configuring multiple VMs for single-node ML training, without crossing the VM layer. 

Additionally, customers can choose smaller GPU configurations—1, 2, 4 and 8 GPUs per VM—providing the flexibility to scale their workload as needed. 

The A2 VM family was designed to meet today’s most demanding applications—workloads like CUDA-enabled machine learning (ML) training and inference, for example. This family is built on the A100 GPU which offers up to 20x the compute performance compared to the previous generation GPU and comes with 40 GB of high-performance HBM2 GPU memory. To speed up multi-GPU workloads, the A2 VMs use NVIDIA’s HGX A100 systems to offer high-speed NVLink GPU-to-GPU bandwidth that delivers up to 600 GB/s. A2 VMs come with up to 96 Intel Cascade Lake vCPUs, optional Local SSD for workloads requiring faster data feeds into the GPUs and up to 100 Gbps of networking. A2 VMs provide full vNUMA transparency into the architecture of underlying GPU server platforms, enabling advanced performance tuning. Google Cloud offers these GPUs globally. 

4. ​​Non-disruptive maintenance means you worry less about planned downtime

Compute Engine offers live migration (non-disruptive maintenance) to keep your virtual machine instances running even when a host system event, such as a software or hardware update, occurs. Google’s Compute Engine live migrates your running instances to another host in the same zone without requiring your VMs to be rebooted. Live migration enables Google to perform maintenance that is integral to keeping infrastructure protected and reliable without interrupting any of your VMs. When a VM is scheduled to be live-migrated, Google provides a notification to the guest that a migration is imminent. 

Live migration keeps your instances running during:

• Regular infrastructure maintenance and upgrades
• Network and power grid maintenance in the data centers
• Failed hardware such as memory, CPU, network interface cards, disks, power, and so on. This is done on a best-effort basis; if a hardware component fails completely or otherwise prevents live migration, the VM crashes and restarts automatically and a hostError is logged.
• Host OS and BIOS upgrades
• Security-related updates
• System configuration changes, including changing the size of the host root partition, for storage of the host image and packages

Live migration does not change any attributes or properties of the VM itself. The live migration process transfers a running VM from one host machine to another host machine within the same zone. All VM properties and attributes remain unchanged, including internal and external IP addresses, instance metadata, block storage data and volumes, OS and application state, network settings, network connections, and so on. This has the benefit of reducing operational and maintenance overhead, helps you build a more robust security posture where infrastructure can be consciously revamped from a known good state and minimizes risks for advanced persistent threats. 

Refer to Lessons learned from a year of using live migration in production on Google Cloud from the Google engineering team.

5. Trusted Computing: Shielded VMs guard you against advanced, persistent attacks

Establishing trust in your environment is multifaceted, involving hardware and firmware, as well as host and guest operating systems. Unfortunately, threats like boot malware or firmware rootkits can stay undetected for a long time, and an infected virtual machine can continue to boot in a compromised state even after you’ve installed legitimate software. 

Shielded VMs can help you protect your system from attack vectors like:

• Malicious guest OS firmware, including malicious UEFI extensions
• Boot and kernel vulnerabilities in the guest OS
• Malicious insiders within your organization

To guard against these kinds of advanced persistent attacks, Shielded VMs use:

• Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS: Helps ensure that firmware is signed and verified
• Secure and Measured Boot: Helps ensure that a VM boots an expected, healthy kernel
• Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM): Establishes root-of-trust, underpins Measured Boot, and prevents exfiltration of vTPM-sealed secrets
• Integrity Monitoring: Provides tamper-evident logging, integrated with Stackdriver, to help you quickly identify and remediate changes to a known integrity state

The Google approach allows customers to deploy Shielded VMs with only a simple click, thereby easing implementation. 

6. Confidential Computing encrypts data while in use

Google Cloud was a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium. Along with encryption of data in transit and at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK), Confidential VM adds a “third pillar” to the end-to-end encryption story by encrypting data while in use. Confidential Computing uses processor-based technology that allows data to be encrypted in use while it is being processed in the public cloud. Confidential VM allows you to to encrypt memory in use on a Google Compute Engine VM by checking a single checkbox. 

All Confidential VMs support the previously mentioned Shielded VM features under the covers—you can think of Shielded VM as helping to address VM integrity, while Confidential VM addresses the memory encryption aspect which relies on CPU features. With the confidential execution environments provided by Confidential VM and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), Google Cloud keeps customers’ sensitive code and other data encrypted in memory during processing. Google does not have access to the encryption keys. In addition, Confidential VM can help alleviate concerns about risk related to either dependency on Google infrastructure or Google insiders’ access to customer data in the clear. 

See what Google Cloud partners say about Confidential Computing here. 

7. Advanced networking delivers full-stack networking and security services with fast, consistent, and scalable performance

Google Cloud’s network delivers low latency, reduces operational costs and ensures business continuity, enabling organizations to seamlessly scale up or down in any region to meet business needs. Our planet-scale network uses advanced software-defined networking and security with edge caching services to deliver fast, consistent, and scalable performance. With 28 regions, 85 zones, and 146 PoPs connected by 16 subsea fiber cables around the world, Google Cloud’s network offers a full stack of layer 1 to layer 7 services for enterprises to run their workloads anywhere. Enterprises can be assured that they have best-in-class networking and security services connecting their VMs, containers, and bare metal resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments with simplicity, visibility, and control. 

Google Cloud’s network has protected customers from one of the world’s largest DDoS attacks at 2.54 Tbps. With our multi-layer security architecture and products such as Cloud Armor, our customers ran their business with no disruptions. Furthermore, our recent integration of Cloud Armor with reCAPTCHA Enterprise adds best-in-class bot and fraud management to prevent volumetric attacks. Cloud Armor is deployed with our Cloud Load Balancer and Cloud CDN, extending the secure benefits at the network edge for traffic coming into Google Cloud so customers have security, performance, and reliability all built in. Furthermore, we are excited to offer Cloud IDS in preview, which was co-developed with security industry leader, Palo Alto Networks, to run natively in Google Cloud. 

Our advanced networking capabilities also extends to GKE and Anthos networking. With the GKE Gateway controller, customers can manage internal and external HTTPS load balancing for a GKE cluster or a fleet of GKE clusters with multi-tenancy while maintaining centralized admin policy and control. Unlike other Kubernetes offerings, we offer eBPF dataplane which brings powerful tooling such as Kubernetes network policy and logging to GKE. eBPF is known to kernel engineers as a “superpower” for its unique architecture to load and unload modules in kernel space, and now this capability is built in with Google Cloud networking. 

For observability and monitoring, our customers deploy Network Intelligence Center, Google Cloud’s comprehensive network monitoring, verification and optimization platform. With four key modules in Network Intelligence Center, and several more to come, we are working towards realizing our vision of proactive network operations that can predict and heal network failures, driven by AI/ML recommendations and remediation. Network Intelligence Center provides unmatched visibility into your network in the cloud along with proactive network verification. Centralized monitoring cuts down troubleshooting time and effort, increases network security and improves the overall user experience.  

8. Regional Persistent Disk for High Availability

Regional Persistent Disk is a storage option that provides synchronous replication of data between two zones in a region. Regional Persistent Disks can be a great building block if you need to ensure high availability of your critical applications as they offer cost-effective durable storage and replication of data between two zones in the same region. 

Regional Persistent Disks are also easy to set up within the Google Cloud Console. If you are designing robust systems or high availability services on Compute Engine, Regional Persistent Disks combined with other best practices such as backing up your data using snapshots enable you to build an infrastructure that is highly available and recoverable in a disaster. Regional Persistent Disks are also designed to work with regional managed instance groups. In the unlikely event of a zonal outage, Regional Persistent Disks allow continued I/O through failover of your workloads to another zone. Regional Persistent Disks can help meet zero RPO and near-zero RTO requirements and other stringent SLAs that your critical applications might require by maximizing application availability and protection of data during events such as host/VM failures and zonal outages. 

9. Cloud Storage’s single namespace for dual-region and multi-region means managing regional replication is incredibly simple

Similar to how Persistent Disk makes data more available by replicating data across zones, Cloud Storage provides similar benefits for object storage. Cloud Storage within a region is cross-zone by definition, reducing the risk that a zonal outage would take down your application. Cloud Storage adds to this by also providing a cross-region option that can protect against a regional outage and gets your data closer to distributed users. This comes in the form of Dual-region or Multi-region settings for a bucket. These are the simplest to implement cross-region replication offerings in the industry—just a simple button or API call to enable them. In addition to being simple to implement, they offer an added advantage of using a single bucket name that spans regions. 

This is unique in the industry. Competitive offerings currently require setting up and managing two distinct buckets, one in each region and they don’t offer the strong consistency properties Cloud Storage offers across regions. Operations and app development are burdened by this design. Google’s single namespace approach dramatically simplifies application development (the app runs on single region or dual/multi-region without any changes), and provides simpler application restarts and testing for DR.

10. Predictive autoscaling 

Customers use predictive autoscaling to improve response times for applications with long initialization times or for applications with workloads that vary predictably with daily or weekly cycles. When you enable predictive autoscaling, Compute Engine forecasts future load based on your Managed Instance Group’s history and scales out the MIG’s in advance of predicted load, so that new instances are ready to serve when the load arrives. Without predictive autoscaling, an autoscaler can only scale a group reactively, based on observed changes in load in real time. 

With predictive autoscaling enabled, the autoscaler works with real-time data as well as with historical data to cover both the current and forecasted load. Forecasts are refreshed every few minutes (faster than competing clouds) and consider daily and weekly seasonality, leading to more accurate forecasts of load patterns.

For more information, see How predictive autoscaling works and Checking if predictive autoscaling is suitable for your workload.

These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud infrastructure apart.  Bring your applications and let the platform work for you.   

Get started by learning about your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the thousands of customers who have embarked upon this journey.

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Dheeraj Konidena (Google) for contributing to this article.

Enterprise agility and the ability to innovate, adapt and respond quickly to the ever-changing risk and regulatory landscape is no longer a choice, but the cornerstone of successful digital transformation and commercial growth. Traditional access to and ways of managing data invariably create challenges in dealing with multiple data repositories, reconciliations, fire-drills, etc.

In response, the move to cloud is increasing significantly. It enables risk analytics and regulatory reporting at scale in a secure environment with data storage, management and encryption capabilities as a standard. In addition, as regulatory reporting requirements become more granular, machine learning can help facilitate new insights and allow for risk management to become more embedded into operational processes.

This webinar will address the day-to-day challenges in risk management and regulatory compliance, while also exploring how technological innovations can provide massive improvements and potential.

Key themes

• Real-life data challenges in the eyes of risk managers: can compliance, fraud detection and identifying liquidity positions be improved through the use of AI?
• Innovative approaches to streamline regulatory reporting to derive deeper customer insights from data at the moment of truth.
• Reimagining operations: how to modernise the data infrastructure to accommodate data explosion, drive flexibility and deliver a more cost effective outcome.

Welcome to a new way of exploring Google Cloud products. Finding your favorite products and discovering new ones requires a user interface that’s easy-to-use, clear, informative, and delightful. Google Cloud users have primarily used our side menu to navigate, but with almost one hundred products and growing, it’s safe to say our product list has outgrown the side menu. Over time, we have listened long and hard to feedback from Google Cloud users, who have highlighted challenges navigating the console to explore our products. We’ve heard over and over that it’s difficult and time consuming to scroll through the long list of products and remember what each one offers. 

That’s why we created a new All products page to help you easily navigate to your favorite Google Cloud products. This page showcases all of the Google Cloud products as well as our key partner products in one, easy-to-navigate place. With one click, you can discover the right product that is right for your solution.

Explore all Google Cloud products

The page is organized into different categories, including Management (ie. IAM, Billing), Compute, Storage, Operations, Security, CI/CD, Artificial Intelligence, Support, and more. Quickly jump to the category of interest through the panel on the left, or you can scroll the entire page. Then you can click each product name to navigate directly to the product homepage. Each product listing also includes a short and long description so you can quickly understand what a product does and whether it fits your needs. This lets you compare categories at-a-glance, saving you the hassle of digging up product overviews elsewhere. 

Under each product, you’ll also find a link to documentation and Quickstarts so you can understand it in more depth and try it out right away, removing the extra step of navigating to documentation in another tab.

Customize your navigation

To make navigation even easier, you can pin products directly from the All products page, and they will show up at the top of your side menu. You can also customize your navigation by reordering your pins in the side menu. That way, you can quickly access your most-used products directly from the side menu instead of scrolling through the panel or the All products page. 

Save time and get more done faster

With the new All products page you can save time scrolling and cut straight to the good stuff – finding your products, discovering new ones, learning, and getting hands on. Try it out for yourself by heading to the Google Cloud Console. Click the side panel and click “View All products,” or on the home dashboard you’ll see a call out to try out the All products page.

If you have any feedback about this new experience, I want to hear! Reach out to me on Twitter at @stephr_wong or on Linkedin at stephrwong.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry was facing disruption. Consumers have come to expect personalized and seamless experiences at every point in their relationship with a brand. Additionally, consumers are expecting CPG brands to meet rising standards for sustainability, social responsibility, and transparency. Business models are shifting as well. Direct-to-consumer and subscription models have been gaining ground on traditional business models. Add in the CPG industry’s ever-present pressure for wider profit margins and the effects of the global pandemic, and you get a perfect storm of disruption. 

Leading CPG companies are responding to these changes by capitalizing on the potential of emerging technologies and leveraging the power of the cloud to create digital enterprises. In doing so, they can unlock value through reduced operational costs, faster innovation, improved marketing ROI, and greater transparency and sustainability—among other benefits. For businesses that run on SAP, accessing these benefits requires creating a digital enterprise with SAP at its heart. 

What CPG can expect from SAP on Google Cloud

SAP drives core business processes across most enterprise functions in CPG companies, and modernizing these operations is step one in unlocking next-level data and analytics capabilities. Creating a digital enterprise with SAP at the core requires establishing a digital foundation on a cloud platform capable of supporting and optimizing SAP workloads well into the future. From there, CPG companies can leverage the combination of SAP data and additional data signals to support high-value use cases utilizing the advanced analytics capabilities of the cloud

For CPG companies, running a successful digital enterprise in this climate depends on the power of the cloud because of the unmatched agility, security, scale, and flexibility offered by cloud technologies. More and more, consumer brands are turning to Google Cloud to host their applications—including core enterprise applications such as SAP—to drive business agility and maximize the value of data through smart analytics and machine learning. Google Cloud establishes a digital foundation for SAP customers by simplifying SAP deployments and offering  a suite of applications that integrates with and enhances SAP functionality. A Forrester study on the total economic value of Google Cloud for SAP customers found an average payback of less than six months and a total ROI of over 160%. By turning to Google Cloud to run their SAP systems, companies are able to: 

• Maximize insights 
  CPG enterprise data is often fragmented across disparate systems. Google’s analytics tools including BigQuery and Looker allow businesses to connect customer, operational and business data at scale by unifying data from SAP systems with other Google data signals such as Ads, Maps, Shopping or Google Marketing Platform. This precious data is fully democratized, allowing for complex queries to be completed rapidly so companies can uncover and analyze insights and create an end-to-end view of the consumer and the business.
• Create an intelligent organization
  Google’s AI and machine learning capabilities allow businesses to create built-in intelligence. Instead of reacting to trends, they can accurately predict them. For marketing teams, this could be the ability to evaluate promotions and effectiveness of marketing spend. For forecasting, product quantities and restock timing can be better planned. Supply chain optimization can include external data sources to closely monitor inventory and eliminate stock outs. 
• Future-proof your business
  Running SAP systems on Google Cloud creates an agile, secure and highly available environment that scales quickly as a business grows and as the CPG market evolves. A recent study conducted by IDC showed that SAP on Google Cloud deployments resulted in a 46% lower three-year cost of operations with 83% less frequent unplanned downtime and 56% more efficient IT teams. This frees IT resources to drive innovation and customer centricity. 
• Deliver on sustainability 
  Around the globe, consumers are becoming more and more demanding regarding sustainability. The impact of climate change and the abundance of plastic waste is only fueling this trend. Consumers are leaning into social signalling, and CPG companies are taking note. Sustainable IT is step #1, significantly advanced by  moving applications to Google Cloud, the cleanest cloud in the industry. We’ve neutralized all of our carbon emissions since our founding in 1998 and matched 100% of our electricity consumption with renewable energy purchases since 2017. Google Cloud allows SAP enterprises to further drive sustainability compliance and business objectives with AI and ML tools that can drive down waste and provide real-time decision making power to support proactive green initiatives. 

Rémy Cointreau is in high spirits after deploying SAP in the Google Cloud

Rémy Cointreau, a family-owned international maker of fine spirits, has products that can take up to one-hundred years to produce. But this long production cycle presents some unique challenges in today’s hyper-competitive premium beverage brands market. Since 1724, the company has been consumed with putting its customers first. In 2020, the company realized it was failing to capitalize on the benefits that the cloud can provide and began searching for a business partner that could help with this transformation.  

Rémy Cointreau made the move to Google Cloud for many reasons. First, the company could connect its SAP backbone to key SaaS applications like Salesforce. This enabled the creation of a 360-view of data among its ecommerce platform, SAP, and Salesforce to deliver sophisticated customer experiences that reflect the heart of the brand. The Rémy Cointreau team quickly realized they now had the ability to be more agile in their finance, manufacturing, and supply chain functions with easy access to valuable SAP system data that drives decision-making. Sebastien Huet, the company’s CTO, explains: “Now that we’re fully deployed on Google Cloud Platform, anything is possible. We can pull data in from multiple sources via integration and analyze it in a matter of days. We don’t need a three-month project to see value.”  

In today’s on-demand, omnichannel world, it’s not enough for CPG brands to understand their consumers. For companies like Rémy Cointreau, it is mission-critical that they anticipate consumer preferences and deliver personalized experiences. The winners will be the companies that can reduce time to insights by treating all their data as strategic assets, breaking down data silos to enable real-time business intelligence. With SAP on Google Cloud, CPGs are transforming consumer relationships and business outcomes.

Are you ready to change how your CPG brand operates? Check out this video and read the Google Cloud for SAP CPG customer white paper and ebook.  Learn more about how your peers are leveraging SAP on Google Cloud to evolve their businesses.