Cloud on Europe’s Terms: How Google Sets to Deliver Cloud Services for Driving Digital Sovereignty
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Cloud computing is globally recognized as the single most effective, agile and scalable path to digitally transform and drive value creation. It has been a critical catalyst for growth, allowing private organizations and governments to support consumers and citizens alike, delivering services quickly without prohibitive capital investment. European organizations—in both the public and private sectors—want a provider to deliver a cloud on their terms, one that meets their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty, without compromising on functionality or innovation.
Last year, we set out an ambitious vision of sovereignty along three distinct pillars: data sovereignty (including control over encryption and data access), operational sovereignty (visibility and control over provider operations), and software sovereignty (providing the ability to run and move cloud workloads without being locked-in to a particular provider, including in extraordinary situations such as stressed exits). After extensive dialogue with customers and policymakers, we are today unveiling ‘Cloud. On Europe’s Terms’. As part of this initiative, we will continue to demonstrate our commitment to deliver cloud services that provide the highest levels of digital sovereignty, all while enabling the next wave of growth and transformation for Europe’s businesses and organizations.
Google Cloud’s baseline controls and security features offer strong protections, meet current robust security and privacy requirements, and address many customer needs. Yet each country in Europe has its own characteristics and expectations. Certain customers in Europe may require more flexibility than current public and private cloud offerings may provide. We want to deliver a platform that allows customers to deploy workloads with the desired local control, without losing the transformational benefits of the public cloud.
We are now delivering on this new vision collaboratively with trusted local technology providers in Europe, starting with T-Systems in Germany. Today, together with T-Systems, we announced a partnership to build a Sovereign Cloud offering in Germany for private and public sector organizations. The offering will become available in mid 2022 with additional features being added over time.
In this new joint offering, T-Systems will manage sovereignty controls and measures, including encryption and identity management of the Google Cloud Platform. In addition, as part of their offering, T-Systems will operate and independently control key parts of the Google Cloud infrastructure for T-Systems Sovereign Cloud customers in Germany.
We are committed to building trust with European governments and enterprises with a cloud that meets their digital sovereignty, sustainability and economic objectives. We are starting with T-Systems today and will continue by partnering with trusted technology providers in selected markets across the region.
Customers in other markets across Europe will be able to use these trusted partner offerings or use Google Cloud’s controls to exercise autonomous control over data access and use; exercise choice over the infrastructure that is used to process that data; and avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
With Google Cloud, our customers also automatically benefit from sustainable business transformation on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Today, we are the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, and by 2030, we aim to operate entirely on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all of our cloud regions worldwide.
We’ll continue to listen to our customers and key stakeholders across Europe who are setting policy and helping shape requirements for customer control of data. Our goal is to make Google Cloud the best possible place for sustainable, digital transformation for European organizations on their terms—and there is much more to come.
Serverless for Startups, the Best Way to Succeed: Expert Says
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As Google Cloud has become a choice for more startups, I’ve experienced an increase in founders asking how they should think about cloud services. Though each startup is different and requirements may vary across industries and regions, I’ve seen a few core best practices that help startups to succeed—as well as several traps to avoid.
For example, If you go with a public cloud provider, you’re ideally not starting from ground zero like you would running your own data center, but it’s important not to introduce similar complexity in a virtualized environment. Just because you’re using public cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean you want to manage it.
Instead, you want to leverage platforms that abstract away complexity so your team can focus on delivering value to customers. That’s where serverless comes in. Serverless platforms are fully managed by the provider, offering automatic scaling for workloads, as well as provisioning, configuring, patching, and management of servers and clusters. Freed from these resource-intensive tasks, your technical talent can focus on the things that differentiate your business, not on IT curation.
This applies to not only running stateless applications, but also managing and analyzing data. You should be collecting data points about which features are most popular on your platform, what people are buying, the types of activities that help your customers get their jobs done, and so on. This information is essential to building and executing on a product roadmap that will serve your customers. However, it’s not enough to collect this data, you need to make your data accessible, secure, and easy for your team to analyze—so where do you run and host it?
On Google Cloud, this is where options like Spanner and Cloud SQL can play a large role, as can BigQuery for analysis. You won’t have to worry about standing up infrastructure or patching servers—you can just stream your data to our data management platforms, where it’s available whenever someone needs to run a query. By leveraging a serverless architecture, your startup can be data-driven without having to invest in the traditional complexity of database administration and management—and that can significantly change your playing field.
Serverless is just one of the factors you should consider as you build out your tech stack. To hear my thoughts on a range of other topics relevant to startups — such as security, cloud credits, and the differences among managed services — check out the below video or visit our Build and Grow page.
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BK Medical’s Lift and Shift of SAP Environs on Google Cloud Results in Real-time Success
BK Medical is known for designing active imaging systems to help care providers visualize anatomy and provide real-time guidance to aid surgical interventions. After becoming an entity independent of the parent company, Analogic corporation, BK Medical decided to separate its SAP environs from the latter, and move into cloud. After assessing cloud vendors with Managecore, BK Medical chose Google Cloud as its managed service provider that could serve as a single source of truth and also help walk through the lift and shift of SAP ECC systems to the cloud. Watch the video to learn how the migration impacted BK Medical’s goals.
Custom AI Solutions, Global Delivery Centers and More Resources Dedicated for Customer Success
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At Google Cloud, our customers are at the forefront of digital transformation—launching entirely new businesses and products built in the cloud, redefining entire industries with data and artificial intelligence, delivering innovative new consumer experiences, or committing to sustainable new ways of doing business.
We’re committed to our customers’ success, and over the past two years we’ve invested significantly in providing ongoing and integrated support through our customer care portfolio, including launching new Premium and Mission Critical Support offerings that allow us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, while delivering the fastest response times in the industry.
Today, I’m proud to unveil several new resources and offerings for our customers, including a new Custom AI Solutions practice, new Global Delivery Centers, expanded Executive Briefing Centers, and new leaders to help continue to drive our organization forward.
Helping businesses innovate with a new Custom AI Solutions practice
We are investing in services and offerings to help our customers innovate and drive innovative change to business processes, culture, and customer experiences with Google Cloud products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are foundational for many such digital transformations, and to help customers create real business value with these technologies, we’re excited to launch a Custom AI offering to address our customers’ most critical innovation needs.
AI and ML technologies are foundational to digital transformations, yet they are not “one size fits all.” Each customers’ problems and opportunities are unique; a rideshare company will use AI differently than a brick and mortar retailer, or a healthcare company, or an insurance firm. To help organizations deploy AI and ML more effectively, we’re launching a new Custom AI Solutions practice, offering customers custom-built AI and ML solutions built into Vertex AI; access to Google’s engineering expertise; and predictable, subscription-based pricing.
Our teams are already partnering closely with early customers to build and deploy custom AI solutions. For instance, USAA, the large North American insurer, is using Google Cloud ML to process near-real-time damage estimates based on digital images to create a streamlined operations experience.
Learn more about our Custom AI Solutions practice offering here, and how we work together with our customers here. To get in touch, please contact our sales team.
Launching new Global Delivery Centers
Our drive to digitally transform our customers’ businesses is often manifested through our Global Delivery Centers, which expand our professional consulting and emerging practices capabilities available to customers and partners around the world.
The teams at our Global Delivery Centers help customers get up-and-running on Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, and consult with customers to rapidly build capacity in areas like data analytics, hybrid and multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. More importantly, they help customers successfully execute projects in support of their most mission-critical business objectives. Critically, these centers also help our global partner ecosystem quickly ramp their Google Cloud practices, and get fast, expert consultation for their customers too.
In 2022, we aim to triple the size of our Global Delivery Center teams in Argentina, Poland, and India. In addition, we’ll invest in building deep Google Cloud talent in Mexico and Portugal, furthering our commitment to the industry’s best expert consultation for customers and partners around the world.
Expanding our Executive Briefing Centers footprint
In addition to our Global Delivery Centers, we’re also pleased to expand our resources and facilities that enable digital and face-to-face meetings and working sessions with our customers. This year, we will launch four new Executive Briefing Centers, located on Google Cloud campuses in London, Paris, Singapore, and Munich.
These centers provide an opportunity to listen to our customers, share the best of Google Cloud’s solutions, and inspire digital transformation, in conversations facilitated by Google Cloud leadership, engineers, and industry experts. By bringing this experience to our customers in-region we can foster deeper partnerships and develop cloud solutions that meet their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty without compromising on functionality or innovation.
Adding new leadership to enable customer success
Finally, I’m excited to welcome two new leaders to Google Cloud on the Customer Experience team, who will help scale our Delivery Centers and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.
Heading our Global Delivery Center experience is Sunil Rao. Sunil comes to Google Cloud from Accenture, where he spent 18-plus years working with large technology customers across many industry verticals and managed large global teams in Accenture Advanced Technology Center. Sunil will also lead our Technical Onboarding Center, which helps businesses around the world get up to speed with technologies that are critical to understanding customer and business process contexts, and delivering great experiences.
Additionally, Lee Moore is joining Google Cloud to lead Customer Experience in North America. Lee spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in various leadership positions, including services integration for complex problem-solving, product development across a number of industry verticals, and building long-term customer relationships.
You’ll be hearing much more from us in the coming months, as we build out even more powerful and effective cloud-based services and offerings, work with customers to deliver new analytics- and AI-based tools and services, and work with our growing list of partners to help ensure customer success, across the globe.
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Digital transformation is about how digital technologies can connect people and processes to solve challenges that traditional methodologies could not.
While this transformation is imperative for businesses of all sizes, the Frost & Sullivan Enterprise Cloud Maturity Index (ECMI) assessment indicates that around 85% of CXOs want to digitally transform their enterprises, but only 39% of them have a clear plan to achieve this transformation.
Most business leaders are exploring new business ideas around cloud to extract better outcomes, increase productivity, create opportunities and redefine customer engagement processes as part of their internal strategies.
It has been proved time and again that enterprises need to bank on emerging technologies like cloud that provide ‘do more with less’ approach. Cloud has the potential to transform IT departments through infrastructure consolidation and optimization.
To understand the interest and level of cloud adoption in enterprises, Google Cloud partnered with Frost & Sullivan to recognize the unique business drivers and key challenges in Cloud adoption that come the enterprise way during their business transformation journey.
Read the report to find out the challenges, solutions and benefits of digital transformation and the cloud.
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Rightmove’s Right Move to Google Cloud
In 2020, Rightmove, UK’s renowned property website app saw over a billion minutes from users and clocked about 100 busy days in 2021. To continue innovating their products and improve customer experiences while achieving sustainability goals, Rightmove chose Google Cloud to migrate their infrastructure!
The property search application platform already boasts of dedicated tech teams running heavily code-driven multi-data center infrastructure and high velocity CI/CD platform. To reduce time to product and time to market, Rightmove selects Google Cloud. Watch further to learn how Google Cloud Products helped them add new features, update their existing services and adhere to sustainability objectives.
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