Thinking of a Multicloud Journey? Here’s What Our Experts Want You to Consider
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Do you want to fire up a bunch of techies? Talk about multicloud! There is no shortage of opinions. I figured we should tackle this hot topic head-on, so I recently talked to four smart folks—Corey Quinn of Duckbill Group, Armon Dadgar of Hashicorp, Tammy Bryant Butow of Gremlin, and James Watters of VMware—about what multicloud is all about, key considerations, and why you should (or shouldn’t!) do it.
Five important insights came out of these discussions. If you’re on a multicloud journey or considering one, keep reading.
Do: Choose to do multicloud for the right reasons
Don’t do multicloud because Gartner says so, implores Corey Quinn. Before embarking on a multicloud, define a “why” focused on business value journey, says Armon Dadger. For example, you might want to use services from each public cloud because of their differentiated services, according to Tammy Bryant Butow. Armon also calls out regulatory reasons, existing business relationships, and accommodating mergers and acquisitions. On the topic of M&A, Corey points out that if you acquire a company that uses another cloud, it’s usually expensive and difficult to consolidate. It can be smarter to stay put.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=xFSDexQhCUY%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
Don’t: Over-engineer for workload or data portability
Thinking that you’ll build a system that moves seamlessly among the various cloud providers? Hold up, says our group of experts. Armon points out that aspects of your toolchain or architecture may be multicloud—think of some of your workflows or global network routing—but that shifting workloads or data is far from simple. Corey says that trying to engineer for “write once, run anywhere” can slow you down, and ignores the inherent uniqueness that’s part of each platform. Specifically, Corey calls out the per-cloud stickiness of identity management, security features, and even network functionality. And data gravity is still a thing, says James, that causes some to dismiss multicloud outright.
If you’re using multiple public clouds, you take advantage of the distinct value each offers, Armon says. Use native cloud services where possible so that you see the benefits from useful innovations, built-in resilience, and baked-in best practices. The value from that cloud-infused workload may outweigh the benefits of seamless portability.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=B1VH56_L8f8%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
Do: Recognize different stakeholder interests and needs
James smartly points out that many multicloud debates happen because people are arguing from different perspectives. Context matters. If you’re an infrastructure engineer who invests heavily in a given cloud’s identity and access management model, multicloud looks tricky. Or if you’re a data engineer with petabytes of data homed in a particular cloud, multicloud may look unrealistic. James highlights that many developers default to multicloud because their local tools—where all the work happens—are multicloud. A developer’s IDE and preferred code framework(s) aren’t tied to any given cloud. Be aware that groups within your organization will come at multicloud from distinct directions. And this may impact your approach!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=I9sqXDqkKBM%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
Don’t: Go it alone
Corey talks about the importance of asking others what worked, and what didn’t. Tammy offers her best practices around sharing results from experiments. It’s about sharing knowledge and tapping into it for community benefit. Others have probably tried what you’re trying, and can help you avoid common pitfalls. If you’ve just made an architectural choice that didn’t work out, share it, and help others avoid the pain.
Read research from analysts, go to conferences or watch videos to observe case studies, and join online communities that offer a safe place to share mistakes and learn from others.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mrSb5vqOfuI%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
Do: Experiment first using techniques like multi-region deployments
If you think you can operate systems across clouds, how about you first try doing it across regions in a specific cloud, suggests Corey. Getting a system to properly work across cloud regions isn’t trivial, he says, and that experience can help you uncover where you have architectural or operational constraints that will be even worse across cloud providers.
This is great guidance if your multicloud aspirations involve using multiple clouds to power one application—versus the more standard definition of multicloud where you use different clouds for different applications—but can also surface issues in your support process or toolchain that fail when faced with distributed systems. Start with muti-region deployments and chaos engineering experiments before aggressively jumping into multicloud architectures.
The Google Cloud take
Do the things above. It’s great advice. I’ll add three more things that we’ve learned from our customers.
- Don’t fear multicloud. You’re already doing it. You don’t single-source everything. As Corey mentioned, you probably already have one cloud for productivity tools, another for source code, another for cloud infrastructure. You’ll use software and application services from a mix of providers for a single app. You have that experience in your team and have been doing that for decades. What people do rightly worry about is using more than one infrastructure service beneath an application, as that can introduce latency, security, and logistical hurdles. Make sure you know which model your team is considering.
- Embrace the right foundational components, including Kubernetes. Will everything run on Kubernetes? Of course not. Don’t try to do that. But it also represents the closest thing we have to a multicloud API. Companies are using Kubernetes to stripe a consistent experience across clouds. And this isn’t just to orchestrate containers, but also to manage infrastructure and cloud-native services. Also, consider where you need other fundamental consistency across clouds, including areas like provisioning and identity federation.
- Use Google Cloud as your anchor. Here’s a fundamental question you have to decide for yourself: Are you going to bring your on-premises technology and practices to the cloud, or bring cloud technology and practices on-prem? We sincerely believe in the latter. Anchor to where you’re trying to get to. We offer Anthos as a way to build and run distributed Kubernetes fleets in Google Cloud and across clouds. By using a cloud-based backplane instead of an on-prem one, you’re offloading toil, leveraging managed services for scale and security, and introducing modern practices to the rest of your team.
We learned a lot about multicloud through these discussions, and it seems like others did too. That’s why we’re going to do a second round of interviews with a new crop of experts so that we can keep digging deeper into this topic. Stay tuned!
How to Get Your Cloud Migration Journey Started Off on the Right Foot
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When moving to the cloud, many organizations concentrate their focus on the change in technology, and overlook an area just as complex: cultural change.
At Google, we’ve spent years nurturing our culture and workforce to best operate in the cloud, and the Google Cloud Professional Services team leverages the lessons we’ve learned for the benefit of enterprise customers embarking on their own cloud journeys.
While it can be tempting to believe in a universally ‘correct’ strategy for change management, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Every organization will have its own unique considerations. But with that said, there are some core strategies we’ve found to be relevant and useful across a broad range of businesses.
1. Define your purpose for moving to Cloud
While pockets of cloud use and experimentation can evolve independently and in parallel across an organization, it’s important to make some deliberate decisions before starting a larger migration. At this stage, we recommend having a detailed answer to two key questions to ensure a successful cloud migration:
- Where do you want to go? (Or “What’s your cloud vision?”)
- How do you plan to get there?
Start by having a conversation with leaders and those who will be key to the journey about how far you want to push your cloud vision. This alignment ensures everyone is on the same page—and will provide greater direction, allowing more deliberate action.
2. Find the change path which is right for you
Whether a ‘lift and shift’ approach to the cloud is right for you, or a more transformative approach with a lot of re-architecting—the most important thing is to find the flavor of change which is appropriate to your context and level of ambition.This will both shape your key migration activities, but also the level of impact to be managed within your organization.
There are many ways to embark on a change journey for cloud migration (which one can find in the chart below). It is important to deeply understand the needs of your business and its people and determine what strategy makes the most sense.
3. Learn from best practices
Based on the lessons we’ve learned along our own journey, and the work we’ve done with customers, there are a number of recommendations we can share that can make a cloud migration more successful. We go into these in more detail in our new whitepaper, but below you can find the ones we think are most relevant:
- Share the vision—and measure, measure, measure. Once you’ve crystallised your cloud vision with leadership and key stakeholders, share that vision widely. Set success goals and communicate them to hold yourself accountable.
- Be clear about the capabilities you will need in the future—and where you’ll get them. For example, if your vision is to become a cloud-first, data and AI-led organization, ensuring you have the right data science skills and machine learning capabilities in your organization to achieve that vision becomes a critical step—be they home-grown or bought-in.
- Find the right balance between capabilities that should be under central control, and capabilities that should be decentralized, or agile. For example, should machine learning be something that sits centrally, or should it be spread across your organization? For every business, the solution will be a little different, and there’s no “one true answer.” There’ll be lots of different opinions about this, so the sooner the conversation starts, the better.
- Start thinking about the needed tech and non-tech skills now, and how you’ll fill the gaps. Building the tech skills will take time, and not everyone will feel comfortable with the future picture of collaboration, innovation, and agility.
To help businesses navigate their own cloud journeys, Google Cloud Professional Services has released a new whitepaper that can help guide organizations. “Managing Change in the Cloud” is closely aligned with the Google Cloud Adoption Framework and is a practical guide for organizations looking to maintain momentum in their cloud adoption. You can download the whitepaper here.
Google Cloud Accelerates Financial Organizations’ Journey towards Digital Transformation
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When I reflect back on the past year and the pandemic, I’m struck by how the reliance on remote work and operations has changed the fundamentals of business forever. For the financial services industry, this rings particularly true. Many conversations I’m having right now with organizations revolve around embracing a transformation cloud, and thinking of cloud computing not just as an infrastructure decision, but also as the locus for transformation throughout the company.
Today, as we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’ll demonstrate just how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. We hope you’ll join us.
How we’re helping financial services firms build their transformation clouds
At Google Cloud, we continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments customers around the world. Our work with financial services industry customers has given us a deep understanding of the real-world, specific use cases that matter most to them. This groundwork led us to engineer products and solutions that are open and flexible, not ones that force them to rip out existing investments in ERP or other early IaaS cloud implementations.
It’s why we’ve engineered solutions such as Lending DocAI, Open Banking with Apigee, and Datashare for financial services to help transform the industry. These solutions were created with our customers’ security and compliance top-of-mind and are built at the intersection of user-optimized experience, technology, and sovereignty.
At their core, financial institutions want to drive growth, reduce costs, mitigate risk, stay compliant, and increase efficiency. As a result, when we partner with them on their transformation journeys, we consider three essential focus areas:
- Enabling the human experience and connected interactions
- Building an open and intelligent data foundation for better insights
- Providing the most trusted and secure cloud in the industry
Enabling humans and connected interactions
A company’s transformation is about more than technology; people and culture ultimately drive change. HSBC, for example, recognized its business users would benefit from guided answers to common questions around risk policy compliance, and turned to Google Cloud to leverage AI and machine learning bots to assist employees, ease the burden on policy experts, and improve the user experience. Using Dialogflow, a core component of Contact Center AI, HSBC was able to build a conversational platform that quickly and accurately addresses user needs at scale.
Another example is Equifax, which used Google Workspace to support collaboration not only internally between employees, but also externally with customers. Customers can use Google Cloud solutions for financial services to build these sorts of technology-enabled human interactions quickly and easily—supporting organizational change at scale.
Building an open and intelligent data foundation for smarter, faster insights
The real impact of Google Cloud solutions for financial services comes when the whole company has access to the right information at the right time, and can act more intelligently on that data. Our solutions help businesses safely leverage their data and get a complete 360-degree view of their customers’ information, which can often be scattered across multiple systems (CRM, lending, credit, etc.). This helps financial institutions improve the overall customer experience—and sometimes even develop new products quickly.
Indeed, all financial institutions are looking for ways to grow revenue and reduce expenses, and data can be a critical ingredient to doing both effectively. As daily transactions rise, so does the volume and complexity of data. But to implement new customer experience innovations (and new revenue streams), financial institutions must first capture data effectively. This is why AXA Switzerland, for example, uses real-time analytics on Google Cloud to gain cross-industry insights about future trends and customer preferences.
Financial services organizations also need the confidence of building on a platform that provides choice, flexibility, and agility to move fast. It’s why we have an open cloud approach that allows Google Cloud services to run in different physical locations such as on-premises, other public clouds, and the edge. Customers can also harness the power of data and AI through our open APIs, machine-learning services, and analytics engines on any major cloud platform. This is why companies like Macquarie Bank are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to modernize and empower its developers.
Compliant and secure to address risk and regulatory needs
As a highly regulated industry, financial services is focused on security and compliance, risk and regulations, and fraud detection and prevention. Google Cloud offers unique capabilities to earn customers’ trust as part of our continuing work to be the most trusted cloud in the industry. Google Cloud provides a secure foundation that you can verify and independently control. Our cloud technology reduces risk and data loss, because it is built on comprehensive zero-trust architecture. Finally, we offer a shared-fate model built on best practices in risk management via automation, guidance, and insurance. This is why customers like BBVA have confidence anywhere their systems may operate.
On the regulatory front, global legislators and regulators continue to focus on the stability of the industry that only a decade ago went through one of the biggest liquidity crises in history. With this oversight comes strong expectations of risk mitigation. Google Cloud offers a single, global set of controls, reviewed by financial institutions and regulators around the world, and verified in collaborative audits—making compliance simpler and less costly for our customers.
Finally, Google Cloud allows financial services firms to operate confidently with advanced security tools that help protect data, applications, and infrastructure, as well as their customers from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse. We help protect your data against threats, using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, ensuring you never have to trade-off between ease of use and security. Google Cloud encrypts data at-rest and in-transit. And we now also offer the ability to encrypt data-in use, while it’s being processed for customer VM and container workloads.
Let us help you with your transformation cloud journey
We’ve seen leading financial services companies embrace Google Cloud to help them move beyond infrastructure toward the next phase of their cloud evolution. This is an era where no company is better positioned to lead than Google Cloud, and we’re excited to help you with your journey.
Learn more about Google Cloud for financial services.
Mid-Sized B2B Firm Achieves the Business Trifecta with a Single Strategy
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Thirteen years’ experience in e-commerce has given Teddy Chan, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, AfterShip, a deep understanding of the challenges of shipping and tracking packages to customers worldwide.
“The key problem many merchants face is customers asking ‘where is my order?’ and ‘when I will get the package?’” Chan says. “When I considered this issue, I came up with the idea of AfterShip.” Chan helped found AfterShip in 2011 to enable merchants to keep track of packages sent to customers via a web portal or an API. AfterShip also allows merchants to notify customers of anticipated delivery times.
“Using AfterShip, merchants can provide the same experience to buyers regardless of which couriers they use,” Chan says. “Merchants can also improve their customer engagement by including up-selling or marketing content with their delivery notifications.”
Hong Kong-headquartered AfterShip continues to grow quickly and now has a 40-person team. Thirty members of this team are based on the China special administrative region and 10 are based in India.
“Google Cloud Platform has a network of global datacentres with deep connectivity that enables us to put our infrastructure close to our customers. In addition, the ability to horizontally scale our global database using tools such as Google Cloud Spanner eliminates any limits on our geographic expansion.”
—Teddy Chan, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, AfterShip
By October 2017, the business was tracking about 30 million packages per month and had expanded its services to include label and rate calculation and self-service return. Revenue, package transaction numbers and team size have doubled every year for the past three years, while more than 300,000 merchants and 426 couriers are signed up to the service. Key customers include Wish, Etsy and Groupon.
Close to half AfterShip’s customers are based in the United States, about one third in Europe and the remainder are located in Asia. AfterShip had initially delivered its applications and services from an incumbent public cloud service. However, the company wanted to continue its growth trajectory while automating key infrastructure processes, implementing a continuous deployment model and controlling costs.
The business needed to achieve these objectives while maintaining a global presence and high-quality service. AfterShip started reviewing its options and decided to migrate to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “Google Cloud Platform has a network of global datacentres with deep connectivity that enables us to place our infrastructure close to our customers,” Chan says.
“In addition, the ability to horizontally scale our global database using tools such as Google Cloud Spanner eliminates any limits to our geographic expansion. Furthermore, the managed services provided through GCP would allow us to focus on building better features for online merchants.” The reliability provided by GCP would also enable AfterShip to meet the stringent service level requirements of large digital marketplaces in the United States, Asia and elsewhere.
“Google Cloud Platform could manage the high volumes and enable us to deliver the service levels that would realise our ambition of becoming the number one tracking API platform in the world,” Chan says. “For example, with Google Cloud Platform, we can provide a 99.95% monthly uptime service level to our customers.” Finally, GCP provided managed solutions, including Google Kubernetes Engine powered by open source container orchestrator Kubernetes, that would enable AfterShip to automate processes such as scaling and enable its team to focus on developing applications.
AfterShip has moved its websites into GCP infrastructure in three datacentres around the world and anticipates completing the migration in Q4 2017. “Google provided a lot of assistance, particularly early in the project when we needed it,” Chan says. “They briefed us on several services we hadn’t known about that could replace the equivalents in the public cloud we were using previously.” The business then completed the migration using its own skilled team members. As well as Google Kubernetes Engine and Google Cloud Spanner, AfterShip is using Google BigQuery to store and analyse transaction information.
“Google Cloud Platform could manage the high volumes and enable us to deliver the service levels that would realise our ambition of becoming the number one tracking API platform in the world.”
—Teddy Chan, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer, AfterShip
Deployment times down from one hour to two minutes
With deployment times falling from up to one hour in its previous cloud environment to about two minutes in GCP, AfterShip has been able to adopt a continuous deployment model. “This has improved our service levels,” Chan says. “If there are any issues we can fix them quickly, while we can iterate faster to create new features in response to customer requests or changes in the market. “This enables us to continue to lead our competitors.”
Targeting a 30 percent reduction in costs
AfterShip is now targeting a 30% reduction in costs by optimising its use of Docker containerisation technology on GCP.
“By using Docker with Kubernetes, we have been able to fine-tune our use of compute resources and better control our costs,” Chan says. “We’re extremely pleased with Google Cloud Platform as it really is built for engineers,” he adds. “In addition, its documentation is extremely clear, allowing us to troubleshoot or carry out activities on the platform ourselves. “We look forward to continuing to grow and extend our package tracking and associated services with Google Cloud Platform.”
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The banking and financial services industry (BFSI) in India is going through a period of unprecedented innovation.
Customers in India have more information than ever before to make better-informed decisions and can pick the banking and other financial services they need from a wide range of providers.
New players like fintech startups and large tech firms are responding to changing customer expectations with faster, better, and cheaper services, altering the competitive landscape.
However, many BFSI executives are still exploring the potential of digital technologies in pockets of their firms or striving to digitize the customer lifecycles from end to end. To succeed, BFSI firms must increasingly focus on how to deliver on customer outcomes through digital customer experience, digital operational excellence, digital innovation, and digital ecosystems.
Forward-thinking BFSI firms are increasingly turning to cloud to support their businesses as they attempt to keep pace with evolving customer needs. Cloud has become a strategic priority; ensuring its support in the market will only enable digital business and accelerate innovation.
Find out cloud adoption trends in Indian BFSI, including the perceived
challenges, drivers, and benefits of cloud investments.
Download Forrester’s Report today.
Google Cloud and Univision Partnership to Up the Ante in UX for Spanish-speaking Audience
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The past year has given everyone lots to think about—about our priorities as people and as businesses. As the world retreated behind closed doors, we saw how shared interests and experiences can bring us together. As the world grappled with a common enemy, we witnessed just how differently individuals, communities and indeed entire countries can experience a situation. And as we faced seemingly unending obstacles to making it through the pandemic, we saw how making smart decisions based on data can drive meaningful solutions—fast.
That’s why we here at Google Cloud are so proud to partner Univision, the country’s leading Spanish-language content and media company. By partnering with Google Cloud, Univision will be able to accelerate growth across its portfolio of properties, deliver an enhanced user experience for Spanish-speaking audiences and provide the enterprise solutions needed to create the Spanish-language media company of the future.
According to Instituto Cervantes, there are over 580 million Spanish language speakers worldwide. Those viewers, like people everywhere, are avid consumers of streaming content. In Q4 of 2020 alone, viewing time for that content increased by 44%1, and in 2020, from 50%2 more sources. With that surge in demand, Univision needed a cloud provider whose infrastructure could reach Hispanic viewers around the world. With two-plus decades spent building out its network and data centers, as well as global content-delivery capabilities, Google Cloud has the infrastructure Univision needs to reach viewers across the Spanish-speaking world.
At the same time, with such a diverse audience for their content, Univision needs to target that content to viewers’ specific preferences. By applying Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology across its content, Univision intends to personalize content based on shows users have previously watched, enhancing their engagement and viewing experience.
And as Univision transforms the user experience, it can use Google Cloud’s data and analytics suite to garner deeper insights into its audience and forge stronger relationships with them on an individual basis. With Looker and BigQuery, Univision employees will have access to real-time data to help them make business decisions about programming.
Univision will also migrate video distribution and production operations to Google Cloud, where we’ll help them streamline media workflows and develop innovative new capabilities. Meanwhile, Google Cloud’s tight business and technical integration with other Google services will help ensure Univision reaches viewers on the device of their choice, wherever they are in the world. For example, in the coming years, Univision will expand its global YouTube partnership and will integrate with entertainment features on Google Search that help people better discover TV shows and movies. The company will also use Google Ad Manager for global ad decisioning and Google’s Dynamic Ad Insertion for PrendeTV and future video-on-demand offerings. Finally, Univision will distribute its content and services on Google Play across Android phones and tablets, as well as Google TV and other Android TV OS devices.
We’re thrilled to partner with Univision to help them reach the Spanish-speaking world with their content. With our cloud portfolio, we can help them reach individual viewers around the world, with personalized content that they can consume however they see fit. Best of all, together, we can help them achieve this vision fast, leveraging established cloud, content delivery, and data analytics technologies. You can learn more about the partnership here.
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