Azimut Group operates an international network of companies handling investment and asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance. Founded in Milan, Italy in 1988, Azimut Group today has branches in fifteen countries, including Brazil, China, and the USA.

“We have subsidiaries and manage funds all over the world,” explains Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager at Azimut Holding S.p.a. “That means that any technology that we put in place has to cover needs from many different countries.”

“When complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Azimut manages its funds with investment advisors who use information sourced from Bloomberg, Reuters and others. “They use a huge amount of data,” says Simone. “They work with spreadsheets, algorithms, formulae and they analyse data in minutes.” In finance, every second is crucial, which is why Azimut decided to develop a risk management dashboard that can process information even more quickly, then distribute it worldwide.

“When an advisor manages data, that data is used to make immediate decisions on funds, capital movements or whether to sell stock,” says Simone. “They have to be ready to make recommendations for any amount of data that comes to them. For our dashboard, that means that when additional information arrives or complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

Generating insights at speed

Investors and investment managers make decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. For Azimut Group, information sourced through financial data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters provided only part of the data that the group required.

“We looked to collect information from a range of different providers,” explains Simone, “then analyse it to develop a predictive algorithm that could work faster than an advisor stationed at the terminal. We set ourselves the challenge to try to manipulate that data to add new insights into our matrix, so that every one of our branches across the world can see risk information about the funds in real-time.”

“We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling. With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it.

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

The first cloud provider Azimut used to build its system struggled to scale quickly to meet different kinds of data challenges. “If we wanted to add more cores, that was fine,” says Simone. “But the previous cloud provider made it complicated to raise the amount of space in a database infrastructure and scale up to demand. Scaling up for more in-depth analysis would take a day, and our need was immediate.”

That’s why Azimut switched one year ago to Google Cloud Platform to run the 150 VMs on its risk analysis platform. “We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling,” says Simone. “With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it. Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

The infrastructure of Azimut’s solution handles around 800TB of data per month, and Google’s global network of servers and high-speed connections ensure that it gets to where it’s most needed by the most direct route. Impressed by the speed, security and availability of Google Cloud Platform, Azimut has moved its intranet on to Google Cloud Platform, too, eliminating the need for staff to login with VPNs.

“Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Driving ahead with Noovle

For Azimut, migrating the risk management dashboard is the latest of many Google product collaborations with cloud consultancy Noovle. “Everything started five years ago,” says Simone, “when Noovle assisted us in migrating to Gmail from our on-premise email solution. From G Suite to Google Cloud Platform, we’ve had a great relationship. Noovle provides consultancy services, support for mobility, and external advisors who work on our premises, such as when they trained us how to broadcast our meetings on Google Hangouts. As an independent company, we know we can trust them for transparent advice. All they care about is the best way to get a job done and to help us reach our goals.”

New app, new customers

In a business case comparison, Google Cloud Platform cost Azimut 35% less to run than the previous cloud provider. Now the group is building a major new mobile application on Google App Engine to be released in 2018.

“The new mobile application will allow customers to trade directly, without human advisors, by proposing different investment solutions depending on targets the customers set,” says Simone. “So if a customer aims to make money with investments, they enter their relevant personal information and we carry out the necessary regulatory checks and suggest what they could buy. The entire project will be based on Google Cloud Platform, so customers can control their investments through the app while we manage the fund, using Google Cloud Spanner on the backend.”

As digital transformation continues apace, cloud native adoption has skyrocketed — and so has the volume, velocity, and variety of data that organizations must monitor to maintain visibility over their IT environments. Rather than a fixed number of virtual machines (VMs) running a single application each, systems are more flexible and ephemeral — with thousands of containers and microservices emitting data — and services and systems have greater interdependencies. All of this has led to an explosion in complexity that makes it nearly impossible to reliably and efficiently operate cloud-native services using traditional observability solutions without dramatically increasing overhead. 

Built on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Chronosphere is the only cloud-native observability solution that helps teams quickly resolve incidents before they affect the customer experience and the bottom line. And the relationship between Google Cloud and Chronosphere has developed into a growing partnership. Chronosphere brings the ability to rapidly and reliably control observability data and costs to Google Cloud customers, while maintaining open source compatibility. Recently, GV (Google Ventures) participated in Chronosphere’s $115 million round of Series C funding. Chronosphere is also available on Google Cloud Marketplace, making it easy for customers to procure and deploy.

Why Chronosphere chose to build on Google Cloud

Chronosphere’s founders, CEO, Martin Mao, and CTO, Rob Skillington, wanted to build an observability solution that solved some of the same problems they encountered when leading the observability team at Uber. The challenges at Uber focused on scale, reliability and cost, with a key emphasis on how these were not easily solvable for monitoring of cloud-native applications. Martin and Rob were looking to build a solution that was cloud-native, highly reliable, and capable of managing the high volume of data that modern organizations process every day. For those reasons, Martin and Rob chose to build Chronosphere on top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE): 

Cloud-native mindset: When Martin and Rob launched Chronosphere, one of the first considerations was this: A cloud-native problem needs a cloud-native solution. Google Cloud and Chronosphere work together to provide a purpose-built software-as-a-service (SaaS) observability solution platform for cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes. Chronosphere runs much of its critical infrastructure on Google Cloud, using the service’s global infrastructure to deliver secure and reliable services to hypergrowth customers.  

Open platform: Martin and Rob have a commitment to openness — a commitment that Google Cloud makes to its customers as well. All of the ins and outs of Chronosphere are open source compatible –built on GKE, the platform  ingests both metric and trace data in a variety of open source formats, such as Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and StatsD, so teams can get onboard easily while avoiding vendor lock-in. And they remain fully in control of how much data to ingest, how it’s ingested, how it’s stored, and for how long. That way, customers remain in control of their observability costs while their systems and data continue to grow, and can troubleshoot and remediate issues more quickly. 

Mission-critical performance: Observability is a mission-critical service because it is essential for the reliability and performance of mission-critical systems. For this reason, Martin and Rob wanted to offer the strongest service level agreements (SLAs) possible for availability, reliability, and performance. Google Cloud provides the secure global infrastructure that allows them to do so. 

Data volume: Modern organizations emit huge volumes of data that they have to sift through in near-real time to gain full visibility. Google Cloud offers the same infrastructure and networks that Google uses to support billions of users every day, capable of processing petabytes of data with ease. 

How Chronosphere works with Google Cloud

GKE provides specific technical benefits that Chronosphere leverages to offer customers the performance and availability they need to spend less time managing their observability systems and more time creating value. 

The Chronosphere collector is a Kubernetes-native, Prometheus-compatible agent that collects, processes, and exports telemetry data, including metrics and traces. When you install the collector in a Kubernetes cluster, it automatically discovers all your workloads and starts to gather data from them. 

The Chronosphere UI tailors the experience to each user based on what services that individual owns or which teams that person belongs to. This makes the overall user experience friendlier and less overwhelming while helping people get to the bottom of issues faster.

Running on GKE means that Chronosphere can leverage Google Cloud’s multiple zones in each geographic region to distribute workloads evenly, ensure customer data stores are isolated from each other, and build tolerance for zonal failures. It also allows for data persistence across multiple zones. At the same time, Google Cloud’s global load balancers bring the data physically closer to the customer, shortening the time it takes for a data point to be visible to a user after its emission.

What this means for customers

The partnership brings together the best in cloud-native services and cloud-native observability. With the power of Google Cloud and Chronosphere, observability teams can transform their observability data based on need, context, and utility, storing only the useful data to reduce costs and improve performance. With purpose-built solutions for a cloud-native world, teams gain faster issue detection and resolution, and also benefit from Chronosphere’s 99.99% availability and open source compatibility — eliminating vendor lock-in. 

“Companies growing their online infrastructure risk huge hits to their bottom line if they don’t also manage increased complexity and cost,” says Martin. “Our partnership with Google Cloud brings together the world’s leading cloud services platform with our powerful observability solution to unlock the benefits of a cloud-native world, while optimizing for efficiency, reliability, and cost.”

Google Cloud and Chronosphere: The perfect match

Google Cloud and Chronosphere offer an industry-leading observability solution built from the ground up to abstract away the complexities of cloud computing for already stressed teams. And the future of this partnership is sure to bring new innovations around performance, reliability, and cost efficiency as both companies continue to invest in these three areas. The goal: to deliver the best performance for cost in the industry. 

Learn more about what Chronosphere and Google Cloud are doing for customers, and check out the Chronosphere listing on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on the Google Workspace blog.

We consistently hear from our customers that the privacy of their data is top of mind, which is why we’ve built state-of-the-art security and privacy-preserving technologies into our products — to keep customer data private and secure. We’ve put Google AI to work on behalf of our customers to automatically stop the majority of online threats before they emerge. Gmail, for example, automatically blocks more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware. These defenses, together with our unique encryption capabilities like client-side encryption (CSE), help our customers such as Groupe Le Monde, PwC, and Verizon, meet their security, privacy, compliance, and digital sovereignty requirements.

Last year, we enabled CSE for Drive, Docs, Slides, Sheets, and Meet, and today we’re excited to share that CSE is generally available for Gmail and Calendar, enabling even more organizations to become arbiters of their own data and the sole party deciding who has access to it. We recognize sovereign controls are important to customers and have accelerated delivery of these encryption capabilities to support our customers in maintaining control over their data and meeting their regulatory compliance needs.

Guarantee complete control of your data for the most challenging regulations

The expansion of CSE capabilities across Google Workspace helps to significantly reduce the burden of compliance for enterprises and public sector organizations. It gives organizations higher confidence that any third party, including Google and foreign governments, cannot access their confidential data. Workspace already encrypts data at rest and in transit by using secure-by-design cryptographic libraries. Client-side encryption takes this encryption capability to the next level by ensuring that customers have sole control over their encryption keys — and thus complete control over all access to their data. Starting today, users can send and receive emails or create meeting events with internal colleagues and external parties, knowing that their sensitive data (including inline images and attachments) has been encrypted before it reaches Google servers.

Users can continue to collaborate across other essential apps in Google Workspace while IT and security teams can ensure that sensitive data stays compliant with regulations. As customers retain control over the encryption keys and the identity management service to access those keys, sensitive data is indecipherable to Google and other external entities.

One key use case for CSE in this context centers on helping organizations subject to regulatory requirements, such as PwC, remain compliant, by meeting the need for the highest levels of encryption for certain types of communication.

“We have been searching for the capability to guarantee that our encrypted communications remain inaccessible to third-parties, including our technology providers, for some time. Google appears to be uniquely positioned with client-side encryption in providing us with complete control over our sensitive data, ensuring that we remain compliant as an organization in the ever changing world of data regulation. These features now being available across Google Workspace represent a pivotal moment for us. We’re enthusiastic about the ability to continue to benefit from the efficiency in working that Workspace provides us with, whilst at the same time maintaining trust with our customers that their confidential data will stay private and compliant,” said Shaun Bookham, UK Operations & Technology Director at PwC.

One of our global telecommunications customers, Verizon, is leveraging CSE to gain complete control over their sensitive data, ensuring that they remain compliant as an organization while supporting customers in highly regulated industries. This opens doors for the company to deliver an exceptional experience for its customers, by extending the level of data protection and privacy to their clients.

“At Verizon, we adhere to governance requirements related to access of our sensitive data while also providing the best experience coupled with deep trust. We have worked alongside Google to develop new encryption solutions and are excited to explore their utilization,” said Russell Leader, Director Collaboration and Mobility at Verizon.

Protecting an organization’s most important assets

The regulatory requirements for separation between an organization’s data and their cloud provider’s environment has resulted in important use cases for client-side encryption — from keeping sensitive R&D data extremely private, even from an organization’s SaaS provider, to scenarios where confidentiality is paramount to the success or failure of a mission-critical operation.

Customers, such as media giant Groupe Le Monde, rely on client-side encryption to protect their most crucial assets. By leveraging client-side encryption across Workspace, Groupe Le Monde can be assured that their communications, appointments, and files will not be subject to leaks, thus helping to keep their journalists safe.

“Client-side encryption gives us the next level of privacy, to ensure integrity within the journalistic process. This allows us to guarantee a higher level of security for our journalists, and to protect our sensitive content,” said Sacha Morard, Chief Technology Officer at Groupe Le Monde.

Another industry-leading Google Workspace enterprise customer uses client-side encryption to protect their most sensitive projects. For these projects, the customer is the sole owner of their encryption keys, thereby protecting their critical intellectual property and maintaining their data sovereignty requirements.

While each customer’s digital transformation journey is different, with all essential Google Workspace apps now being covered by CSE, companies of all sizes in all industries can benefit from these protections.

Starting today, client-side encryption is available globally to customers with Workspace Enterprise Plus, Education Standard, and Education Plus. To learn more about client-side encryption and how to get started today, watch our presentation from Google Cloud Next ’22 and check out the documentation.