Highmark & Google’s Secure-by-design Technique to Bring the Living Health Solution to Life
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In an industry as highly regulated as healthcare, building a single secure and compliant application that tracks patient care and appointments at a clinic requires a great deal of planning from development and security teams. So, imagine what it would be like to build a solution that includes almost everything related to a patient’s healthcare, including insurance and billing. That’s what Highmark Health (Highmark)—a U.S. health and wellness organization that provides millions of customers with health insurance plans, a physician and hospital network, and a diverse portfolio of businesses–decided to do.
Highmark is developing a solution called Living Health to re-imagine healthcare delivery, and it is using Google Cloud and the Google Cloud Professional Services Organization (PSO) to build and maintain the innovation platform supporting this forward thinking experience. Considering all the personal information that different parties like insurers, specialists, billers and coders, clinics, and hospitals share, Highmark must build security and compliance into every part of the solution.
In this blog, we look at how Highmark Health and Google are using a technique called “secure-by-design” to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of bringing Living Health to life.
Secure-by-design: Preventive care for development
In healthcare, preventing an illness or condition is the ideal outcome. Preventive care often involves early intervention—a course of ideas and actions to ward off illness, permanent injury, and so on. Interestingly, when developing a groundbreaking delivery model like Living Health, it’s a good idea to take the same approach to security, privacy, and compliance.
That’s why Highmark’s security and technology teams worked with their Google Cloud PSO team to implement secure-by-design for every step of design, development, and operations. Security is built into the entire development process rather than waiting until after implementation to reactively secure the platform or remediate security gaps.
It’s analogous to choosing the right brakes for a car before it rolls off the assembly line instead of having an inspector shut down production because the car failed its safety tests. The key aspect of secure-by-design is an underlying application architecture created from foundational building blocks that sit on top of a secure cloud infrastructure. Secure-by-design works to ensure that these building blocks are secure and compliant before moving on to development.
The entire approach requires security, development, and cloud teams to work together with other stakeholders. Most importantly, it requires a cloud partner, cloud services, and a cloud infrastructure that can support it.
Finding the right cloud and services for secure-by-design
Highmark chose Google Cloud because of its leadership in analytics, infrastructure services, and platform as a service. In addition, Google Cloud has made strategic investments in healthcare interoperability and innovation, which was another key reason Highmark decided to work with Google. As a result, Highmark felt that Google Cloud and the Google Cloud PSO were best suited for delivering on the vision of Living Health—its security and its outcomes.
“Google takes security more seriously than the other providers we considered, which is very important to an organization like us. Cloud applications and infrastructure for healthcare must be secure and compliant,” explains Highmark Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Omar Khawaja.
Forming a foundation for security and compliance
How does security-by-design with services work? It starts with the creation and securing of the foundational platform, allowing teams to harden and enforce specified security controls. It’s a collaborative process that starts with input from cross-functional teams—not just technology teams—using terms they understand, so that everyone has a stake in the design.
A strong data governance and protection program classifies and segments workloads based on risk and sensitivity. Teams build multiple layers of defense into the foundational layers to mitigate against key industry risks. Google managed services such as VPC Service Controls help prevent unauthorized access. Automated controls such as those in Data Loss Prevention help teams quickly classify data and identify and respond to potential sources of data risk. Automation capabilities help ensure that security policies are enforced.
After the foundational work is done, it’s time to assess and apply security controls to the different building blocks, which are Google Cloud services such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, and Google Cloud Storage. The goal is to make sure that these and similar building blocks, or any combination of them, do not introduce additional risks and to ensure any identified risks are remediated or mitigated.
Enabling use cases, step by step
After the foundational security is established, the security-by-design program enables the Google Cloud services that developers then use to build use cases that form Living Health. The service enablement approach allows Highmark to address complexity by providing the controls most relevant for each individual service.
For each service, the teams begin by determining the risks and the controls that can reduce them. The next step is enforcing preventive and detective controls across various tools. After validation, technical teams can be granted an authorization to operate, also called an ATO. An ATO authorizes the service for development in a use case.
For use cases with greater data sensitivity, the Highmark teams validate the recommended security controls with an external trust assessor, who uses the HITRUST Common Security Framework, which maps to certifications and compliance such as HIPAA, NIST, GDPR, and more. A certification process follows that can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. In addition to certification, there is ongoing monitoring of the environment for events, behavior, control effectiveness, and control lapses or any deviation from the controls.
The approach simplifies compliance for developers by abstracting compliance requirements away. The process provides developers a set of security requirements written in the language of the cloud, rather than in the language of compliance, providing more prescriptive guidance as they build solutions. Through the secure-by-design program, the Highmark technology and security teams, Google, the business, and the third-party trust assessor all contribute to a secure foundation for any architectural design with enabled Google Cloud services as building blocks.
Beating the learning curve
Thanks to the Living Health project, the Highmark technology and security teams are trying new methods. They are exploring new tools for building secure applications in the cloud. They are paying close attention to processes and the use case steps and, when necessary, aligning different teams to execute. Because everyone is working together collaboratively toward a shared goal, teams are delivering more things on time and with predictability, which has reduced volatility and surprises.
The secrets to success: Bringing everyone to the table early and with humility
Together, Highmark and Google Cloud PSO have created over 24 secure-by-design building blocks by bringing everyone to the table early and relying on thoughtful, honest communication. Input for the architecture design produced for Highmark came from privacy teams, legal teams, security teams, and the teams that are building the applications. And that degree of collaboration ultimately leads to a much better product because everyone has a shared sense of responsibility and ownership of what was built.
Delivering a highly complex solution like Living Health takes significant, more purposeful communication and execution. It is also important to be honest and humble. The security, technology, and Google teams have learned to admit when something isn’t working and to ask for help or ideas for a solution. The teams are also able to accept that they don’t have all the answers, and that they need to figure out solutions by experimenting. Khawaja puts it simply, “That level of humility has been really important and enabled us to have the successes that we’ve had. And hopefully that’ll be something that we continue to retain in our DNA.”
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How L&T Financial Services Processes 95% of Motorcycle Loans in Less Than Two Minutes
L&T Financial Services is one of the largest lenders in India. India’s demonetization policy in recent years has led to a shift from cash transactions to digital payments. In 2016, the government withdrew 500 and 1000 rupee notes from circulation and encouraged a heavily cash-based population to deposit their canceled notes in banks. Financial institutions needed to pivot to a new way of doing business to stay competitive. L&T Financial Services modernized its IT infrastructure to keep up with changes and capture digital opportunities.
“Working capital is crucial to stimulate growth in rural communities. Our role as a lender is to provide access to funds. We don’t want to burden borrowers with the complexities of getting a loan. Towards this end, digitization is an important step,” says Dinanath Dubhashi, Managing Director and CEO at L&T Financial Services. “Google Cloud helps us streamline service delivery and identify the right customers. By offering the fastest processing time in the industry, we want to be the go-to lender for all customers.”
L&T Financial Services considered multiple cloud providers before choosing Google Cloud. According to Dinanath, Google Cloud understands both the need for businesses to move fast and the need for IT to modernize at different speeds. “We weren’t forced to abandon existing IT systems and migrate lock, stock, and barrel to Google Cloud on day one.”
L&T Financial Services engaged Google Cloud Professional Services to guide its digital transformation journey. The smooth migration from proof of concept to full-scale deployment on Google Cloud took a matter of months.
“Collaboration: a small idea with big opportunities. G Suite helps us connect remote branches with the head office, easily access shared files to submit and track approvals, and conduct face-to-face discussions to accelerate approval processes.”
—Dinanath Dubhashi, MD and CEO, L&T Financial Services
Digitizing the workforce with G Suite
The move to the cloud at L&T Financial Services started in 2017 when the company introduced G Suite to its 14,500 employees. The legacy email system was cumbersome to use, especially for frontline staff who need email access while they are on the road. Using Gmail, employees can connect with customers and co-workers from anywhere, on any device. Employees save time by scheduling meetings with Calendar, collaborating on Docs, and conducting video calls using Hangouts Meet.
Converting data into credit insights using BigQuery
Taking data intelligence one step further, L&T Financial Services adopts a responsible lending approach by applying algorithm-based data analytics to improve credit standards. Beyond traditional data such as credit score and credit payment history, the company also considers macro-economic indicators for risk audits. For example, a farmer’s ability to pay off the loan of his new tractor depends on a successful planting and harvest. So L&T Financial Services feeds long-term data into BigQuery and runs queries to predict loan defaults based on rainfall and crop yield.
This Chart, from Home Depot, Dramatically Demonstrates the Power of a Cloud Data Warehouse
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The Home Depot (THD) is the world’s largest home-improvement chain, growing to more than 2,200 stores and 700,000 products in four decades. Much of that success was driven through the analysis of data. This included developing sales forecasts, replenishing inventory through the supply chain network, and providing timely performance scorecards.
However, to compete in today’s business world, THD has taken this data-driven approach to an entirely new level of success on Google Cloud, providing capabilities not practical on legacy technologies.
The pressures of contemporary growth that drove much of the work are familiar to many businesses. In addition to everything it was doing, THD needed to better integrate the complexities in its related businesses, like tool rental and home services. It needed to better empower teams, including a fast-growing data analysis staff and store associates with mobile computing devices. It wanted to better use online commerce and artificial intelligence to meet customer needs, while maintaining better security.
Even before addressing these new challenges, THD’s existing on-premises data warehouse was under stress as more data was required for analytics and data analysts were utilizing the data with increasingly complex use cases. This drove rapid growth of the data warehouse, but also created constant challenges for the team in managing priorities, performance, and cost.
In order to add capacity to the environment, it was a major planning, architecture, and testing effort. In one case, adding on-premises capacity took six months of planning and a three-day service outage. Within a year, capacity was again scarce, impacting performance and ability to execute all the reporting and analytics workloads required. The capacity refresh cycles were shrinking, and the expecations for data were growing. There had to be a better way.
Still, THD did not take its move to the cloud lightly. A large-scale enterprise data warehouse migration involves tremendous effort among people, process, and technology. After careful consideration, THD chose Google Cloud’s BigQuery for its cloud enterprise data warehouse.
BigQuery, a scalable serverless data warehouse, was better on cost, infrastructure agility, and analytics capability, driving better insights with improved performance. There are no service interruptions when capacity is added, and that capacity can be added within a week (and soon same day). It doesn’t require complex system administration, and its standard SQL support means people can easily ramp up quickly. Valuable BigQuery products like Identity and Access Management meant THD could create many separate Google Cloud projects, while ensuring that different teams weren’t interfering with each other or accessing protected data.
THD also utilizes BigQuery’s flat-rate monthly pricing model that allows teams to budget their capacity based on need and provides billing predictability. The capacity not being used by a given project is available for enterprise use. This ensures no surprises when the monthly bill arrives and provides all analytical users access to significant computing power.
While THD’s legacy data warehouse contained 450 terabytes of data, the BigQuery enterprise data warehouse has over 15 petabytes. That means better decision-making by utilizing new datasets like website clickstream data and by analyzing additional years of data.
As for performance, look at this chart:
With the cloud EDW migration complete, and the legacy on-premises data warehouse retired, analysts now execute more complex and demanding workloads that they would not have been able to complete before, such as utilizing Datalab for orchestrating analytics through Python Notebooks, utilizing BigQuery ML for machine learning directly against the BigQuery data (no movement of large datasets), and AutoML to help determine the best model for predictions.
Additionally, engineers at THD have adapted BigQuery to monitor, analyze, and act on application performance data across all its stores and warehouses in real time, something that was not practical in the on-premises system.
With over 600 projects that THD now has on Google Cloud, the BigQuery story is just one of the many ways that Google Cloud is working with THD to deliver meaningful business results, every day.
Take a Look at 30 Eventrac Locations!
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New locations in Eventarc
Back in August, we announced more Eventarc locations (17 new regions, as well as 6 new dual-region and multi-region locations to be precise). This takes the total number of locations in Eventarc to more than 30. You can see the full list in the Eventarc locations page or by running gcloud eventarc locations list .
What does location mean in Eventarc?
An Eventarc location usually refers to the single region that the Eventarc trigger gets created in. However, depending on the trigger type, the location can be more than a single region:
- Pub/Sub triggers only support single-region locations.
- Cloud Storage triggers support single-region, dual-region, and multi-region locations.
- Cloud Audit Logs triggers support single-region locations and the special
globalregion.
Before looking into trigger location in more detail, let’s look at other locations relevant in Eventarc.
What other locations are relevant in Eventarc?
Triggers connect event sources to event targets:
Each event source, event target, and trigger has its own location. Sometimes, these locations have to match and sometimes they can be different.
Here’s an example of a trigger connecting Cloud Storage events from a bucket in the europe-west1 region to a Cloud Run service in the us-central1 region with a trigger located in the europe-west1 region:
gcloud eventarc triggers create trigger-storage \--destination-run-service=hello \--destination-run-region=us-central1 \--location=europe-west1 \--event-filters="type=google.cloud.storage.object.v1.finalized" \--event-filters="bucket=my-bucket-in-europe-west1-region" \--service-account=$PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com
In many cases, you don’t have control over the location of the event source. In the example above, the Cloud Storage bucket is in the europe-west1 region. That’s the location that you need to work with and it has implications for the trigger location (which I’ll get to later).
The location of the event target is the region of the service where you want the events to go. You get to choose this from one of the supported regions when you deploy your Cloud Run service. You typically want this to be in the same region as your event source for latency and data locality reasons (but this is not strictly a requirement). In the example above, the event source (bucket) is in europe-west1 but the event target (Cloud Run service) is in us-central1 as specified by the --destination-run-region flag.
The location of the trigger is dictated by the event source location, but the trigger type also comes into play. It is specified by the –location flag. Let’s take a look at the trigger location for each trigger type in more detail.
Location in Pub/Sub triggers
In a Pub/Sub trigger, you connect a Pub/Sub topic to an event target. Pub/Sub topics are global and not tied to a single region. However, when you create a Pub/Sub trigger, you need to specify a region for it (because Eventarc triggers need to live in a region) with the --location flag as follows:
gcloud eventarc triggers create trigger-pubsub \--destination-run-service=hello \--destination-run-region=us-central1 \--location=us-central1 \--event-filters="type=google.cloud.pubsub.topic.v1.messagePublished" \--transport-topic=projects/your-projectid/topics/your-topic
By specifying a location, Eventarc automatically configures the geofencing feature in Pub/Sub such that events only persist in the specified location. As I noted above, you typically want to (but are not required to) choose the same region for the trigger and the Cloud Run service for lower latency and data locality. You can also use regional Pub/Sub service endpoints to publish to the topic to ensure that all of the data stays in a single region.
Location in Cloud Storage triggers
In a Cloud Storage trigger, you connect a Cloud Storage bucket to an event target. A Cloud Storage bucket can be in a single-region (e.g. europe-west1), dual-region (e.g. eur4), or multi-region (e.g. eu) location. The location of the bucket dictates the location of the trigger and they have to match. The earlier trigger example was for a bucket in the europe-west1 single-region location. Here’s another trigger connecting Cloud Storage events from a bucket in the eu multi-region location. Notice how the location flag matches the bucket region:
gcloud eventarc triggers create trigger-storage \--destination-run-service=hello \--destination-run-region=us-central1 \--location=eu \--event-filters="type=google.cloud.storage.object.v1.finalized" \--event-filters="bucket=my-bucket-in-eu-multi-region" \--service-account=$PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com
If the bucket region and the trigger region do not match, you’ll see an error:
ERROR: (gcloud.eventarc.triggers.create) INVALID_ARGUMENT: The request was invalid: Bucket "my-bucket-in-eu-multi-region" location "eu" does not match trigger location "europe-west1". Try again by creating the trigger in "eu".
Location in Cloud Audit Logs triggers
In a Cloud Audit Logs trigger, you connect any event source that emits Audit Logs to an event target. The location of the event source will dictate the trigger location. This is typically a single region but there is a special global region that’s necessary in some cases.
For example, if you want to read Cloud Storage events from a bucket in the europe-west1 region with an Audit Logs trigger, you will create the trigger with the same location. Note that this will match all buckets in the europe-west1 region as there’s no filter by bucket in Audit Logs:
gcloud eventarc triggers create trigger-auditlog \--destination-run-service=hello \--destination-run-region=us-central1 \--location=europe-west1 \--event-filters="type=google.cloud.audit.log.v1.written" \--event-filters="serviceName=storage.googleapis.com" \--event-filters="methodName=storage.objects.create" \--service-account=$PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com
On the other hand, if you want to match a dual-region or a multi-region bucket such as eu, you will create the trigger with the global location as Audit Logs triggers only support a single or global region. Note that this will match all buckets in all regions globally:
gcloud eventarc triggers create trigger-storage \--destination-run-service=hello \--destination-run-region=us-central1 \--location=global \--event-filters="type=google.cloud.storage.object.v1.finalized" \--event-filters="bucket=my-bucket-in-europe-west1-region" \--service-account=$PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com
As you can see from this example, if you want to read Cloud Storage events, the native Cloud Storage trigger is a much better option, but this example illustrates a typical case in which a global Audit Log trigger is necessary.
That wraps up this closer look at locations in Eventarc. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @meteatamel for any questions or feedback.
Transform Your Business: Comprehensive Cloud Services and Tailored Pricing Plans
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As the saying goes, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future.” Some organizations find it challenging to predict what cloud resources they’ll need in months or years ahead. Every organization is on its own unique cloud journey. To help, we’re developing new ways for customers to consume and pay for Google Cloud services. We’re doing this by removing barriers to entry, aligning cost to consumption and providing contractual and product flexibility. Read on to learn how we’re rolling out several new go-to-market programs across these key areas to help our customers purchase and consume Google Cloud services more easily.
Removing barriers to entry with Google Cloud Flex Agreements
Many customers choose multi-year commitments because they provide better line-of-sight into IT spend and budgeting. However, these commitments can create difficulty for those who don’t have clear visibility into their future cloud consumption needs. That’s why today we’re launching Flex Agreements, which enable customers to migrate their workloads to the cloud with no up-front commitments. As part of this new licensing option, Google Cloud customers still get access to unique incentives, such as monthly spend discounts1, committed use discounts, cloud credits, and access to professional services, based on monthly spend and workloads migrated to Google Cloud.
Flex Agreements are just one example of how we are removing barriers to help customers start using Google Cloud. In 2022, we launched the Innovators Plus annual subscription, which gives developers a curated toolkit to accelerate their expertise, including access to live and on-demand training through Google Cloud Skills Boost, Google Cloud credits, and more.
We also recently expanded trials for Google Cloud products. For example, the new Spanner free trial instance is good for 90 days, allowing developers to create Google Standard SQL or PostgreSQL databases, explore Spanner capabilities, and prototype applications—with no commitment or contract needed.
Contractual and feature flexibility
Contractual flexibility has always been one of our core principles. Committed Use Discounts (CUDs), for example, provide discounted prices in exchange for a commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified term. Last year, we introduced Flexible CUD, spend-based commitments that offer predictable and simple flat-rate discounts that apply across multiple virtual machine families and regions.
In addition to contractual flexibility, our customers also need the flexibility to choose features and functionality based on their stages of cloud adoption and the complexity of their business requirements. Therefore, over the next few quarters, we will launch new product pricing editions—Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus—in parts of our cloud portfolio. This new commercial packaging model will help give customers more choice and flexibility to optimize their cloud spend.
For customers running workloads such as those in regulated industries like banking and public sector, the higher-end Enterprise Plus tier will offer compute, storage, networking and analytics services with high availability, multi-region support, regional failover and disaster recovery, advanced security, and a broad range of regulatory compliance support. The Enterprise pricing tier will include a broad range of features designed for customers with workloads that demand a high level of scalability, flexibility, and reliability. The Standard pricing tier will offer cost-efficient and easy-to-use managed services that include all essential capabilities such as autoscaling to meet the core workload requirements of customers.
Align costs to consumption with autoscaling
At Google Cloud, a core requirement for the products we build is providing customers industry-leading capabilities to automatically scale (autoscale) services up and down to match capacity with real-time demand. Autoscaling improves uptime, reduces infrastructure costs, and removes the operational burden of managing resources.
Many Google Cloud products include autoscaling capabilities to help customers manage unplanned variations in demand. For example, Dataflow vertical and horizontal autoscaling, in combination with granular adaptive resource configuration (aka “right-fitting”), has resulted in up to 50% saving in infrastructure costs for streaming by automatically choosing the right number of instances required to run the jobs and dynamically re-allocating more or fewer instances during the runtime of jobs. Bigtable also provides native autoscaling capabilities, and Spanner’s autoscale is an open source tool that works across regional and multi-regional Spanner deployments.
Similarly, we added multiple features such as Cluster Autoscaler, Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, Vertical Pod Autoscaling, and Node Auto-Provisioning to GKE for elasticity and cost efficiency.
For L.L.Bean, the ability to quickly scale capacity to meet changing usage patterns (e.g., during the holidays), as well as to rapidly perform load tests to test capacity, are “night and day” with Google Cloud compared to L.L.Bean’s legacy on-premises IT system.
“We won’t have to pay for peak capacity to have it available during peak shopping times. We just scale capacity up or down as needed.” — Randy Dyer, Enterprise Architect, L.L.Bean
We are now taking these capabilities to the next level by enabling autoscaling in BigQuery at a more granular level so you never pay more than what you use. This allows you to provision additional capacity in smaller increments, so you never overprovision and overpay for underutilized capacity. BigQuery customers can now try the new BigQuery autoscaler (currently in public preview) in their Google Cloud console.
A commitment to flexibility and choice
At Google Cloud, we remain deeply committed to the success of our customers and partners, and we are uniquely positioned to help organizations transform their business. By providing you with more flexibility and choice in how to purchase our products, we are empowering you to be more efficient and resilient.
Join Google Data Cloud & AI Summit to hear the latest announcements around innovations in Google Data Cloud for databases, data analytics, business intelligence, and AI. Gain expert insights, new solutions, and strategies that can help you transform customer experiences with modern apps, boost revenue, and reduce costs.
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DB Corp Opts For Google Cloud to Drive Transformation to Real-Time Operation
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About DB Corp
DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 62 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.
Google Cloud Result
- Reduced time to complete sales reports and updates from a week to two hours
- Delivered a single source of truth and real-time data to support decision-making
- Hindi news source material with 95 percent accuracy
Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.
Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices. However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.
Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues. These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day. DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services. Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.
Expertise in managing large data volumes behind GCP selection
However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery. In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform as a service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp. “We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”
DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services. The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.
The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business. “As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar. “For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.
DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.
Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly. Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.
Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers. Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.
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