Over the past few years, as the education sector was going through transformative change, EdTech startups rose to meet the demand of learners and help address some of the biggest challenges in education. At Google Cloud, we’re inspired by how EdTech startups continue to solve challenges with agility, innovative technology, and determination. We’re proud to help EdTechs make learning more personal, safe, and accessible, and we’re working to connect EdTech startups with the right people, products, and best practices that will help them grow

Announcing a new partnership with StartEd

Google Cloud is excited to announce a partnership to offer mentor-based programming for EdTechs with StartEd — an organization that accelerates education innovators addressing Early Childhood, K-12, HigherEd, Workforce, and Adult Learning. 

Founded by entrepreneurs nearly ten years ago, StartEd is on a mission to attract and develop a network of innovators working to ensure equitable, quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all. The company trains and connects thousands of diverse entrepreneurs, educators, and investors at for-profit and not-for-profit organizations each year, working alongside corporations, foundations, and higher education institutions across the United States. 

StartEd has helped grow more than 2,500 companies and built a mentor network of over 800 senior leaders with deep expertise in early-stage EdTech companies. The StartEd community now numbers more than 25,000 members. 

“I am thrilled to embark on this transformative partnership with Google Cloud,” said Ash Kaluarachchi, StartEd CEO and managing director. “This alliance not only amplifies our mission to empower and nurture the world’s education innovators at every point in their journey, but it also unlocks unprecedented potential for the entire EdTech ecosystem. Together, we’re poised to redefine the future of education and work and to create lasting, positive impact for generations to come.”

Mentoring and networking opportunities for EdTech startups

Through this partnership, U.S.-based EdTech startups can apply to a new program, StartEd sponsored by Google Cloud. The program offers startups access to personal coaching, hands-on training, business support, and a large network of industry experts to help them accelerate their growth and transform education. Beyond the benefits from StartEd, startups will gain access to cloud credits, technical support from Google Cloud, and coaching from Google’s education leadership.

Apply to StartEd, sponsored by Google Cloud, today.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s been a rapid acceleration of digital transformation across the entire healthcare industry. Telehealth has become a more mainstream and safe way for patients and caregivers to connect. Machine learning modeling has helped speed up innovation and drug discovery. And new levels of integration and data portability have helped enable greater vaccine availability and equitable access to those who need it.

Data has been at the crux of this digital transformation — helping people stay healthy, accelerating life sciences research and delivering more personalized and equitable care. We recently unveiled partial results from our research with The Harris Poll, which revealed that nearly all physicians (95%) believe increased data interoperability will ultimately help improve patient outcomes. Today, we’re unveiling the second part of that research. 

In February 2020, we commissioned The Harris Poll to survey 300 physicians in the U.S. about their biggest pain points — this was just before the COVID-19 pandemic strained the entire healthcare system and made us all hyper-aware of the risks we take in going to the hospital. In June 2021, we followed-up with those same questions and more. What it unveiled was just how much COVID-19 reshaped technology’s role in the healthcare field and how it’s changing day-to-day operations for physicians. 

Here are some of the highlights: 

Healthcare organizations accelerated technological upgrades over the course of the pandemic. After a year shaped primarily by the COVID-19 pandemic, use of telehealth saw substantial YOY growth, jumping nearly threefold from 32% in February 2020 to 90% this year. Forty-five percent of physicians say the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of their organization’s adoption of technology. In fact, more than 3 in 5 physicians (62%) say the pandemic has forced their healthcare organization to make technology upgrades that normally would have taken years. For example, 48% of physicians would like to have access to telehealth capabilities in the next five years. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, about half of physicians (53%) say their healthcare organization’s approach to the adoption of technology would best be described as “neutral” (i.e., willing to try new technologies only if they have been in the market for awhile or others have tried and recommended them). 

Despite the technological leaps this year, most physicians still believe the industry lags behind in technology adoption but recognize the opportunity for technological support and advancement. The majority of physicians don’t view the healthcare industry as a leader when it comes to digital adoption. More than half of physicians describe the healthcare industry as lagging behind the gaming (64%), telecommunications (56%), and financial services industries (53%). However, the healthcare industry is not seen to be trailing as much as it was last year behind retail (54% in 2020; 44% in 2021); hospitality and travel (53% in 2020; 43% in 2021); and the public sector (39% in 2020; 26% in 2021). 

Better interoperability alleviates physician burnout, improves health outcomes and speeds up diagnoses. The majority of physicians say increased data interoperability will cut the time to diagnosis for patients significantly (86%) and will ultimately help improve patient outcomes (95%.) In addition to better patient experiences and outcomes, more than half of physicians (54%) believe increased access to data via technology has had a positive impact on their healthcare organization overall. A majority believe that technology can alleviate the likelihood of physician “burn-out” (57%) and that efficient tools help decrease friction and stress (84%). And, as a result, 6 in 10 physicians say access to better technology and clinical data systems would allow them to have better work/life balance (60%) and that better access to/more complete patient data would reduce administrative burdens (61%). It is therefore not surprising that nearly 9 in 10 physicians (89%) say they are increasingly looking for ways to bring together all patient data into a single place for a more complete view of health. 

Familiarity with new Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) interoperability rules grows, and many physicians are in favor. Most physicians (74%) say they have at least heard of the new DHHS rules (launched in 2019) to improve the interoperability of electronic health information. This is a clear rise from 2020 (64%), but deeper knowledge is fairly low. Only 30% of physicians say they are somewhat or very familiar with the new rules (though, again, this is a rise from 2020, when only 18% said they were very/somewhat familiar). Similar to in 2020, among those who have heard of the new rules, nearly half are in favor (48% in 2021; 45% in 2020) but a similar proportion remain unsure (46% in 2021; 50% in 2020). And like in 2020, by far the top potential benefit of the rules is thought to be forcing EHRs to be more interoperable with other systems (70%).

Google was founded on the idea that bringing more information to more people improves lives on a vast scale. In healthcare, that means creating tools and solutions that make data available in real time to help streamline operations and improve quality of care and patient outcomes. For example, our recently announced Healthcare Data Engine makes it easier for healthcare and life sciences leaders to make smart real-time decisions through clinical, operational, & groundbreaking scientific insights. To find out more about the Healthcare Data Engine, click here.

^{Survey methodology: The 2021 survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Google Cloud from June 9 – 29, 2021 among 303 physicians who specialize in Family Practice, General Practice, or Internal Medicine, who treat patients, and are duly licensed in the state they practice. The 2020 survey was conducted from February 18 – 25, 2020 among 300 physicians who specialize in Family Practice, General Practice, or Internal Medicine, who treat patients, and are duly licensed in the state they practice. Physicians practicing in Vermont were excluded from the research. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, please contact press@google.com.}

Today, we’re announcing that we are collaborating with Sparkle and others to build and operate two submarine cable systems linking the Middle East with southern Europe and Asia: the Blue Submarine Cable System connecting Italy, France, Greece, and Israel; and the Raman Submarine Cable System connecting Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman and India. 

Developing additional network capacity and routes is critical to Google users and customers around the globe, who depend on robust connectivity to power their online lives, and communicate with friends, family and business partners. Google users and Google Cloud customers will benefit from increased capacity and decreased latency to regions in the area. 

Each equipped with 16 fiber optic pairs, the Blue and Raman Submarine Cable Systems are expected to be ready for service in 2024. In time, consortium members hope to make additional landings and connect the two systems through terrestrial network assets.

Like with other infrastructure projects, building a subsea cable is an opportunity to pay tribute to a regional luminary who has advanced human understanding. The Raman cable is named for Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, an Indian physicist who won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics—the first Asian to receive that honor in science. C.V. Raman’s work centered on light scattering, which finds that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the deflected light changes wavelength and amplitude. This so-called Raman effect is a foundational principle in the field of optics that enables any underwater network cable. A trip across the Mediterranean also prompted him to ask why the sea is blue, when water itself is clear? Thanks to C.V. Raman, we now know that the sea isn’t simply reflecting the sky, but because the water itself causes blue light to scatter.      

With Blue and Raman, we now have 18 investments in subsea cables around the world, including Google-funded cables like Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Echo, JGA, INDIGO and Havfrue. You can learn more about Google Cloud’s network and infrastructure here.

As organizations continue to evolve to meet the needs of their stakeholders, they are increasingly looking to adopt the cloud and digitally transform their business. Since our partnership with NetApp began in 2018, we’ve been focused on delivering the infrastructure, tools, and services to help customers on their cloud migration journey and benefit from their data to better serve their customers. 

“Customers are looking to adopt flexible and scalable solutions that meet the needs of their business,” said Ronen Schwartz, SVP & GM, Cloud Volumes, NetApp. “Our long-standing partnership with Google Cloud continues to deliver innovative solutions for customers as they look to migrate and run their business critical applications in the cloud while unlocking the power of their data with industry-leading cloud services.”

Innovative, industry-first solutions have become the standard for our partnership. From the general availability of NetApp Cloud Volumes Service (CVS) for Google Cloud in 2019, to our collaboration on new architectures in 2020 with the release of the software-defined CVS powered by Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), we continue to deliver first-of-its-kind enterprise file storage services together. In 2021, the pace of innovation has only increased—together, we delivered volume replication powered by SnapMirror, which efficiently copies volume data from one Google Cloud region to another for data consistency, development, testing, or disaster recovery. 

We’ve also made our services available globally—you can now run Cloud Volumes ONTAP in all 28 Google Cloud regions, and CVS is now available in 19 regions, allowing you to access our services wherever you are around the globe. All of this is backed up by a 99.99% SLA for CVS, enabling high availability for your enterprise workloads.

Hundreds of customers including MailerLite, a leader in marketing automation, have benefitted from our joint services. MailerLite was looking to move millions of files to the cloud without disruption as they were facing availability, management, and maintenance challenges as their business scaled. By leveraging NetApp CVS on Google Cloud, MailerLite was able to migrate over 100 million files to Google Cloud in about an hour, removing their ongoing infrastructure overhead, saving developer hours, and eliminating the scalability limitations they previously experienced. 

Expanding our partnership

Last week at Google Cloud Next ‘21, we announced we are expanding our strategic partnership in two ways to make it even easier for customers to migrate and run business critical applications on Google Cloud. First, NetApp will provide storage infrastructure for the newly announced Google Distributed Cloud Hosted, where data resides in customer-owned data centers and colocation facilities. This enables a safe and secure way to modernize an on-premises deployment while still meeting data security and privacy requirements.

Additionally, for customers looking to migrate their VMware workloads to Google Cloud, we announced preview access for NetApp Cloud Volumes as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine. By providing customers with the choice to scale compute and storage independently, customers can now reduce costs and complexity when migrating and running storage-bound workloads. This also allows customers to address regional disaster recovery use cases, making it easier and more cost-effective to move on-premises workloads into Google Cloud. To get started, you can sign up for preview access using the Registration for Preview Access form.

Looking forward

We’re excited for what’s to come with our partnership and committed to delivering value to customers across industries. Google Cloud is a Gold sponsor at this week’s NetApp Insight, and we invite you to join our spotlight session featuring Google Cloud and NetApp leaders. Additionally, we are leading multiple breakout sessions where you will hear from our product team on how you can accelerate cloud adoption with Google Cloud and NetApp. You can also learn more and get started today by visiting our NetApp on Google Cloud website.