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Relax: Support on Google Cloud is Easy and Efficient
To navigate the complexity of today’s cloud environment and to get the most out of your investment, you need robust support that is fast, efficient, and available at the time of need. Google Cloud Platform support checks all the boxes and helps you architect for the inevitable and quickly resolve any issues that might arise with your cloud investments.
Google Cloud offers two support options to address the needs in the cloud. While role-based support provides customizable roles and predictable pricing, the enterprise support offers fast incident response with personalized service.
Role-based support is designed to address the support needs for the development and production environments of organizations of different sizes. Organizations can customize their support entitlements by granting support access to the right individuals on their team depending on the organizational needs.
Enterprise support, on the other hand, is ideal for large organizations with business-critical needs and helps maximize business value and minimize risk. Companies can quickly build and execute a Google Cloud strategy by working directly with Technical Account Managers, who bring deep product knowledge and an understanding of cloud adoption best practices to guide you in your journey with monitored success metrics to keep you on track to grow your business with Google Cloud.
Watch this video to understand how GCP support escalation process works and how to use it.
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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 and impactful: cultural change. Having your people ready to embrace the change — supporting them with the right processes, equipping them with the right skills — is as important as getting the technology right.
To realize the full value of cloud technologies, many organizations are rethinking their IT organizational structure. There are a variety of potential talent implications too — from adopting agile ways of working to hiring for more cloud-centric skills to looking at redeploying current IT skills and reskilling and upskilling current teams.
As one of the organizations that pioneered hyperscale infrastructure, which led to the creation of the cloud, Google has spent years nurturing its culture and workforce to best operate in the cloud. We leverage this experience every day to help organizations ready their workforce for the change, and in this whitepaper, we aim to pass that experience along to you.
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In this whitepaper, we outline migration frameworks that we built based on conversations we’ve had with CIOs, CTOs, and their technical staff. The goal of these frameworks is to help you devise a migration strategy that empowers both IT and the business.
Learn how to analyze migration strategies for your business, including:
- Moving up the stack before you migrate
- Migrating workloads into the cloud (mostly) as is
- Optimizing and modernizing workloads once you’ve migrated
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Pharma Firm Drives 80% Improvement in Speed with SAP on Google Cloud
FFF Enterprises is a leading supplier of critical-care biopharmaceuticals, plasma products, and vaccines. Their passion for patient safety and product efficacy drives their mission of Helping Healthcare Care.
For FFF Enterprises if they have to focus on ERP infrastructure, that takes away from getting products to patents. Learn why FFF Enterprises chose to deploy SAP on Google Cloud and drove an 80% improvement in speed for their SAP environment at a lower cost.
G R Infraprojects Limited Turns to Google Cloud to Run Business-Critical SAP S/4HANA
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Road construction is booming in India. A recent report prepared by the India Brand Equity Foundation—a trust established by the Department of Commerce—pointed out that in FY 2019 alone, the country added 10,855 kilometers of highways to a road network that spans 5.89 million kilometers. This network is the second largest in the world and transports 90% of passenger traffic and 64.5% of all goods in the country.
The Indian Government has also earmarked road construction as key to plans to increase the nation’s GDP to $5 trillion in coming years, targeting road construction worth $212.8 billion in the two years from April 2020.
G R Infraprojects Limited is well positioned to support the government’s program. The business, which started as a contractor building roads in rural villages in India, now specializes in road engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), a model whereby private construction firms build roads funded by the government.
The business now undertakes the processing of bitumen, manufacture of thermoplastic road-marking paint and road signage, and fabrication and galvanizing road-crash barriers. Its in-house integration model includes a design and engineering team, as well as manufacturing facilities in Rajasthan, Assam, and Gujarat.
The business recently expanded into rail—another area expected to benefit from extensive government investment—with its competencies including earthworks, materials supply, track lining, and bridge construction.
In this environment—and despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic—G R Infraprojects Limited aims to substantially increase turnover and manpower over the next five years.
Best-in-class infrastructure key to success
Digital transformation is key to enabling growth while best-in-class IT infrastructure is one of the foundations on which the business seeks to build success.
G R Infraprojects Limited’s digital initiatives include deployment of a new document management system and corporate systems that enable remote monitoring, live tracking, effective real-time communication, and efficient data management.
Providing a scalable, reliable cost-effective infrastructure
But most important of all is providing a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure to support a business-critical SAP enterprise resource planning system. Over the last few years, versions of SAP have enabled the organization to digitize processes and seamlessly run business-critical functions such as inventory management and finance.
G R Infraprojects Limited initially went live with SAP ECC6.0, with a few hundred team members using the system for business-critical tasks such as tracking stock level and movement and generating financial statements and reports for review and action.
“Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Lowering maintenance costs
However, as G R Infraprojects Limited grew, projects proliferated, and new markets emerged, the business elected to move to the cloud from an on-premises infrastructure. “We wanted to move because there were so many maintenance costs in on-premises solutions and cloud provided convenience to IT and the broader organization,” explains Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation at G R Infraprojects Limited.
The business also wanted to move to SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of features such as AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning to transform business processes. The system runs on the HANA database, an in-memory database with fast processing speeds and a simplified data model.
G R Infraprojects Limited selected Google Cloud to run SAP S/4HANA because, Sachin says, it is “much better than any other platform,” incorporates a wide range of features, and meets uptime requirements. The cloud service could also scale to support forecast growth without a sharp increase in cost.
Furthermore, Sachin adds, “Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”
“With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day. With such a scalable and dynamic platform, we are very happy with the performance.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Successful transition with Infrabeat
G R Infraprojects Limited completed the project with assistance from partner InfraBeat over three months and SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud went live mid-2019. “Our dedicated SAP team worked closely with Infrabeat to deliver the project successfully,” says Sachin. “We needed an experienced partner to assist with the implementation process and Infrabeat performed that role admirably. Both teams supported each other and worked to plan to deliver a great result.”
SAP S/4HANA runs on an infrastructure comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud NAT to enable the secure transmission and receipt of packets to and from the internet.
G R Infraprojects Limited estimates the cost of running SAP S/4 HANA in Google Cloud is significantly lower than on alternative infrastructure options—freeing up budget for other business priorities.
In addition, moving SAP S/4 HANA to infrastructure as a service through Google Cloud has eliminated the need to assign internal team members to infrastructure management, allowing them instead to focus on higher-value activities.
Google Cloud also incorporates the security needed to protect the data and processes of SAP S/4 HANA from intrusion or disruption and ensure the uptime and continuity required of a business-critical system.
Optimized speed and availability
G R Infraprojects Limited’s decision to run SAP S/4 HANA on Google Cloud is delivering benefits on a daily basis. “With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day,” says Sachin. “We are very happy with the performance.”
Success with SAP S/4HANA has helped the business decide to move its remaining apps and data to the cloud when its on-premises servers and other equipment reach end of life. G R Infraprojects Limited is already running Active Directory in Google Cloud and Sachin says the cloud platform’s “fast and excellent services” made the decision easy.
“There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Adding value
As G R Infraprojects Limited grows, Sachin adds, the business expects Google Cloud to continue to add value. “There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”
Recent Updates on Google Cloud EKM to Meet Customers’ Cloud Data Security
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Google Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM) lets you protect your cloud data with encryption keys that are stored and managed in a third-party key management system outside Google Cloud’s infrastructure. This allows you to achieve full separation between your encryption keys and your data stored in the cloud, making you the ultimate arbiter of access to your data. We are continuously innovating and developing the functionality of Cloud EKM, so let’s explore some recent updates we’ve made.
New functionality
Available today, we have added several much-anticipated features to Cloud EKM to help meet customer requirements:
Cloud EKM over VPC
Many customers want to incorporate an additional layer of security and reliability when connecting their key manager to the cloud. To help meet this need, we are introducing Cloud EKM support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks. This support allows Cloud EKM to connect via a secured private network, giving customers stricter control over network access to their external key manager. For more information, see Using Cloud EKM with VPC.
Support for asymmetric keys
In addition to symmetric encryption keys, Cloud EKM now recognizes both RSA as well as Elliptic Curve asymmetric keys created in a supported external key manager. With support for asymmetric keys, you can sign approvals granted via Access Approval. Asymmetric keys can add a layer of assurance when granting administrative access to customer data. You can also use the external asymmetric keys to sign data just as you would a cloud native key. For more information, see Asymmetric signing keys.
Protection level organization policy
We’ve made a new organization policy available for Cloud KMS that allows for fine-grained control over what types of keys are used. By using this org policy, you can specify that only specified KMS key types, for example EXTERNAL or EXTERNAL_VPC, may be created. This function can help meet specific requirements for separation of data or data sovereignty, ensuring only externally-managed keys are used with certain workloads. For more information, see Organization policy constraints.
Cloud EKM supports the Google Cloud services which typically store customers’ most sensitive data assets, and we are constantly adding support for more services. For example, we recently added Cloud EKM support for Cloud Storage, allowing customers to leverage Google-scale storage while adhering to local regulations and holding their keys in their own key manager. For a complete list, see our currently supported services, and if you’re interested in using Cloud EKM with a GCP service that is not yet supported, you can make feature suggestions here.
Best practices for Cloud EKM
The newly published Reference architectures for reliable deployment of Cloud EKM services guide provides recommendations for running a highly available and reliable external key manager integrated with Cloud EKM. These recommendations answer some of the most common questions and concerns we’ve heard from customers. The recommendations are aimed at operators of an external key manager, meaning that if a supported partner operates your EKM, you might share some of these responsibilities with a partner, depending on the design of their product and how it integrates with Cloud EKM.
Take encryption into your own hands
Being deliberate about encryption is critical for securing your sensitive data on Google Cloud. We’re always evolving our encryption products to meet your needs and help you achieve your business goals, and we hope that the additional features mentioned in this blog will allow you to make better use of your key management infrastructure. To get started with Cloud EKM, check out our documentation to learn more or try it for yourself in the GCP console.
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