Hackensack Meridian Health (HMH) executive Mark Eimer explains how an ambitiously-timed rollout of a comprehensive suite of Google products helped the entire organization—from doctors to IT staff—achieve better security, cultivate a more equitable work environment, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.

How does a recently merged, 17-hospital healthcare system fast-track a platform migration and hardware rollout securely and in a way that improves work for everyone, regardless of location or role? These are the questions that kept me up at night in early 2020, when the pandemic demanded a “big bang”—something our legacy laptops and operating systems couldn’t handle.

We began our work with Google in 2020 with the adoption of Chrome as our default browser. As we migrated platforms, keeping patient data safe was of the utmost importance to us, along with providing every staff member with the tools they needed to work virtually. Our staff often experienced issues accessing our web-based applications using Internet Explorer or Edge Browser, a problem that went away when we switched to Chrome. Chrome’s versatile compatibility also made it easier for my team to migrate all of our web-based operations, and Chrome’s security and manageability were key components to making this switch a huge win for the organization.

The success of this migration led us to extend our Google partnership to patient care applications—where Google’s expertise in AI and ML helps scale the use of diagnostics tools and improve other aspects of the patient journey.

Achieving security at every step 

Like so many other healthcare organizations, we’ve been concerned about ransomware attacks. This is part of why we moved to Google Workspace and distributed over 3,000 Chrome OS devices in kiosk mode in March of 2020, when many of us went remote due to the pandemic. We were very concerned about team members accessing corporate applications through home devices that were running EOL operating systems (WIN7), as well as a general lack of antivirus and encryption measures.

We were protected by the fact that Google’s software and hardware both had built-in security features that we needed to stave off sophisticated attackers. For example, Chrome OS automatically updates to the latest security update and encrypts data living outside the cloud on the hardware. These features protected us from security-related disruptions, letting us securely move a huge library of file shares and emails across thousands of accounts to Google Chrome OS in just four months.

A year later, in March 2021, we migrated the enterprise over to Google Workspace and saw an immediate reduction in spam by 30% from the inherent built-in AI/ML. This meant staff were less likely to receive (and click through) phishing attempts. My team could connect, create, and collaborate easily and securely—even as more of us were working from home and needed to access sensitive data remotely. 

Leveling the playing field

As an organization, we were surprised by how many team members didn’t have personal computers at home. We quickly decided that if we needed team members to work from home, the health network would have to supply hardware. Chromebooks’ lower price tag compared to PCs—on top of their built-in security controls—allowed us to purchase, deploy, and support that initial distribution of 3,000 Chromebooks to team members in less than three weeks, providing devices to every eligible remote employee instead of just a select few. This was vital to reaching our equitable technology goal as part of our diversity and inclusion initiative: everybody has the same tools to do good work.

When all employees have what they need to do their jobs well, we get better patient outcomes. Before we began this cloud adoption journey, patient and staff experiences were different within the hospitals and outside of them. 

Now it’s the same wherever our staff is, and we’ve seen efficiency and accessibility benefits extend to the patient side. For example, we built a web-based contact center that supports 80 locations that use Workspace and Chrome OS devices. Since customer service, admin, and providers are all on the same system, it has become a one-stop shop for patients.

Furthermore, through the Grow with Google program, we were able to provide another benefit to employees that drove our equity goals. Google trained 50 non-IT staff members—from environmental services, food and nutrition, and other non-tech areas who were interested in making a career change to IT—on the Google products we were using. They may not have thought about switching to a career in IT before the Grow with Google program came to our organization, but through this partnership, they now have that opportunity.

A strategic, long-term partner

With any large-scale rollout, the work doesn’t end once laptops are in employee hands. Google has shown their commitment to long-term collaboration as they continuously optimize their products for the unique needs of healthcare providers and go the extra mile in tailoring tools to our staff’s workflows. 

For example, on the Chrome OS side, the Google team has helped our registration desks and document centers with device integration for hardware like credit card readers and e-signature pads. They’ve also helped us meet security and privacy requirements mandated by state and federal governments around HIPAA, Medicaid, and Medicare reimbursements. Over this next year, we’ll look at a feature roadmap with Google Cloud to deliver further enhancements, iterating on the product itself to meet our needs for the present and the future.

Delivering the future of healthcare

The benefits we’ve seen around security and usability—and the ability to provide all staff with equal access to Google’s technology—are why we’re expanding our partnership with Google to both the administrative and clinical sides of HMH. In addition to further Google rollouts with corporate, next year we’re distributing Chromebooks to all 350 of our ambulatory clinics.

We’re also working with the Google professional services team to create a custom AI model that analyzes 3D mammogram images. This AI model will enable two providers to read mammograms—which adheres to international best practices but is currently rare in the US—without requiring additional time. Conducting double readings of mammograms will yield better health outcomes for our patients, such as a lower patient recall rate and an increased accuracy in detecting breast cancer.

We’re currently building the model using a variety of Google Cloud products, including Cloud Healthcare API. Once complete, this model is expected to be trained, deployed, and maintained in Google’s Vertex AI, allowing our providers to be more productive as they make clinical decisions with AI support. As the model is proven over time, we plan to make the predictive services accessible to other healthcare organizations.

With Google, we’re able to achieve a unified architecture for storing data as well as training and deploying AI models, which enable our staff to work more efficiently and securely from anywhere. While I may not be able to predict the future as accurately as AI can, I foresee our continued partnership with Google as a key part of HMH’s improved provider and patient outcomes.

Since Aristocrat’s founding in 1953, technology has constantly transformed gaming and the digital demands on our gaming business are a far cry from challenges we faced when we started. As we continue to expand globally, security and compliance are top priorities.

Managing IT security for several gaming subsidiaries and our core business became more complex as we entered into new markets and scaled up our number of users. We needed a centralized platform that could give us full visibility into all of our systems and efficient monitoring capabilities to keep data and applications secure. We also needed the ability to secure our systems without compromising user experiences.

We turned to Google Cloud and Splunk to better manage complexity and support highly efficient, secure, and more dynamic gaming experiences for everyone. We are committed to using today’s modern technologies to give players more optimal experiences.

Bringing our digital footprint into the cloud

When we set out on our digital transformation, we looked to address many business requirements.

These requirements included:

• Regulation: We wanted a platform that could efficiently address our industry’s stringent and global regulatory compliance requirements.
• Player experience: Our IT environment must support smooth gaming experiences to keep users engaged and satisfied.
• Scalability: As we grow and diversify, meeting the changing demands of an increasingly global gaming community, we need an easily scalable platform to align with our current and future needs.

Google Cloud offered us the perfect foundation through solutions such as Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery, and Google Cloud Storage. These acted as the right infrastructure components for us for the following reasons:

• Google Cloud is globally accessible and supports compliance, helping to streamline security and regulatory processes for our team.
• With Google Cloud, we can manage our entire development and delivery processes globally with fast and efficient reconciliation of regional compliance requirements.
• When we need to adjust existing infrastructure or deliver new capabilities, Google Cloud accelerates the process and takes the heavy lifting off of our team.
• Google Cloud allows us to support tens of thousands of players on each of our apps while experiencing minimal downtime and low latency. The importance of this support can’t be underestimated in an industry where players have little to no patience if lags in games occur.

We migrated our back-office IT stack alongside our consumer-facing production applications to Google Cloud given our positive experiences with compliance, security, scalability, and process management. This migration has significantly accelerated our digital transformation while streamlining our infrastructure for faster and more cost-effective performance.

In many ways, Google Cloud has been, with maybe a pun intended, a game-changer for us. For instance, when we suddenly had to support a lot of remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, native identity and access management tools in Google Cloud allowed us to retire costly VPNs used for backend access and quickly adopt a more easily managed, cost-effective zero-trust security posture.

Accessing vital third-party partners and managed services

Aristocrat has many IT needs best addressed in a multi-cloud environment. Google Cloud is particularly attractive given its strong cloud interoperability, as well as the many products and services available on Google Cloud Marketplace. The marketplace accelerated our deployment of key third-party apps including Splunk and Qualys.

Given the personal information we store and the global regulatory compliance statutes we must oblige, security lies at the heart of our business. Splunk is a critical component of our digital transformation because it offers solutions that provide the enhanced monitoring capabilities and visibility we need. The integration between Splunk and Google Cloud gives us confidence that our data is secure. We know our data can be secure in Google Cloud, while simplified billing through Google Cloud Marketplace makes payments and license tracking easier for our procurement team.

As part of our protected environment, we use the Splunk platform as our security information and event management system, leveraging the InfoSec app for Splunk that provides continuous monitoring and advanced threat detection to significantly improve our security.

We can manipulate and present data in Splunk in a way that provides us with a single pane-of-glass for our hybrid, multi-cloud environment and our third-party apps and systems. Splunk observability tools have likewise helped us to track browser-based applications like our online gaming apps to monitor details related to security and performance.

Splunk and Google Cloud have transformed how we operate. We can now quickly ingest and analyze data at scale within our refined approach to security management by offloading software management to Splunk and Google Cloud. This ability enables us to approach security more strategically, and positions us to integrate more AI/ML capabilities into our products for even greater governance and performance.

This is just the beginning of our journey with Splunk and Google Cloud. We’re excited to see the innovation we can continue bringing to the gaming community worldwide.

The music industry is rapidly changing. Only 20 years ago, the availability of music and the infrastructure that was required to make an album a sales success were incredibly complex and expensive. With the decline of physical sales and a fundamental shift to digital, music streaming now accounts for more than half of all sales globally.

At the same time, technology has democratized music-making; in many ways, it has made the musical landscape more diverse. Artists can upload their music with the click of a button. But while it’s easier for creators to share their songs with audiences, getting paid has become more fragmented.

Although music is booming, people no longer buy it outright. Instead, listeners download music digitally or subscribe to streaming services to have their libraries with them at all times. To monetize digital content effectively, artists need to know when, where, and how often their songs are played on each service. To help them navigate this complicated royalties landscape and maximize their profits, Berlin-based international music company BMG provides customized, transparent, and fair services to songwriters and artists.

With publishing and recording divisions under one roof, the subsidiary of international media giant Bertelsmann works with both emerging artists and established stars, including John Legend, Kylie Minogue, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards. With the MyBMG web and mobile application, clients can view and analyze their royalty details in real time and collect payment. When a new record is released, BMG uses data to maximize its impact and revenue for its creators.

“We make sure that everyone who uses our clients’ music knows who needs to be paid the associated royalties, then we collect these royalties and share them out quickly and transparently,” explains Sebastian Hentzschel, Chief Information Officer at BMG. “When our artists release new music, we make sure that it’s marketed and promoted effectively around the world.”

“We needed a scalable solution for our royalty workloads that was intuitive for our developers. We also wanted a partner, not a client-vendor relationship. With autoscaling via BigQuery, excellent customer support, and a clean and simple user interface, Google Cloud ticks every box for us.”

—Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology, BMG

Getting up to speed with a new way of paying artists

In this digital world, artists aren’t just paid every time a fan buys an album—they’re paid a small amount, or royalty, for each song downloaded or streamed by a listener. So, when the industry shifted to digital, the volume of data that BMG needed to handle grew exponentially. “One CD sale is equivalent to about 1,500 streamed songs or plays,” says Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology at BMG. “That means IT departments have to process 1,500 times the amount of data to calculate payments for artists, and this makes scalable micropayment processing very important.”

Until 2019, BMG’s infrastructure was entirely hosted on-premises. Hardware limitations made it challenging to scale on-demand, making it harder to handle the data peaks that royalty processing can bring. “With our on-premises infrastructure, we were going to hit a ceiling in a few years,” says Gaurav. “We still managed to process royalty payments for our clients, but it was increasingly time consuming and expensive. To keep focusing on our clients, rather than our infrastructure, we decided to migrate to Google Cloud.”

From the outset, Gaurav and his team had a clear vision for the partnership: “Most importantly, we needed a scalable solution for our royalty workloads that was intuitive for our developers. We also wanted a partner, not a client-vendor relationship,” he says. “With autoscaling via BigQuery, excellent customer support, and a clean and simple user interface, Google Cloud ticks every box for us.”

Keeping artists happy with business-as-usual payouts during migration

To move applications to the cloud while keeping payment cycles on track for its artists, BMG teamed up with Google Cloud partner Rackspace Technology. “We selected Rackspace Technology because it combines strong technical muscle and a global footprint, with the customer service of a local boutique firm,“ shares Gaurav.

BMG’s own technology team put together the outline for the Google Cloud architecture, which they passed on to Rackspace Technology for optimizations and the ultimate stamp of approval. Whenever Gaurav and his developers needed support, Rackspace Technology was ready to go. “So far, we’ve migrated 17 applications successfully, and Rackspace Technology has been 100% spot-on with each suggestion,” says Gaurav. “I can’t recall a single flaw in a Rackspace Technology-approved architecture, and that really says something.”

When BMG began its migration in August 2019, the team developed an ambitious two-year plan. Only 14 months later, however, the project is more than 75% complete. Among the solutions that BMG is using today are Cloud Storage to securely store 130 TB of data, and Cloud SQL as its standard database technology. The web applications run on Compute Engine, App Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

“After successfully moving a few applications, it was clear that with the strong teamwork of BMG and Rackspace Technology, together with the ease of use of Google Cloud, we could speed up the project without sacrificing quality,” says Gaurav. “We’re set to complete our migration six months before schedule, helping us to quickly move out of our hybrid environment.”

“Our income-tracking teams are very savvy on the data, and the simplicity of Google Cloud empowers them to self-serve analytics, rather than wait for IT. Our teams are much more productive.”

—Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology at BMG

Royalty reporting and processing with BigQuery and Dataproc

So far, all of BMG’s critical workloads are up and running on Google Cloud. Royalty calculations, for example, which require incredible processing power and the collection of many micropayments to ensure full and timely payout, run entirely on Dataproc with output stored on BigQuery for downstream integration and reporting.

Enabling more harmonious workflows through self-serve analytics

As the new beating heart of BMG’s royalty reporting, BigQuery changed the rhythm of collaboration company-wide. In the past, income tracking teams had to contact IT departments if they needed deeper data insights for their work. By integrating Data Catalog with BigQuery, BMG has made the data more accessible to all teams. This helps them detect missing income and new revenue streams independently, maximizing profits for artists.

“Our income-tracking teams are very savvy on the data, and the simplicity of Google Cloud empowers them to self-serve analytics, rather than wait for IT,” says Gaurav. “Our teams are much more productive.”

“Google Cloud enables us to be more client focused and deliver better features faster. We believe it’s just the beginning. We offer rights and royalty services for music publishing, recorded music, neighboring rights, and books. Without scalability limitations, it’s absolutely conceivable to offer our platform as a service to other companies or industries, such as gaming. Google Cloud has opened a world of possibilities.”

—Sebastian Hentzschel, Chief Information Officer, BMG

With a leaner IT environment, BMG can focus its effort on the needs of its clients. Beyond improvements in royalty processing, it can concentrate on app development, releasing new features and enhancements more frequently. By hosting applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, and Compute Engine, BMG has built a CI/CD pipeline with automated deployments and testing to significantly speed up workflows.

“In our old system, it could take several weeks to set up an environment,” says Gaurav. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, any of our developers can complete the process in a few clicks. Having that autonomy makes our developers more motivated and self-driven.”

“Google Cloud enables us to be more client focused and deliver better features faster,” adds Sebastian. “We believe it’s just the beginning. We offer rights and royalty services for music publishing, recorded music, neighboring rights, and books. Without scalability limitations, it’s absolutely conceivable to offer our platform as a service to other companies or industries, such as gaming. Google Cloud has opened a world of possibilities.”

With the migration almost complete, BMG is looking forward to its next technology project. It plans to leverage AutoML to further scale and automate royalty tracking with machine learning. On the marketing side, advanced analytics will help BMG determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns around the world, further increasing profits for artists. By connecting Google Data Studio to BigQuery, BMG will increase the quality of its analyses, helping musicians better understand the reach of their music around the world.

In the end, Gaurav shares, helping musicians is what it all comes down to. “We’re a new kind of music company because we build our services around our artist, songwriter, and publisher clients, not the other way around,” he says. “Google Cloud is helping us maintain strong relationships with our clients, and that’s music to our ears.”

From data centers and cloud regions to subsea cables, Google is committed to connecting the world. Our investments in infrastructure aim to further improve our network—one of the world’s largest—which helps improve global connectivity, supporting  users and Google Cloud customers. Our subsea cables play a starring role in this work, linking up cloud infrastructure that includes more than 100 network edge locations and over 7,500 edge caching nodes. 

As it turns out, readers of this blog seem to find what happens under the sea just as fascinating as what’s going on in the cloud. Posts on our cables are consistently among our most popular, which is why we brought them together for you here so you can take a deeper dive (pun intended).

Here’s a list our most popular posts on our underwater infrastructure:

2021

• Hola, South America! Announcing the Firmina subsea cable
• This bears repeating: Introducing the Echo subsea cable
• The Dunant subsea cable, connecting the US and mainland Europe, is ready for service

2020

• Announcing the Grace Hopper subsea cable, linking the U.S., U.K. and Spain

2019

• Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa
• A quick hop across the pond: Supercharging the Dunant subsea cable with SDM technology
• Curie subsea cable set to transmit to Chile, with a pit stop to Panama

2018

• Expanding our cloud network for a faster, more reliable experience between Australia and Southeast Asia
• Delivering increased connectivity with our first private trans-Atlantic subsea cable

2017

• Google invests in INDIGO undersea cable to improve cloud infrastructure in Southeast Asia

2016

• New undersea cable expands capacity for Google APAC customers and users
• Google Cloud customers run at the speed of light with new FASTER undersea pipe
• A journey to the bottom of the internet

Our cable systems provide the speed, capacity and reliability Google is known for worldwide, and at Google Cloud, our customers can make use of the same network infrastructure that powers Google’s own services. To learn more, you can view our network on a map, or read more about our network.