As Google Cloud has become a choice for more startups, I’ve experienced an increase in founders asking how they should think about cloud services. Though each startup is different and requirements may vary across industries and regions, I’ve seen a few core best practices that help startups to succeed—as well as several traps to avoid. 

For example, If you go with a public cloud provider, you’re ideally not starting from ground zero like you would running your own data center, but it’s important not to introduce similar complexity in a virtualized environment. Just because you’re using public cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean you want to manage it.

Instead, you want to leverage platforms that abstract away complexity so your team can focus on delivering value to customers. That’s where serverless comes in. Serverless platforms are fully managed by the provider, offering automatic scaling for workloads, as well as provisioning, configuring, patching, and management of servers and clusters. Freed from these resource-intensive tasks, your technical talent can focus on the things that differentiate your business, not on IT curation. 

This applies to not only running stateless applications, but also managing and analyzing data. You should be collecting data points about which features are most popular on your platform, what people are buying, the types of activities that help your customers get their jobs done, and so on. This information is essential to building and executing on a product roadmap that will serve your customers. However, it’s not enough to collect this data, you need to make your data accessible, secure, and easy for your team to analyze—so where do you run and host it? 

On Google Cloud, this is where options like Spanner and Cloud SQL can play a large role, as can BigQuery for analysis. You won’t have to worry about standing up infrastructure or patching servers—you can just stream your data to our data management platforms, where it’s available whenever someone needs to run a query. By leveraging a serverless architecture, your startup can be data-driven without having to invest in the traditional complexity of database administration and management—and that can significantly change your playing field. 

Serverless is just one of the factors you should consider as you build out your tech stack. To hear my thoughts on a range of other topics relevant to startups — such as security, cloud credits, and the differences among managed services — check out the below video or visit our Build and Grow page.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/gn4RjLbs8Hc?enablejsapi=1&

At Google Cloud, our customers are at the forefront of digital transformation—launching entirely new businesses and products built in the cloud, redefining entire industries with data and artificial intelligence, delivering innovative new consumer experiences, or committing to sustainable new ways of doing business.

We’re committed to our customers’ success, and over the past two years we’ve invested significantly in providing ongoing and integrated support through our customer care portfolio, including launching new Premium and Mission Critical Support offerings that allow us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, while delivering the fastest response times in the industry.

Today, I’m proud to unveil several new resources and offerings for our customers, including a new Custom AI Solutions practice, new Global Delivery Centers, expanded Executive Briefing Centers, and new leaders to help continue to drive our organization forward.

Helping businesses innovate with a new Custom AI Solutions practice

We are investing in services and offerings to help our customers innovate and drive innovative change to business processes, culture, and customer experiences with Google Cloud products and services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies are foundational for many such digital transformations, and to help customers create real business value with these technologies, we’re excited to launch a Custom AI offering to address our customers’ most critical innovation needs. 

AI and ML technologies are foundational to digital transformations, yet they are not “one size fits all.” Each customers’ problems and opportunities are unique; a rideshare company will use AI differently than a brick and mortar retailer, or a healthcare company, or an insurance firm. To help organizations deploy AI and ML more effectively, we’re launching a new Custom AI Solutions practice, offering customers custom-built AI and ML solutions built into Vertex AI; access to Google’s engineering expertise; and predictable, subscription-based pricing. 

Our teams are already partnering closely with early customers to build and deploy custom AI solutions. For instance, USAA, the large North American insurer, is using Google Cloud ML to process near-real-time damage estimates based on digital images to create a streamlined operations experience.

Learn more about our Custom AI Solutions practice offering here, and how we work together with our customers here. To get in touch, please contact our sales team.

Launching new Global Delivery Centers

Our drive to digitally transform our customers’ businesses is often manifested through our Global Delivery Centers, which expand our professional consulting and emerging practices capabilities available to customers and partners around the world.

The teams at our Global Delivery Centers help customers get up-and-running on Google Cloud quickly and cost effectively, and consult with customers to rapidly build capacity in areas like data analytics, hybrid and multi-cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. More importantly, they help customers successfully execute projects in support of their most mission-critical business objectives. Critically, these centers also help our global partner ecosystem quickly ramp their Google Cloud practices, and get fast, expert consultation for their customers too.

In 2022, we aim to triple the size of our Global Delivery Center teams in Argentina, Poland, and India. In addition, we’ll invest in building deep Google Cloud talent in Mexico and Portugal, furthering our commitment to the industry’s best expert consultation for customers and partners around the world.

Expanding our Executive Briefing Centers footprint

In addition to our Global Delivery Centers, we’re also pleased to expand our resources and facilities that enable digital and face-to-face meetings and working sessions with our customers. This year, we will launch four new Executive Briefing Centers, located on Google Cloud campuses in London, Paris, Singapore, and Munich. 

These centers provide an opportunity to listen to our customers, share the best of Google Cloud’s solutions, and inspire digital transformation, in conversations facilitated by Google Cloud leadership, engineers, and industry experts. By bringing this experience to our customers in-region we can foster deeper partnerships and develop cloud solutions that meet their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty without compromising on functionality or innovation. 

Adding new leadership to enable customer success

Finally, I’m excited to welcome two new leaders to Google Cloud on the Customer Experience team, who will help scale our Delivery Centers and deliver exceptional experiences for our customers.

Heading our Global Delivery Center experience is Sunil Rao. Sunil comes to Google Cloud from Accenture, where he spent 18-plus years working with large technology customers across many industry verticals and managed large global teams in Accenture Advanced Technology Center. Sunil will also lead our Technical Onboarding Center, which helps businesses around the world get up to speed with technologies that are critical to understanding customer and business process contexts, and delivering great experiences.

Additionally, Lee Moore is joining Google Cloud to lead Customer Experience in North America. Lee spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in various leadership positions, including services integration for complex problem-solving, product development across a number of industry verticals, and building long-term customer relationships.

You’ll be hearing much more from us in the coming months, as we build out even more powerful and effective cloud-based services and offerings, work with customers to deliver new analytics- and AI-based tools and services, and work with our growing list of partners to help ensure customer success, across the globe.