In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

Google Cloud is proud to support our customers with the cleanest cloud in the industry. For the past four years, we’ve matched 100% of our electricity use with renewable energy purchases, and we were the first company of our size to commit going even further by running on carbon-free energy 24/7 by 2030.  As we work to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy, we help you take immediate action to decarbonize your digital applications and infrastructure. We’re also working with our customers across every industry to develop new solutions for the unique climate change challenges that organizations face. Today, we’re excited to expand our portfolio of carbon-free solutions and announce new partnerships that will help every company build a more sustainable future. 

First, we’re launching Carbon Footprint, a new product that provides customers with the gross carbon emissions associated with their Google Cloud Platform usage. Now available to every GCP user for free in the Cloud Console, this tool helps you measure, track and report on the gross carbon emissions associated with the electricity of your cloud usage. Of course, the net operational emissions associated with your Google Cloud usage is still zero. With growing requirements for Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) reporting, companies are looking for ways to show their employees, boards and customers their progress against climate targets. Using Carbon Footprint, you have access to the gross energy related emissions data you need for internal carbon inventories and external carbon disclosures, with one click. 

Built in collaboration with customers like Atos, Etsy, HSBC, L’Oréal, Salesforce, Thoughtworks and Twitter, our Carbon Footprint reporting introduces a new standard of transparency to support you in meeting your climate goals. You can monitor your gross cloud emissions over time, by project, by product and by region, giving IT teams and developers metrics that can help them reduce their carbon footprint. Our detailed calculation methodology is published so that auditors and reporting teams can verify that their cloud emissions data meets GHG Protocol guidance.

“The power of knowledge combined with the power of technology innovation plays a vital role in proactively responding to the climate crisis we are facing. With Google Carbon Footprint reporting, Atos feeds emissions data in our Decarbonization Data Platform, demonstrating potential emissions reductions from the Google Cloud Platform to our customers. This reporting opens up new levels of emissions transparency, trajectory planning, and data insight to support our customers in meeting, and potentially accelerating towards, their climate goals.”—Nourdine Bihmane, Head of Decarbonization Business Line, Atos

“The capability to measure and understand the environmental footprint of our Public Cloud usage is among the key axis of our sustainable tech roadmap. With Google Cloud Carbon Footprint, we are now able to directly follow the impact of our sustainable infrastructure approach and architecture principles.”—Hervé DUMAS, Sustainability IT Director, L’Oreal

While digital infrastructure emissions are just one part of your environmental footprint, accurately accounting for IT carbon emissions is necessary to measure progress against the carbon reduction targets required to avert the worst consequences of climate change. To help you account for emissions beyond our cloud and across your organization, we’re excited to partner with Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, integrating our Google Cloud Platform emissions data into their carbon accounting platform. 

“As we face unprecedented climate challenges, companies across the globe need to embed sustainability into the core of their business in order to meet growing customer and stakeholder expectations, and reduce their environmental impact. Together, Google Cloud and Salesforce Sustainability Cloud can help our joint customers accelerate their path to Net Zero, leveraging data-driven insights and visualizations to track and reduce their carbon emissions to drive sustainable change.”—Ari Alexander, GM of Salesforce Sustainability Cloud. 

From information to action

With the gross energy-related emissions footprint of data associated with your Google Cloud usage now available, we’re committed to providing tools to not only measure your carbon footprint, but help you reduce it. We recently launched low-carbon region icons to help you choose cleaner regions to locate your Google Cloud resources. New users who see the icons are over 50% more likely to choose clean regions over others, ensuring their applications emit less carbon over time. 

For current Google Cloud users, we’re pleased to announce that Active Assist Recommender will include a new sustainability impact category, extending its original core pillars of cost, performance, security, and manageability. Starting with the Unattended Project Recommender, you’ll soon be able to estimate the gross carbon emissions you’ll save by removing your idle resources. Unattended Project Recommender uses machine learning to identify, with a high degree of confidence, projects that are likely abandoned based on API and networking activity, billing, usage of cloud services, and other signals, and provides actionable recommendations on how to remediate those abandoned projects. By deleting these projects, not only can you reduce costs and mitigate security risks, but you can also reduce your carbon emissions. In August, Active Assist analyzed the aggregate data from all customers across our platform, and over 600,000 gross kgCo2e was associated with projects that it recommended for cleanup or reclamation. If customers deleted these projects they would significantly reduce future gross carbon emissions. Check out this blog to learn more about Active Assist.

Solutions for climate resilience 

Many of our customers face difficult questions about how their business impacts the natural environment today, and how it will be affected by climate change in the future. Answering these questions requires rich datasets about the planet, better analytics tools and smarter models to predict potential outcomes. For over a decade Google Earth Engine has supported scientists and developers with hyperscale computing power and the world’s largest catalog of satellite image data. Today, we are delighted to announce the preview of Earth Engine as part of Google Cloud Platform. Now, you can access Earth Engine and combine it with other geospatial-enabled products like BigQuery. By extending Earth Engine’s powerful platform to enterprises through Google Cloud, we are bringing the best of Google together. 

Over the past year we’ve worked with a number of organizations to use Earth Engine technology with tools like BigQuery and the Cloud AI Platform to develop new solutions for responsible commodity sourcing, sustainable land management and carbon emissions reduction. Earth Engine enables companies to track, monitor and predict changes in the Earth’s surface due to extreme weather events or human-caused activities, thus  helping them save on operational costs, mitigate and better manage risks, and become more resilient to climate change threats. This new offering will wrap the unique data, insights and functionality of Earth Engine with a fully-managed, enterprise-grade experience and reliability.

As we work with our customers to accelerate their sustainability initiatives, earth observation data is proving critical to effectively plan for the long-term impacts of climate change. To extend our geospatial and sustainability use cases we’re also expanding our partnerships with CARTO, Climate Engine, Geotab, NGIS, and Planet to bring their data and core applications to Google Cloud.

These partners will each make their existing platforms and datasets available globally on Google Cloud, giving you low-latency and reliable access to critical data and applications that will inform your sustainability initiatives. By integrating water availability, agricultural data, weather risks, and extensive daily satellite imagery into Earth Engine and BigQuery, you can achieve more ambitious goals for the sustainability of your business and our planet.

Committing to help you meet your climate goals

With each of these tools, we’re working to reduce the barriers you face in adopting more sustainable technology practices. We understand that building more sustainable applications and infrastructure is not easy. You face competing priorities, technical challenges, and the perception that climate action is costly. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. Today, we are making a sustainability pledge to you: teams across Google Cloud are committing to eliminating the barriers you face in building a more sustainable digital future for your organization, and will help you take action today to realize your climate goals. We’ll do this in a number of ways: 

1. In digital transformation projects and workshops, sustainability teams will always have a seat at the planning table, so we can work together on using cloud technology to build a more sustainable future. 
2. We’re putting low-carbon signals natively into our products to help developers choose more sustainable options early in their application development. 
3. We’ll ensure carbon impact is measured consistently with other key performance indicators. Leveraging the social cost of carbon, the ROI models and value assessments you conduct with Google Cloud will project your emissions impact too. 
4. We’ll be transparent about our carbon impact, by publishing third-party reviewed reports and methodologies, so you can trust the data for your own reports and disclosures. 
5. We’ll continue to work with the industry on best practices, including educational resources like Sustainable IT – Decoded, a new masterclass created in partnership with Intel, that shares the expertise of sustainability thought leaders. 

For the next decade we need to work together to avert the worst consequences of climate change. We’ve made tremendous progress in building technology that helps everyone do more for the planet, and we’re excited to see what you do with it. Visit this page to learn more about Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts.

Editor’s note: In this blog post we learn how TapClicks migrated to Google Cloud to offer their marketing customers a unified platform for data management, operations, insights, and analysis.

TapClicks is a smart marketing cloud, powered by data, that unifies our customer’s marketing. By choosing to migrate our core applications last year to Google Cloud, we cut costs, solved data-sharing concerns for our customers, and opened our stack up to a new ecosystem of possibilities. 

The core problem that we’re solving for our customers is how to manage their marketing infrastructures data and operations. Life isn’t easy for marketers now. There are 7,000 different vendors servicing this space today – creating much complexity between digital agencies, media, and brands. Marketers face challenges in navigating all of these systems, logging in and out, understanding pacing goals, and managing the flow of marketing data so they can analyze and report internally as well as to their clients at scale.

We unify omnichannel campaign data (250 API connectors and 6000 Smart Connectors ™ ) from a plethora of marketing sources on an automated data warehousing solution, creating simplicity for organizations. Over 4,000 agencies, media companies, and brands use our Marketing Operations and Data Management Platform, which imports data at scale and creates an automatic data warehouse on Google Cloud. Teams can also leverage TapClicks, like our world class Facebook connector, to import data directly into Google Data Studios.  Beyond importing and storing, we also provide data exporting to other Google solutions like Google Data Studio and Google Sheets.  We also create interactive dashboards that let stakeholders and clients analyze their data, as well as automated, multi-channel reports that go out to clients at specified times. So channel comparisons, optimizations, attribution, and calculations are easily performed.  Some of our customers are able to generate hundreds of thousands of individual reports and dashboards for their clients.

Although we may be best known for our reporting and analytics, we also empower teams managing the marketing operations workflow from customers and internal stakeholders, especially at scale. Our user-friendly, configurable system helps manage their orders and campaigns. Through automation of this process, we deliver tremendous amounts of efficiency, time saving, cost savings, and reduction of errors. The combination of these solutions makes up our unified platform, with additional capabilities like marketing intelligence that offers competitive and brand-level analysis. This is a disruptive solution in use by all leading media companies, agencies and many brands.

Partnering for possibilities

We faced a few challenges with our original tech stack, which included a mix of the leader in web services revenue, leaders in high performance data warehousing, as well as vendors on bare metal servers. 

• One challenge was around costs, which were growing. 
• Second, many of our customers work with multiple brands, and are very hesitant to share their data with the leader in web services, who’s often viewed as their competitor. 
• Third, these vendors are more focused on their own revenue rather than a true long term partnership that would enable their customers to enjoy similar success as they have experienced.

When looking at other cloud providers, Google Cloud emerged for us as the front runner. They were competitive on costs, and their native Kubernetes support was superior— a big selling point for our DevOps team. There’s also a movement in the marketing and advertising industry away from AWS toward Google Cloud because of the data-sharing concern. Finally, most of our customers are already using Google Cloud tools, so there’s brand recognition and familiarity there, and easier integrations with their own systems.

Migrating to Google Cloud

Our migration, which took about five months, involved moving a significant chunk of our infrastructure, including our core applications, using Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). In our legacy architecture, each of our clients was assigned to one of our virtual machines (VMs), and there was a lot of unused capacity because we had to provision for the max usage. We appreciated GKE’s cloud native capabilities, especially autoscaling, a huge benefit for our web application. We have varying usage patterns during the day, and though our application is mostly used during business hours, there are also days in the month of higher usage, and autoscaling saves us time and costs. GKE also makes deployments much easier, and we anticipate a lot of benefits there for our developer environments. We’ve moved some of our microservices into GKE and plan to move more in the future. All in all, we were able to migrate our core products and the bulk of our AWS spend successfully to Google Cloud. 

We also moved from our other vendors Relational Database Service (RDS) to running MySQL on our own VMs on Google Cloud, which gives us more flexibility in terms of settings and fine tuning. We’re still trying to find the best mix as we’re modernizing our infrastructure, and we took this opportunity to migrate from MySQL 5.7 to 8.0.  

Our next stage is exploring more of the capabilities and services of Google Cloud, including BigQuery, which we’re considering for our own data warehouse. The fact that we could also run Snowflake on Google Cloud, if needed, was another selling point for our migration. 

We’re especially interested in BigQuery ML’s machine learning and natural language processing capabilities, which enabled better predictive insights. Our customers want insights from their campaigns— which are working, which are paying off, where should they invest next? Using our platform, they’re looking not only to generate reporting, but also identify opportunities to improve campaign performance. We plan to use AI and ML to improve those capabilities, so that our customers can seamlessly unlock insight and intelligence from their marketing data and campaigns.

Double-clicking on Google Cloud

For us, being able to deeply leverage and partner with Google Cloud to deliver those solutions on a single stack is critical, and we think our customers will love it. We see TapClicks and Google Cloud partnering at a level beyond what you typically see in a cloud provider relationship. Already, fifty percent of our company is working with various Google Cloud solutions, and we envision TapClicks and Google Cloud as extensions of each other, providing a single, powerful platform solution. 

Google Cloud understands the partnership concept, and their team was able to shine a light on their services and what they could bring to the table. Compared to our previous experiences, dealing with the Google Cloud team has been a true pleasure. Now that we’ve migrated, we’re ready to take our next steps into the services available to us in the Google Cloud ecosystem, and the problems we’ll continue to solve for our customers. Learn more about TapClicks and BigQuery ML.