Hybrid Cloud: The Trade-offs IT Leaders Hate–and a Way Around Them
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What do CIOs and CTOs deliver for the company? If you said “technology,” that’s just the beginning. According to their research, McKinsey found that 85% of CIOs and CTOs interviewed in the spring of 2019 said they were essential for at least two of the three most common CEO priorities—revenue acceleration, improved agility and time to market, and cost reduction.
IT modernization – including migrating to the cloud – is key to business growth and agility.
Yet, according to a recent McKinsey study, 80% of CIOs report that regardless of their level of cloud migration, they still haven’t reached their projected agility and business benefits.
Sometimes, this is because of issues like training and skills gaps in the IT workforce. Surprisingly often though, the barrier to reaching the goals is based on trade-offs that CIOs themselves feel they must make to strike a balance between the perfect and the possible.
But what if you could have it all without the trade-offs? As Will Grannis, Managing Director of the CTO Office at Google, and Arul Elumalai, Partner at McKinsey & Company discussed in our recent digital conference, many of the compromises CIOs make can be avoided with new technology, modern architectures and by encouraging a transformation mindset across the business.
In interviews, CIOs explained how they’ve leveraged the best of the cloud without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility. Here’s how these leaders avoid three of the top perceived trade-offs—both with technology and by transforming their operating model.
Trade-off #1: Developer agility vs. control and governance
Moving to the cloud offers new opportunities for speed, but 69% of organizations indicate that stringent security guidelines and code review processes can slow developers significantly.
One CISO of a multinational company mentioned that cloud development was so fast that they had to institute manual checks on their developers’ code. So much for agility.
To overcome this trade-off and maintain both speed and security, some respondents found success in DevOps, hiring security-experienced talent and introducing automation for security and quality. Building in security into the CI/CD pipeline and increasing automation don’t just eliminate the tradeoff, they result in higher quality and faster innovation.
At Google Cloud, we’ve also observed that customers with strong DevOps practices have increased speed-to-market and product/service quality. From our own journey, we’ve learned seven critical lessons essential to adopting a DevOps model, ranging from taking up small projects and embracing open source to building an overall DevOps culture.
Trade-off #2: Single-vendor benefits vs. freedom from lock-in
CIOs perceive benefits to using the fewest number of clouds, specifically avoiding introducing multiple systems that require their teams to develop and maintain multiple skillsets. Unfortunately, 83% of the CIOs interviewed said that while they would prefer fewer clouds, the potential financial and technical lock-in drives them to multiple providers.
Successful CIOs said that they can avoid lock-in pitfalls not just with contractual guardrails and executive and board education, but with evolving hybrid cloud technologies that provide additional choices.
Hybrid cloud platforms based on containers can further mitigate the risk of using a single cloud vendor. The key to successful hybrid architectures is the infrastructure abstraction and portability that containers create for them, enabling disparate environments to work together.
This notion has been at the heart of our strategy at Google Cloud with Anthos, which provides an abstraction layer and an application modernization platform for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Enterprises can use Anthos to modernize how they develop, secure, and operate hybrid-cloud environments and enable consistency across cloud environments.
Trade-off #3: Best-of-breed tools vs. standardization and familiarity
Optimizing tool chains for different environments can improve productivity, but many CIOs believe that this means reduced functionality and tools.
While 77% of CIOs said they had to standardize to the lowest common denominator, some have found a better solution. Rather than giving up the languages, libraries, and frameworks that their teams prefer, effective leaders said that they found success by investing in training programs to upscale talent and adopting new open and vendor-agnostic solutions. Architectures that are based on open-source components have been the keys that helped remove this tradeoff, and eliminate the notion of a lowest common denominator.
This is why we have built Anthos on open-source components like Kubernetes, Istio and Knative. Anthos gives your business the choice you need. With the ability to create code that works in most environments using the tools, languages, and systems you prefer, you can do more without major changes to how you work.
Regardless of your current cloud adoption level, check out “Unlock business acceleration in a hybrid cloud world” to discover more about McKinsey’s findings, including how CIOs drive agility, methods to make trade-offs unnecessary, and how to prepare your team for the cloud. Then, stay tuned for subsequent posts that take a closer look at how hybrid solutions and strategies can help CIOs drive a transformation mindset across the business—without compromising on security, agility, and flexibility.
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Digital transformation is about how digital technologies can connect people and processes to solve challenges that traditional methodologies could not.
While this transformation is imperative for businesses of all sizes, the Frost & Sullivan Enterprise Cloud Maturity Index (ECMI) assessment indicates that around 85% of CXOs want to digitally transform their enterprises, but only 39% of them have a clear plan to achieve this transformation.
Most business leaders are exploring new business ideas around cloud to extract better outcomes, increase productivity, create opportunities and redefine customer engagement processes as part of their internal strategies.
It has been proved time and again that enterprises need to bank on emerging technologies like cloud that provide ‘do more with less’ approach. Cloud has the potential to transform IT departments through infrastructure consolidation and optimization.
To understand the interest and level of cloud adoption in enterprises, Google Cloud partnered with Frost & Sullivan to recognize the unique business drivers and key challenges in Cloud adoption that come the enterprise way during their business transformation journey.
Read the report to find out the challenges, solutions and benefits of digital transformation and the cloud.
Google Invests 1 Billion Euros on Germany to Support Growing Businesses
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In September 2001, the first-ever German Google employee switched on their computer in Hamburg. Since then, we’ve grown to more than 2,500 employees in four offices across Germany. Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich have long been our home, and we continue to invest in the growth of the local economy.
Today, 20 years after the start of “Google Germany”, we are pleased to present one of our most important investment programs to date in this country. With the expansion of our Cloud Region in Frankfurt in a new Google-owned Hanau facility, a new Google Cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg, and a broad investment plan in renewable energy, our commitment is clear: Google is investing in Germany’s potential and supporting the transition to a digital and sustainable economy. Between now (2021) and 2030, this investment in digital infrastructure and clean energy will total approximately 1 billion euros.
Expanding our Frankfurt cloud region to support growing demand from German businesses and organizations
In Hanau, only 20 kilometers from the DE-CIX Internet hub in Frankfurt, Google is proud to be nearing completion of an additional cloud facility that will be fully operational in 2022. This expansion of our existing Frankfurt Google Cloud region will serve the growing demand for Google Cloud services in Germany.
The 4-story building is 10,000 square meters and was sustainably constructed with energy efficient infrastructure and adherence to our circular economy model for waste. The symbolic handover of the keys from developer NDC-Garbe, together with local government officials, took place on site yesterday.
A new cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg
In addition to the Hanau expansion of our Google Cloud region in Frankfurt, we are pleased to announce that a new Google Cloud region will be located in Berlin-Brandenburg, further extending our ability to meet growing demand for cloud services in the country. When open, this will be our second Google Cloud region in Germany, providing enterprise customers with faster access to secure infrastructure, smart analytics tools and an open platform. Designed and dedicated to providing enterprise services and products for Google Cloud customers of all sizes and industries in Germany, the Berlin-Brandenburg region will have three zones to protect against service disruptions and join the existing network of 27 Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network.
One of the cleanest clouds in the industry becomes even cleaner
Since 2017, Google has matched 100% of our global, annual electricity use with renewable energy. Last year, we set out to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere and at all times by 2030, enabling us to offer cloud customers one of the cleanest clouds in the industry, while helping Europe achieve its ambitious climate goals.
Today, we’re excited to announce that ENGIE Deutschland has been selected as Google’s carbon-free energy supplier in Germany. Under the terms of the agreement, ENGIE will assemble and develop, on Google’s behalf, a 140 megawatt (MW) carbon-free energy portfolio in Germany that has the ability to flex and grow with us as our needs change. This includes a new 39MW solar Photovoltaic system, and 22 wind parks in five federal states that will see their lives extended so they continue to produce electricity instead of being dismantled. This portfolio will ensure that the energy delivered to Google’s German facilities will be nearly 80% carbon-free by 2022 when measured on an hourly basis. This is a first but important step on Google’s journey to reach our goal of full electricity decarbonization by 2030.
This is the first energy supply of its kind in Europe, with a focus on sourcing carbon-free energy for every hour of Google’s operations. Not only will this new agreement draw the roadmap for the industry and more 24/7 carbon-free energy contracts in Europe, but it provides our cloud customers with two more regions where they can lower their carbon footprint. And importantly, by working with our energy suppliers to transform how clean energy is delivered to customers, Google is supporting the broader decarbonization of the German electricity grid.
What customers and partners are saying
As companies continue to grapple with changing customer demands, technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions in Germany and around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Berlin-Brandenburg and the expansion of our Google Cloud region in Hanau will help our customers — such as BMG, Delivery Hero, and Deutsche Bank — adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working.
“We are very pleased about the symbolic handover of the keys to the building here in Hanau to Google Cloud,” said Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky. “With Google, we have a strong partner at our side who is supporting us in setting up Hanau’s economic future, both digitally and sustainably. The data center facility of Google Cloud embodies this transformation: We bring the cloud to us in Hanau and thus support the digital transformation of companies and public authorities. Not only in our city and Hesse, but throughout Germany and Europe. The new building meets high sustainability standards and the clean energy initiative presented today by Google is in line with our aspirations for sustainable digitalization.”
“Sustainability is a central pillar of Deutsche Bank’s strategy and we have made strong public commitments to be part of the solution,” said Bernd Leukert, Chief Technology, Data and Innovation Officer and Member of the Management Board at Deutsche Bank. “We welcome the new Google Cloud region in Germany, which will enable us to deliver additional resilience and performance for our German client base.”
Ralf Bernhard, Senior Originator Renewables, ENGIE, said: “ENGIE is excited to collaborate with Google based on a first-of-a-kind agreement which will support the company with its sustainability goals and ambitious carbon-free energy target. Thanks to our expertise in energy and risk management, we can seamlessly integrate renewable energy from existing plants and develop new assets to design a tailor made product that meets Google’s needs and plans to go even greener.”
20 years since Google first touched down in Germany, our commitment to helping Germany continue to lead in technical innovation is stronger than ever. We are excited to continue working with our partners in Hesse, Berlin and Brandenburg and across Germany to advance infrastructure and clean energy projects, help accelerate digital transformation, and secure a sustainable future for German and European companies and organizations.
The Power of Two: Best Practices for Mergers & Acquisitions on Google Cloud
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Congratulations! Your company just acquired or merged with another organization, beginning an important new chapter in its history. But like with many business deals, the devil is in the details — particularly when it comes to integrating the two companies’ cloud domains and organizations. In this blog post, we look at how to approach mergers and acquisitions (M&A) from the perspective of Google Cloud. These are the best practices that your Google Cloud Technical Account Managers follow — or that we recommend you follow if you plan to perform the integration yourself.
Although there are various M&A scenarios, here are the two most common ones we will focus on:
- Both entities engaged in the M&A have some presence on Google Cloud and are looking for some level of integration
- Only one of the entities has a presence on Google Cloud, and is looking at best ways to work together
Depending on your situation, your approach to integrating the two companies will vary substantially.
When both companies have a Google Cloud presence
In the first scenario, let’s assume company A is acquiring company B. Prior to the M&A, both companies have their own Google Cloud Organizations — the top level structures in the Google Cloud resource hierarchy — and have one or more billing accounts associated with them. There are also various Folders and Projects below each Google Cloud Organization. In this scenario, here are the key questions to ask:
- How do you plan to integrate/consolidate two distinct Google Cloud Organizations?
- How do you plan to organize the billing structure?
- How do you handle Projects under the two Organizations?
- What is the identity management strategy for the two Organizations?
For each of these key questions, go ahead and formulate a detailed plan of action. If you have access to the Technical Account Manager service through Google Cloud Premium Support, you can reach out to them to further develop this plan.
Understanding Google Cloud Organizations
From an organizational integration standpoint, when each entity in an M&A has its own Google Cloud Organization, you have various options: no integration, partial, or full.
No integration – When company B operates as an independent entity from company A, no migration is required. One caveat is if company A has negotiated better pricing terms/discounts and support packages with Google Cloud. In that case, you can sign an affiliate addendum by working with your Google Cloud account team to help unlock the same benefits for company B.
Partial integration – Some projects move over to company A from company B and others stay with Company B. There can be some shared access between the two companies and each of the organizations can continue to use their existing identity providers. This can be a self-serve or a paid services engagement with Google Cloud depending on the complexity of the two companies and how many project migrations need to take place between them.
Full integration – Company B is fully incorporated into company A. This means you go through a full billing, Google Workspace identity and project migration from company B into company A. This can be a complex process and we highly recommend engaging your Google Cloud account teams to scope out a paid services engagement to go through this transition.
Planning your project migration
No matter what you want your end state to look like, project migration requires careful planning. Again, if you have an assigned Technical Account Manager, please reach out to them to ensure that you have a conversation around best practices before starting this migration.
If you’re taking a self-service approach, at a high level, we recommend leveraging the Resource Manager API to manage your project migrations. Do keep in mind that there are several prerequisites and required permissions documented here that need to be assigned before going down this path.
In addition, please be sure to read the billing and identity management considerations below to ensure that you are covering all of the bases associated with such a migration, as your choices can fundamentally alter your Google Cloud footprint.
Billing considerations
When deciding how to structure your Organizations and billing accounts, our recommendation is to always limit the number of Organization nodes and use the Folder structure to manage departments/teams within it. Creating additional Organization nodes is only advised in cases where you require a level of isolation for certain Projects from central administration for a specific business reason, for example, if the company being acquired already has their own Organization node and there is a business justification to let it operate as a standalone entity.
Warning: If you have multiple Organization nodes, be aware that you will not have central visibility across all your organizational resources, and that policy management across different Organization nodes can be cumbersome. You will also have to manage multiple Workspace accounts and manage identities across them, which can be difficult, especially when operating at scale.
From a billing account management perspective, our recommendation is to create one central billing account that lives within the Organization node with tags and labels incorporated for additional granularity. However, there are a few business cases which warrant the creation of additional billing accounts such as:
- You need to split charges for legal or accounting purposes
- Invoices are paid in multiple currencies
- You need to segregate usage to draw down on a Google Cloud promotional credit
- Subsidiaries need their own invoice
Keep in mind that committed-use and spend-based discounts and promotional credits cannot be shared across billing accounts and are provisioned on a per-billing-account basis. As such, more billing accounts can make it harder to leverage these discounts and credits.
Identity management
As you might expect, merging two entities has identity management implications. Cloud Identity is the solution leveraged by Google Cloud to help you manage your user and group identities. Even if the acquired company only uses the productivity products that are part of Google Workspace, the identities would still be managed by Cloud Identity.
Google Workspace considerations
To move large amounts of content into a Google Workspace domain, we recommend one of three options, depending on your end goal and data complexity:
- For general migrations: Leverage Google Workspace Migrate to move data into your Workspace domain from either another Workspace domain or a third-party productivity solution
- For manual migrations: Use the Export tool to move your organization’s data to a Cloud Storage archive so you can selectively download exported data by user and service
- For complex Google Workspace scenarios: Speak with your Google Cloud Technical Account Manager about the possibility of using a custom scoped engagement to merge two Google Workspace environments without business interruption
When only one company is on Google Cloud
Now, let’s consider the scenario where only company A has a presence on Google Cloud but company B does not. The approach you take to integrate the two organizations largely depends on your desired end state — full, partial or no integration.
If the plan is to eventually integrate company B into company A, your approach here will have a lot of similarities with the ‘full integration’ option mentioned above — just at a later point in time.
You may also run into a scenario where company B has a presence on an alternative cloud platform and you need to migrate resources into or out of Google Cloud. Again, similar to the partial integration option called out above, a paid engagement or a self-service exercise would be a good fit depending on the complexity of the desired end state.
Here to help
A merger or acquisition is an exciting milestone for any company, but one that needs to be managed carefully. Once you carefully review these considerations, develop a plan of action for your organization. You can also engage Google’s Professional Services for a paid engagement or Google’s Technical Account Management Service for a self-managed process to achieve the desired results.
If you are going through or considering going through M&A at your organization and have a different scenario than what we have discussed, please feel free to reach out to your account teams for guidance or contact us at https://cloud.google.com/contact.
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Modernize your Windows Workloads by Migrating them to Google Cloud
Google has plenty to offer when it comes to migrating and modernizing traditional enterprise Windows workloads to the cloud. Explore different approaches for re-hosting, modernizing, and transforming Windows applications, and the benefits of moving to Google Cloud.
Learn from demos on some of the cutting-edge technologies that can offload some of the operational IT burden into optimized managed services.
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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