Headquartered in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, Cargills Bank is not short on ambition or vision: it plans to make banking services accessible to all Sri Lankans and become a financial services leader at home and internationally. Founded in 2014 and licensed by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka to provide domestic and offshore banking services, Cargills Bank provides Retail, Credit and Debit Cards, Corporate, SME, Agri, Micro Finance, Treasury, and Trade banking products to customers.

The bank delivers these products from a network that includes 19 branches, the internet, mobile applications, and a partnership with supermarket chain Cargills Food City that enables customers to transact at more than 370 service points across Sri Lanka.

Cargills Bank initially deployed productivity and communications applications running in an on-premises data center. However, these applications could not support the bank’s growing need to operate as an agile, collaborative, technology-enabled institution. “We wanted to minimize the time and resources dedicated to administration and give our employees the ability to engage and collaborate more effectively. This naturally led us to the cloud and to G Suite,” says Indika Fernando, Senior Manager IT, Applications and Development, Cargills Bank.

Accelerating workflows

The bank also wanted to use scripts to accelerate and automate workflows that incorporated its productivity applications. “The limitations of our previous platform meant it took us three weeks to complete a simple workflow. We wanted to accelerate this process for simple and complex workflows,” explains Fernando.

A technology review by the Cargills Bank IT team found G Suite could meet all of the company’s business and technical requirements. “Employees could meet using voice and video connections from their desktops, mobile devices, and meeting rooms, and collaborate in real time on documents,” says Fernando.

This was a considerable improvement compared to the previous platform that required each stakeholder to wait until other people provided their input, or people providing input into different copies of the same document, forcing a document author to spend time consolidating all feedback into a final version.

“With G Suite, we can be sure that all stakeholders provide detailed and timely input into the documents we rely on to make critical business decisions,” says Fernando.

Augmenting G Suite

G Suite also supported an initiative by Cargills Bank to provide single sign-on for all business applications, while cost effectively giving workers access to cloud-based spreadsheet, document, slide, information collection, web, and wiki creation tools. Furthermore, Apps Script enables the bank’s developers to perform tasks including building add-ons for G Suite products such as Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Forms; writing custom functions for Sheets; publishing web apps embedded in Google Sites; and interacting with services such as AdSense, Analytics, Calendar, Drive, Gmail, and Maps.

Cargills Bank completed migrating its workforce to G Suite a couple of years ago. To help ensure the project was completed on time, within budget, and delivered access to the full range of G Suite tools, the bank engaged Google Partner Finetech Consultancy, which is also headquartered in Colombo.

“The partner oversaw creation of our architecture and undertook training and change management,” says Fernando. “It provided expert consultancy and troubleshooting throughout the three-month deployment and played an integral role in enabling us to launch on schedule.”

The bank has established a Google based social network to create and run internal communities and give its employees the freedom to create communities. “The communities effectively operate as internal social networks that our departments and staff can use to disseminate day-to-day information and announcements,” says Fernando. “For example, leaders of a training and development community use the forum to publish details of upcoming training programs and celebrate people who have completed training exercises.”

Cargills Bank has also established Hangouts Meet as a key communication tool. Employees use voice, video, and chat services to collaborate, with an audit trail that is a requirement in a regulated industry.

Using Apps Script to increase the power of G Suite has delivered a range of benefits to Cargills Bank and enabled the institution to pass on valuable insights to the Sri Lankan Google user community. “Our work with Google has made us a source of expert knowledge that can be accessed by the wider business community” says Fernando.

Workflows increased from 25 to 40

With G Suite and Apps Script, Cargills Bank teams are working more efficiently and the number of streamlined processes has increased from 25 to 40. The bank is using Forms to support simple applications, and a combination of Forms, Apps Script, and HTML code to run complex workflows encompassing validation, documentation, and authorization, and that require sandboxes for code testing and experimentation.

Key workflows supported by Forms and Apps Script include credit card and bank account applications. These workflows automate the process of helping ensure relevant teams review and accept or reject customer applications based on KYC rules. For example, when a customer applies for a new account, a bank employee will scan the request document and supporting information, which is then sent electronically to another team for verification. That team may reject, request more information, or approve the application for escalation to another team for authorization. The authorization team can then approve, reject, or request more information. Each step is automated and associated documentation stored on Drive.

For a credit card application, the Cargills Bank risk department uses a Forms and Apps Script powered workflow to evaluate risk factors such as an applicant’s age, credit history, income, and assets.

Other workflows powered by G Suite manage vehicle reservations, loan origination, customer complaints, incident management, system access requests, lead generation, and e-learning.

“All requests and requirements for vehicles for occasions such as official visits are submitted and authorized through a process supported by Apps Script,” says Fernando. “An approved reservation is sent to the calendar of the person who made the request and pops up in a person’s mobile phone or computer when it is scheduled. This is much simpler than our previous system that required us to send text messages to people to advise them their vehicles were ready.”

E-learning a key process

E-learning is a particularly important activity Cargills Bank has implemented using G Suite. Employees complete learning modules online that help them perform their roles effectively and to pass exams set either by the bank or based on content regulated by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. Most of the learning material is created in Forms, while Google workflows and dashboards enable managers to track when employees have completed various e-learning modules.

Automation through Google has enabled Cargills Bank to complete backend processes associated with workflows from two days to just two minutes. Uptime is over 99 percent, helping ensure the bank can meet regulatory and internal business requirements.

With workflows powered by G Suite and Apps Script well established within the bank, the institution is continuing to invest in Google Cloud Platform services. A Cloud SQL database manages retail and housing loan information captured and used by Cargills Bank’s loan origination system and workflows. The bank has also started using Google Data Studio to create dashboards that enable it to visualize critical information.

Furthermore, Fernando and his team are exploring the potential of Google machine learning services to help develop chatbots. “Whenever our development team sees a powerful new product from Google, we conduct a deep dive to determine what application it may have for the bank,” Fernando says.

Upgraded G Suite and added new workflows

In January 2019, Cargills Bank elected to upgrade to G Suite Business to take advantage of features such as unlimited storage to archive all its files in digital formats on Drive.

The institution had also used Apps Script to develop complex new workflows across several modules to automate and streamline credit risk scoring, and track and audit hardware movement. In addition, Cargills Bank has developed and deployed new applications using App Maker, available through G Suite Business, and connected them to Cloud SQL to enhance the security of workflow data.

Cargills Bank is now using Google Data Studio, through connectivity to Sheets, to create dashboards for its previously-developed workflow applications.

The institution has also stepped up its collaboration activities through the use of the Jamboard digital whiteboard, available through G Suite. Initially used to exchange ideas between members of the Cargills Bank technology department, the service is due to launch to all users in the coming months.

Reduced friction

Cargills Bank Chief Operating Officer Rohan Muttiah welcomes the role G Suite plays in enabling the business to realize its objectives. “Cloud-based productivity tools such as G Suite reduce friction within our business processes, enabling us to operate more efficiently and effectively in bringing banking to the people of Sri Lanka,” he says.

“Deploying G Suite has given us an agile, dynamic platform to achieve growth based on increased use of fintech and digital technologies,” Fernando says. “Ultimately we want all Sri Lankans to access financial services wherever and whenever they need to and we see G Suite as providing many of the capabilities that enable us to do that.”

Whether with the cloud or within their own data centers, enterprises have undergone a period of remarkable consolidation and centralization of their compute resources. But with the rise of ever more powerful mobile devices, and increasingly capable cellular networks, application architects are starting to think beyond the confines of the data center, and looking out to the edge. 

What exactly do we mean by edge? Think of the edge as distributed compute happening on a wide variety of non-traditional devices — mobile phones of course, but also equipment sensors in factories, industrial equipment, or even temperature and reaction monitoring in a remote lab. Edge devices are also connected devices, and can communicate back to the mothership over wireless or cellular networks. 

Equipped with increasingly powerful processors, these edge devices are being called upon to perform tasks that have thus far been outside the scope of traditional IT. For enterprises, this could mean pre-processing incoming telemetry in a vehicle, collecting video in kiosks at a mall, gathering quality control data with cameras in a warehouse, or delivering interactive media to retail stores. Enterprises are also relying on edge to ingest data from outposts or devices that have even more intermittent connectivity, e.g., oil rigs or farm equipment, filtering that data to improve quality, reducing it to right-size information load, and processing it in the cloud. New data and models are then pushed back to the edge; in addition, we can also push configuration, software, and media updates and decentralize processing workload.

Edge isn’t all about enabling new use cases – it’s also about right-sizing environments and improving resource utilization. For example, adopting an edge model can also relieve load on existing data centers. 

But while edge computing is full of promise for enterprises, there are many pieces that are still works in progress. Further, developing edge workloads is very different from developing traditional applications, which enjoy the benefits of persistent data connections and run on well-resourced hardware platforms. As such, cloud architects are still in the early days of figuring out how to use and implement edge for their organizations. 

Fortunately, there are tools you can use to help ease the transition to edge computing — and that likely fit into your organization’s existing computing systems. Kubernetes, of course, but also higher level management tools like Anthos, which provides a consistent control plane across cloud, private data center and edge locations. Other parts of the Anthos family – Anthos Config Management and Anthos Service Mesh — go one step further and provide consistent, centralized management to your edge and cloud deployments. And there’s more to come.

For the remainder of this blog post, we’ll dive deeper into the past and current state of edge computing, and the benefits that architects and developers can expect to see from edge computing. In a next post, we’ll take a deeper look at some of the challenges that designing for edge introduces, and some of the advantages the average enterprise has in adopting the edge model. Finally, we’ll look at the Google Cloud tools that are available today to help you build out your edge environment, and look at some early customer examples that highlight what’s possible today — and that will spark your imagination for what to do tomorrow. 

The evolution of edge computing 

The edge is not a new concept. In fact, it’s been around for the last two decades, spanning many use cases that are prevalent today. One of the first applications for edge was to use content delivery networks (CDN) to cache and serve daily static website pages near clients, for example, web servers in California data centers serving financial data to European customers. 

As connectivity has improved and software evolved, the edge has evolved too, and the focus has shifted towards using edge to distribute services. First, simple services expanded from static HTML to javascript libraries or image repositories. Common functions like image transformation, credit and address validation support services followed. Soon, organizations were deploying more complex cloudlet and clustered microservices installations, as well as distributed and replicated datasets. The term “endpoint” became ubiquitous, and APIs profilerated. 

In parallel, there’s been an explosion of creativity in hardware, microcontrollers and dedicated edge devices. Fit-for-purpose products were deployed globally. Services like Google Cloud IoT Core extended our ability to manage and securely connect these dispersed devices, allowing platform managers to register tools and leverage managed services like Pub/Sub and Dataflow for data ingestion. And with Kubernetes, large remote clusters — mini private clouds in and of themselves — operate as self-healing, autoscaling services across the broader internet, opening the door to new models for applications and architectural patterns. In short, both distributed asynchronous systems and economies have blossomed.

What does this mean for enterprises? For the purposes of this series, edge means you can now go beyond the corporate network, beyond cloud VPCs, and beyond hybrid. The modern edge is not sitting at a major remote data center, nor is it a CDN, cloud provider, or in a corporate data center rack — it’s just as likely to look like 100 of these attached to a thousand sensors.

Edge, in short, is about having hardware and devices installed at remote locations that can process and communicate back the information they collect and generate. The edge management challenge, meanwhile, is being able to push configuration and software/model/media updates to these remote locations when they are connected.

Enable new use cases

Today, we have reached a new threshold for edge computing — one where micro-data-processing centers are deployed as the edge of a fractal arm, as it were. Together, they form a broad, geographically distributed, always-on framework for streaming, collecting, processing and serving asynchronous data. This big, loosely coupled application system lives, breathes and grows. Always changing, always learning from the data it collects — and always pushing out updated models when the tendrils are connected. 

Right now, the rise of 5G is pushing the limits of edge even further. Devices enabled with 5G can transmit using a mobile network — no ISP required — enabling connectivity anywhere within reach of a cell tower. Granted, these networks have lower bandwidth, but they are often more than adequate for certain types of data, for example fire sensors in forests bordering remote towns that emit temperature or carbon monoxide data periodically. Recently, Google Cloud partnered with AT&T to enhance business use of 5G edge technology but there is so much more that can be done. 

Reduce data center investments

In addition to enabling the digitization of a broad range of new use cases, adopting edge can also benefit your existing data center.

Let’s face it: data centers are expensive to maintain. Moving some data center load to edge locations can reduce your data center infrastructure investment, as well as compute time spent there. Edge services tend to have much lower service level objectives (SLOs) than data center services, driving lower levels of hardware investment. Edge installations also tend to tolerate disconnectedness, and thus function perfectly well with lower SLOs — and lower costs. 

Let’s look at an example of where edge can really reduce costs: big data. Back in the day, we used to build monolithic serial processors — state machines — that had to keep track of where they were in processing in case of failure. But time and again, we’ve seen that smaller, more distributed processing can break down big, expensive problems into smaller, more cost-effective chunks. 

Starting with the explosion of MapReduce almost 20 years ago, big-data workloads were parallelized across clusters on a network, and state management was simplified with intermediate output to share, wait for, or restart processing from checkpoints. Those monolithic systems were replaced by cheaper, smarter, networked clusters and data repositories where parallel work could be executed and rendered into workable datasets. 

Flash forward to today, and we are seeing those same concepts applied and distributed to edge data-collection points. In this evolution of big data processing, we are scaling up and out to the point where observation data is so massive that it must first be prefiltered, and then preprocessed down to a manageable size and still be actionable. Only then should it be written back to the main data repositories for more resource-intensive processing and model building.

In short, data collection, cleanup, and potentially initial aggregation happens at the edge location, which reduces the amount of junk data sitting in costly data stores. This increases performance of the core data warehouse, and reduces the size and cost of network transfers and storage! 

The edge is a huge opportunity for today’s enterprises. But designing environments that can make effective use of the edge isn’t without its challenges. Stick around for part two of this series, where we look at some of the architectural challenges typically encountered while designing for the edge and how we begin to address them.

In 2020, many businesses across industries turned their focus and investments towards digital strategies. APIs being an integral part of every organization’s digital disruption, will grow in relevance throughout 2021. Read the report to gain more insights on driving API-led digital transformations and in-depth analysis of Google Cloud’s Apigee API Management Platform usage data, case studies and third-party surveys conducted with tech leaders.