Bootstrap your Startup with our technical guided series

At Google Cloud, we want to provide you with the access to all the tools you need to grow your business. Through the Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups, leverage industry leading solutions with how-to video guides and resource handbooks curated for startups.

This multi-series contains 3 chapters: Start, Build and Grow, which matches your startup’s stage of growth:

• The Start Series: Begin by building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish.
• The Build Series: Optimize and scale existing deployments to reach your target audiences.
• The Grow Series: Grow and attain scale with deployments on Google Cloud.

Kick off with The Start Series

The Start Series is designed to help your startup begin building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish. The series contains 12 videos and is dedicated to those who are starting out their cloud journey with Google Cloud. From setting up your project, to choosing the right compute option, to configuring your networking to managing your databases, and understanding support and billing – the Start Series guides you at every step of the journey.

Check out our website and our Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups full playlist.

Coming up next – The Build Series

Launch into the next part of the journey continuing from the Start Series, with the upcoming Build Series, where we will be focusing on the optimization and scaling of existing deployments to help your startups reach your target audiences.

Join us by checking out the video series on the Google Cloud Tech channel, and subscribe to stay up to date.

See you in the cloud!

In today’s hybrid office environments, it can be difficult to know where your most valuable, sensitive content is, who’s accessing it, and how people are using it. That’s why Egnyte focuses on making it simple for IT teams to manage and control a full spectrum of content risks, from accidental data deletion to privacy compliance.

I used to be an Egnyte customer before joining the team, so I’ve experienced first-hand the transformative effects that Egnyte can have on a company. Because data is fundamental to a company’s success, we take the trust of our 16,000 clients very seriously. There is no room for error with a cloud governance platform, which means that the technology providers we work with can’t fail either. That’s why we work with Google Cloud.

Since Egnyte was founded in 2007, we have delivered our services to clients 24/7. We do this by running our own data centers: two in the USA and one in Europe. But as the company continued its steady growth, owning and managing these data centers became unsustainable. There’s a tremendous amount of work that goes into managing everything that we need from a data center. Not only were we constantly building, maintaining, and paying for all this infrastructure, but we’d have to constantly expand our data centers to accommodate our business growth. This caused a never-ending pipeline issue because we had to predict how many businesses we were going to win over the next 12 to 18 months. What if we planned to grow the business by 20%, and ended up growing by 25% instead?

We knew that being limited to our own data centers was going to negatively impact our business, so we looked for alternatives. To gain scalability and introduce another layer of reliability to our business, we decided to collaborate with a reputable cloud provider who could reliably back up our data. We examined the offerings of every cloud provider, and found that in every category that we analyzed, Google was hands-down the winner.

One of these categories is the reach of the network. With its own transoceanic fiber with points of presence in all markets where we’re currently doing business as well as markets where we intend to do business one day, Google network is second to none. Another important criteria for us was flexibility in the product offering, so we could better consider the financial risks of this large-scale data migration. For a while, we needed to pay for both our new cloud infrastructure and our old on-premises one while they overlapped during the migration, but Google Cloud made it easier for us to plan for this.

By December 2021, we had completed our full migration to Google Cloud. This significant migration was completed gradually and without disrupting our services at any point. Our close collaboration with the Google Cloud team is one of the big reasons we completed this so successfully. Google Cloud was able to anticipate some of the problems we’d likely be facing and helped us overcome them along the way.

We were able to shut off our last data center in February 2022, and the beneficial changes to the business are already obvious. Capacity planning, which used to be our biggest challenge on-premises, is now a problem of the past. The ability to spin up new resources on Google Cloud means we no longer need to buy additional resources a year in advance and wait for them to be shipped.

Using Google Cloud means that we no longer rely on aging infrastructure, which is a very limiting factor when you’re developing and engineering a platform as complex as Egnyte. Our entire platform is now always operating on the latest storage, processing, network, and services available on Google Cloud.

Additionally, we have services embedded on our infrastructure such as Cloud SQL, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, and Memorystore for Redis, which means we no longer need to build services from scratch or shop, install, and build them into the product and company work flow. There’s a long list of Google Cloud services that have significantly simplified our processes and that now support our flagship products, Egnyte Collaborate and Secure and Govern.

Looking ahead, we’ll continue to take advantage of what Google Cloud has to offer. Our migration has impacted not only our business but also our clients. We can offer even higher reliability and faster scalability to our clients whenever they need our platform to protect and manage critical content on any cloud or any app, anywhere in the world. We look forward to seeing what’s next.

With a global, always-on workforce, the U.S. Navy requires secure collaboration between teams across countries and time zones. This is especially relevant for the 50,000 U.S. Navy sailors deployed aboard approximately 100 ships at any given time, who need to connect with personnel at regional shipyards for everything from routine maintenance, to more serious ship repairs.

Google Public Sector directly assists Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the largest of the U.S. Navy’s five “systems commands,” by providing support to the U.S. Naval Ship Repair Facility and Japan Regional Maintenance Center (SRF-JRMC) in Yokosuka and Sasebo, Japan. NAVSEA is using Google Workspace, which harnesses Google’s threat protection and zero trust capabilities, to enable effective, secure, and compliant collaboration between the SRF-JRMC and Navy stakeholders around the world.

The workforce in the SRF-JRMC facility had two unique challenges. The first was around ineffective collaboration and communication channels. Before deploying Google Workspace, a Navy officer in Japan would need to be on-base to communicate over a secure connection, and calls were typically late at night given the time difference. This challenge was even further magnified when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, further restricting staff mobility.

The second challenge was a language barrier. With more than 3,000 Japanese Master Labor Contract (MLC) employees providing critical support to SRF-JRMC’s shipyard, Navy leadership needed an easier way to communicate with their Japanese-speaking counterparts. Breaking down this barrier would ensure work could be completed faster and more effectively, facilitating a more collaborative environment.

Enabling secure collaboration

The Navy partnered with Google Public Sector to enable Google Workspace for SRF-JRMC. Today, Google Workspace assists the Navy’s shipyards by enabling Google Voice for secure voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calling options, so personnel can join calls and sessions on-site or at-home to communicate securely and reliably across continents. In addition, early access to solutions like English to Japanese translated captions in Google Meet help break down the language barrier by providing instant translation during meetings. The platform also saves the U.S. Navy thousands of dollars a month in phone bills by providing country-specific dial-in numbers for interviews.

Moreover, Google Workspace tools like Google Drive and Docs also help to simplify human resource workflows by streamlining the hiring for onboarding local Japanese employees for the shipyard. Having a shared Google Drive eliminates the need to send multiple files back and forth among the NAVSEA team, allowing them to minimize on-premises storage space. In addition, Google Docs enables Navy employees to communicate and collaborate with each other and with potential candidates securely, and across any device.

“As the largest overseas ship repair facility of the U.S. Navy, operational readiness and continuity of operations is our top priority,” said Peter Guo, chief information officer at SRF-JRMC. “Cloud collaboration capabilities provide us seamless and secure connectivity across continents and break down language barriers with our colleagues across the globe. We’ve improved our ability to operate anytime, and anywhere and have increased our ability to securely communicate and coordinate especially during network outages and natural disasters.”

Providing pandemic assistance

Google for Government’s Workspace solutions also became useful to the SRF-JRMC during the pandemic, providing valuable communication and collaboration tools during a time of uncertainty. In addition to deploying Google Workspace, SRF-JRMC’s IT department created a COVID-19 Pandemic Dashboard, a Google-based site that consolidated Japanese and international open-source data on COVID-19 outbreaks and provided updated guidance. The Dashboard was built in less than two hours, using Looker Studio, and it leveraged an automated data collection process to track local hospitalization numbers. Before building the site, it took the NAVSEA team hours to compile this information; now, the team can access this information in real-time.

“This Dashboard drastically reduced redundant weekly meetings centered on COVID-19 updates, and saved more than 10 hours per week manually gathering data and presenting it via slide decks,” said Guo. “Additionally, this capability enabled our leadership to make real-time, data-driven decisions and put necessary risk mitigations in place. It empowered supervisors across the shipyard to reference this website at any time and put additional health measures in place to minimize the transmission of COVID-19. Every minute counts at our two shipyards in Japan, so this made a tremendous impact on our operational efficiency and ensured the safety of our sailors.”

Delivering the best possible tools means making life better and work more fulfilling for millions of people, inside and outside of government. To help government agencies maintain access to communications and collaboration tools that they need during and after an incident to keep work going, we are also offering workshops for federal, state and local governments. Learn more about Google for Government solutions for the Department of Defense, and Google Workspace for Government.