About DB Corp

DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 62 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.

Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices. However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.

Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues. These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day. DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services. Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.

Expertise in managing large data volumes behind GCP selection

However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery. In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform as a service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp. “We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”

DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services. The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.

The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business. “As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar. “For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.

DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.

Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly. Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.

Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers. Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.

Gone are the days when technology was relegated to the sidelines of a business, only considered essential for industries and professionals directly dealing with it. Today, it is not just a value-add, but an integral part of every enterprise’s operations and ultimately, its success. This has wrought many changes in the way we work, the most noteworthy of which is creating the necessity for every executive – not just the CIO & CTO – to familiarise themselves with the technologies of the future.

Among these is cloud computing, which is essential to doing business in the 21^st century. As the IT infrastructure needs of enterprises grow, and we inch closer to true mobility, it’s no surprise that cloud adoption is increasing by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, too many C-suite executives dismiss cloud computing as being outside of their area of expertise. And while ignoring the technology aspect may have been possible for CEOs and CFOs in the past, it has now infiltrated every aspect of work, and arguably life itself. This makes it essential for executives across different functions and departments to familiarise themselves with at least the very basics of up-and-coming innovations.

One myth that has followed cloud computing is that it is a one-size-fits-all solution that businesses can merely install and use for storage. And while cookie-cutter solutions do exist, they end up doing more harm than good in the long term. To avoid this pitfall, it’s important for enterprises to understand the range of offerings at their disposal, and pick the one that most closely aligns with their needs.

Most people associate cloud deployment with subscribing to a third-party cloud service provider, which owns and manages all the resources that a firm might require. Known as the public cloud, this is the most popular option, especially for small and medium businesses that cannot bear the cost of IT infrastructure. Cost-effectiveness isn’t the only upside of this technology, though, since public clouds offer the added benefits of increased security, greater scalability, maximum uptime and ease of setting up.

Though the public cloud is the most widely used, it’s far from the only option that a business has. Enterprises seeking an added degree of customisation might find private cloud solutions to their liking. These offer an added layer of privacy, which may be mandated by the industry or jurisdiction that they operate in. Moreover, private clouds can allow access even in cases where geography or connectivity is unreliable. One of the factors that has held people back from switching to the private cloud has been the fact that they might need to buy and maintain the requisite infrastructure. In such cases, the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) lets businesses tap into resources stored on a public cloud, within an isolated environment, with more granular control over virtual networks.

A fourth solution, known as the hybrid cloud, also offers the best of two worlds by utilising resources that are on-prem as well as on the public cloud. It is ideal for companies that already have money invested in IT infrastructure, but still want to make the most of the emerging technology. It can also serve as a stepping stone for ventures that are looking to make the switch, but have their reservations about the public cloud.

Each of these offerings comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The key lies in evaluating your needs against the options at your disposal, and making sure that the two align. Only then will you be able to reap all the rewards of cloud implementation.

Startups need to move quickly and focus their limited resources on areas where they can differentiate. If infrastructure isn’t your differentiator, don’t put a lot of energy into your infrastructure when someone else can do it for you. What’s more, time-to-market matters to startups more now than ever. Successful early stage companies know this, and leverage existing tools, libraries, frameworks and innovations whenever possible.  

Next week Google Cloud will be featured at TechCrunch Disrupt, the iconic annual event where “founders and investors shaping the future of disruptive technology” come together to share stories, network, and learn from each other. Google Cloud will host a session and Google Cloud engineers will be available in a virtual booth to answer startup questions. 

The session, “Demo Derby – How startups are disrupting the status quo with innovative data analytics, AI and modern app development” will be a fun, fast-paced set of presentations showing short demos of startups and startup projects built with Google Cloud. 

Demo Derby Presenters

• Andrea Le Vot, Chief Data Protection Officer with startup BlueZoo will deliver a demo showing how they are revolutionizing the property insurance industry with AI and Cloud – and doing so while actually protecting people’s privacy.
• Dale Markowitz and Zack Akil, Applied AI Engineers, will show how easy it is to use AI for everything from video search to editing to automated translation.
• Vidya Nagarajan, Group Product Manager from Google Cloud will deliver a fast paced demo that shows how startups can drive developer productivity with serverless innovations.

“Disrupt is iconic for its engagement with founders, investors, and the broad community of early stage companies,” said Andrea Le Vot, Chief Data Protection Officer at BlueZoo. “We are thrilled to share our insights with others in our community, and to show how we have partnered with Google Cloud to innovate faster than most of the larger, well funded insurance companies in our market.”

The series of snippet sized demos will be followed by a roundtable discussion with the demo developers focused on lessons learned, best practices, how to reduce time-to-market, and how to focus on where you can most effectively differentiate.

The session will air on Day One of the event: Tuesday September 21, 2021 at 1pm PT and will be available on demand after the event for all Disrupt attendees.

Picking the right database for your application is not easy. The choice depends heavily on your use case—transactional processing, analytical processing, in-memory database, and so on—but it also depends on other factors. This post covers the different database options available within Google Cloud across relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) databases and explains which use cases are best suited for each database option. 

Relational databases 

In relational databases information is stored in tables, rows and columns, which typically works best for structured data. As a result they are used for applications in which the structure of the data does not change often. SQL (Structured Query Language) is used when interacting with most relational databases. They offer ACID consistency mode for the data, which means:

• Atomic: All operations in a transaction succeed or the operation is rolled back.
• Consistent: On the completion of a transaction, the database is structurally sound.
• Isolated: Transactions do not contend with one another. Contentious access to data is moderated by the database so that transactions appear to run sequentially.
• Durable: The results of applying a transaction are permanent, even in the presence of failures.

Because of these properties, relational databases are used in applications that require high accuracy and for transactional queries such as financial and retail transactions. For example: In banking when a customer makes a funds transfer request, you want to make sure the transaction is possible and it actually happens on the most up-to-date account balance, in this case an error or resubmit request is likely fine.

There are three relational database options in Google Cloud: Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and Bare Metal Solution.

Cloud SQL: Provides managed MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL Server databases on Google Cloud. It reduces maintenance cost and automates database provisioning, storage capacity management, back ups, and out-of-the-box high availability and disaster recovery/failover. For these reasons it is best for general-purpose web frameworks, CRM, ERP, SaaS and e-commerce applications.

Cloud Spanner: Cloud Spanner is an enterprise-grade, globally-distributed, and strongly-consistent database that offers up to 99.999% availability, built specifically to combine the benefits of relational database structure with non-relational horizontal scale. It is a unique database that combines ACID transactions, SQL queries, and relational structure with the scalability that you typically associate with non-relational or NoSQL databases. As a result, Spanner is best used for applications such as gaming, payment solutions, global financial ledgers, retail banking and inventory management that require ability to scale limitlessly with strong-consistency and high-availability. 

Bare Metal Solution: Provides hardware to run specialized workloads with low latency on Google Cloud. This is specifically useful if there is an Oracle database that you want to lift and shift into Google Cloud. This enables data center retirements and paves a path to modernize legacy applications. 

Non-relational databases

Non-relational databases (or NoSQL databases) store compex, unstructured data in a non-tabular form such as documents. Non-relational databases are often used when large quantities of complex and diverse data need to be organized. Unlike relational databases, they perform faster because a query doesn’t have to access several tables to deliver an answer, making them ideal for storing data that may change frequently or for applications that handle many different kinds of data. 

For example, an apparel store might have a database in which shirts have their own document containing all of their information, including size, brand, and color with room for adding more parameters later such as sleeve size, collars, and so on.

Qualities that make NoSQL databases fast:

• Eventual consistency: stores usually exhibit consistency at some later point (e.g., lazily at read time)
• Horizontal scaling, usually using hashed distributions
• Typically, they are optimized for a specific workload pattern (i.e., key-value, graph, wide-column)
• Typically, they don’t support cross shard transactions or flexible isolation modes.

Because of these properties, non-relational databases are used in applications that require large scale, reliability, availability, and frequent data changes.They can easily scale horizontally by adding more servers, unlike some relational databases, which scale vertically by increasing the machine size as the data grows. Although, some relations databases such as Cloud Spanner support scale-out and strict consistency.

Non-relational databases can store a variety of unstructured data such as documents, key-value, graphs, wide columns, and more. Here are your non-relational database options in Google Cloud: 

• Document databases: Store information as documents (in formats such as JSON and XML). For example: Firestore
• Key-value stores: Group associated data in collections with records that are identified with unique keys for easy retrieval. Key-value stores have just enough structure to mirror the value of relational databases while still preserving the benefits of NoSQL. For example: Datastore, Bigtable, Memorystore
• In-memory database: Purpose-built database that relies primarily on memory for data storage. These are designed to attain minimal response time by eliminating the need to access disks. They are ideal for applications that require microsecond response times and can have large spikes in traffic. For example: Memorystore
• Wide-column databases: Use the tabular format but allow a wide variance in how data is named and formatted in each row, even in the same table. They have some basic structure while preserving a lot of flexibility. For example: Bigtable
• Graph databases: Use graph structures to define the relationships between stored data points; useful for identifying patterns in unstructured and semi-structured information. For example: JanusGraph

There are three non-relational databases in Google Cloud:

• Firestore: Is a serverless document database which scales on demand and acts as a backend-as-a-service. It is DBaaS that increases the speed of building applications. It is perfect for all general purpose uses cases such as ecommerce, gaming, IoT and real time dashboards. With Firestore users can interact with and collaborate on live and offline data making it great for real-time application and mobile apps.  
• Cloud Bigtable: Cloud Bigtable is a sparsely populated table that can scale to billions of rows and thousands of columns, enabling you to store terabytes or even petabytes of data. It is ideal for storing very large amounts of single-keyed data with very low latency. It supports high read and write throughput at sub-millisecond latency, and it is an ideal data source for MapReduce operations. It also supports the open-source HBase API standard to easily integrate with the Apache ecosystem including HBase, Beam, Hadoop and Spark along with Google Cloud ecosystem.
• Memorystore: Memorystore is a fully managed in-memory data store service for Redis and Memcached at Google Cloud. It is best for in-memory and transient data stores and automates the complex tasks of provisioning, replication, failover, and patching so you can spend more time coding. Because it offers extremely low latency and high performance, Memorystore is great for web and mobile, gaming, leaderboard, social, chat, and news feed applications.

Conclusion

Choosing a relational or a non-relational database largely depends on the use case. Broadly, if your application requires ACID transactions and your data structure is not going to change much, select a relational database. 

In Google Cloud use Cloud SQL for any general-purpose SQL database and Cloud Spanner for large-scale globally scalable, strongly consistent use cases. In general, if your data structure may change later and if scale and availability is a bigger requirement than consistency then a non-relational database is a preferable choice.  Google Cloud offers Firestore, Memorystore, and Cloud Bigtable to support a variety of use cases across the document, key-value, and wide column database spectrum.

For more comparison resources on each database check out the overview. For more hands-on experience with Bigtable, check out our on-demand training here and learn about migrating databases to managed services check out this whitepaper.  

https://youtube.com/watch?v=2TZXSnCTd7E%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

For more #GCPSketchnote, follow the GitHub repo. For similar cloud content follow me on Twitter @pvergadia and keep an eye out on thecloudgirl.dev.

Digital tools such as cloud computing are fueling economic transformation across the US, including Ohio. Google continues to invest across cities and communities in Ohio, bringing over 200 jobs to the state, and helping provide $12.85 billion of economic activity for tens of thousands of Ohio businesses, nonprofits, publishers, creators and developers. To further accelerate the transformation of all Ohioan businesses and technologists, we’re thrilled to announce our newest Google Cloud region in Columbus, Ohio is open. The Columbus cloud region brings a second region to the Midwest, the 10th region to North America, and grows our global cloud region count to 33.

A region for the Buckeye State

Now open to Google Cloud customers, the Columbus region (us-east5) provides you with the speed and availability you need to innovate faster, build high-performing applications, and serve local customers — all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Additionally, the region gives you added flexibility to distribute your workloads across the central, midwest, and eastern US.

The Columbus region offers immediate access to three zones, for high availability workloads, and our standard set of products, including Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, CloudSQL, and Cloud Identity. Our private backbone connects Columbus to our global network more quickly and securely. In addition, you can integrate your on-premises workloads with our new region using Cloud Interconnect. This means that Columbus-based customers can expand globally from their front door, and those based outside the region can more easily reach their users in the Midwest.

What customers are saying

Industries including retail, financial services, and IT are investing in Columbus. Organizations across these verticals have turned to the Google Cloud to innovate faster and help solve their most complex challenges

“As Wendy’s continues to innovate in new ways to create fast, frictionless, and fun interactions that redefine the way customers visit and enjoy our restaurants, our partnership with Google Cloud is a key enabler to delivering on our AI/ML and data analytics strategies. The proximity of the new Google Cloud region to Wendy’s headquarters provides the ability for us to move and scale quickly as business needs evolve. Additionally, Google Cloud’s investment in Columbus positions central Ohio as a true technology hub, which further boosts Wendy’s and other regional employers’ ability to recruit innovative talent,” said Kevin Vasconi, Chief Information Officer, Wendy’s.

“Huntington National Bank’s API Architecture is a central component to our growth and technology strategy. As our business segments grow from an offering and geographic perspective, we must evolve our technology to provide the optimal experience for our customers and our partners. Collaborating directly with Google Cloud on the build out of their cloud region in Central Ohio, provides the access our technology teams need to innovatively scale our infrastructure to meet the demands of our business with increased availability, lower latency, and greater resiliency,” said Geoff Preston, Chief Architect, Huntington National Bank.

“Google Cloud has been instrumental in our ability to scale and optimize data management and compute resources. We prioritize scale, elasticity and resilience in cloud services and Google Cloud delivers all three globally and locally. With Google Cloud security, we can efficiently process the quantities of application data required to accelerate alert detection and reduce response times for the critical infrastructure our customers depend on to enable the continuity of their vital applications.” said Sheryl Haislet, Chief Information Officer at Vertiv, a global provider of critical digital infrastructure and continuity systems headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, that leverages Google Cloud solutions to provide resilience for its operations and to better support customers.

“The addition of the new cloud region in Ohio continues to demonstrate Google Cloud’s commitment to the enterprise space and their presence in the region,” said Chris Delong, Chief Technology Officer, Designer Brands Inc. / DSW

What’s next

We are thrilled to welcome you to our new cloud region in Columbus, and eagerly await to see what you build with our platform. Register here for our Cloud Study Jam in June – an event for local developers to get hands-on training with Google Cloud. Stay tuned for more region announcements and launches this year, including our next U.S. region in Dallas, TX. And for more information, contact sales to get started with Google Cloud today.