Today, we’re announcing Firmina, an open subsea cable being built by Google that will run from the East Coast of the United States to Las Toninas, Argentina, with additional landings in Praia Grande, Brazil, and Punta del Este, Uruguay. Firmina will be the longest cable in the world capable of running entirely from a single power source at one end of the cable if its other power source(s) become temporarily unavailable—a resilience boost at a time when reliable connectivity is more important than ever. 

As people and businesses have come to depend on digital services for many aspects of their lives, Firmina will improve access to Google services for users in South America. With 12 fiber pairs, the cable will carry traffic quickly and securely between North and South America, giving users fast, low-latency access to Google products such as Search, Gmail and YouTube, as well as Google Cloud services.

Single-end power source capability is important for reliability, a key priority for Google’s network. With submarine cables, data travels as pulses of light inside the cable’s optical fibers. That light signal is amplified every 100 km with a high-voltage electrical current supplied at landing stations in each country. While shorter cable systems can enjoy the higher availability of power feeding from a single end, longer cables with large fiber-pair counts make this harder to do. Firmina breaks this barrier—connecting North to South America, the cable will be the longest ever to feature single-end power feeding capability. Achieving this record-breaking, highly-resilient design is accomplished by supplying the cable with a voltage 20% higher than with previous systems.

Celebrating the world’s visionaries

We sought to honor a luminary who worked to advance human understanding and social justice. The cable is named after Maria Firmina dos Reis (1825 – 1917), a Brazilian abolitionist and author whose 1859 novel, Úrsula, depicted life for Afro-Brazilians under slavery. A mixed-race woman and intellectual, Firmina is considered Brazil’s first novelist. With this cable, we’re thrilled to draw attention to her pioneering work and spirit. You can learn more about Firmina in this Google Doodle.

Including Firmina, we now have investments in 16 subsea cables, such as Dunant, Equiano and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Echo, JGA, INDIGO, and Havfrue. We’re continuing our work of building out a robust global network and infrastructure, which includes Google data centers and Google Cloud regions around the world. 

Learn more about our infrastructure.

Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.

Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.

With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.

As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for  local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app. 

Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.

Providing reliable service, 24/7

From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.

On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.

Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.

Improving the user experience

At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us. 

As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Creating a secure-by-default experience based on robust defenses has always been a core design principle for Gmail. That’s why we’ve established a strong baseline of security in Gmail, with built-in protections to help automatically filter out potentially malicious messages. While these defenses help keep Gmail users safe, email functions as part of a large, complex, interconnected ecosystem that we continually invest in and work to protect. After first announcing Gmail’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) pilot last year, today we’re announcing that over the coming weeks we’re rolling out Gmail’s general support of BIMI, an industry standard that aims to drive adoption of strong sender authentication for the entire email ecosystem. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience.

“Bank of America has a wide range of security measures in place to support our customers, and we constantly evolve our program to deliver best in class protection. Part of this effort is our partnership with Google on BIMI, which provides an easy way to validate if correspondence is from us.” — Bank of America

BIMI enables organizations that authenticate their emails using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)—a standard for providing strong sender authentication that allows security systems to perform better filtering, separating legitimate messages from potentially spoofed ones—to validate ownership of their logos and securely transmit them to Google. BIMI is designed to be easy: for organizations with DMARC in place, validated logos display on authenticated emails from their domains and subdomains.

Here’s how it works: Organizations who authenticate their emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and deploy DMARC can provide their validated trademarked logos to Google via a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). BIMI leverages Mark Verifying Authorities, like Certification Authorities, to verify logo ownership and provide proof of verification in a VMC. Once these authenticated emails pass our other anti-abuse checks, Gmail will start displaying the logo in the existing avatar slot.  

“Gmail’s support of BIMI is a win for email authentication, brand trust, and consumers alike. BIMI gives organizations the opportunity to provide their customers with a more immersive email experience, strengthening email sender authentication across the entire email ecosystem.” — Seth Blank, Chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group

This is just the start for BIMI. The standard expects to expand support across logo types and validators. For logo validation, BIMI is starting by supporting the validation of trademarked logos, since they are a common target of impersonation. Today, Entrust and DigiCert support BIMI as Certification Authorities, and in the future the BIMI working group expects this list of supporting validation authorities to expand further. To learn more about BIMI and see the latest news, visit the working group’s website.

To take advantage of BIMI, ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC. For Gmail users, no action is required. We’re proud to be one of the leading members in both establishing and supporting the BIMI standard and will continue to support efforts that contribute to security for the entire email ecosystem.

About Usha Martin

Founded more than 50 years ago and headquartered in Kolkata, India, Usha Martin is a leading steel and wire rope manufacturer. The company’s products are used in sectors such as oil and gas, aerial haulage, and general engineering.

Industries: Manufacturing

Location: India

Usha Martin operates several wire and rope manufacturing plants in India, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In 1974, Usha Martin established an integrated alloy steel plant in Jamshedpur, India.

The business operates a range of joint ventures internationally, including a partnership with Joh Pengg AG of Austria to produce oil-tempered wire for the automotive industry and a venture with TESAC of Japan to manufacture and sell specialized wire rope.

Usha Martin’s ICT strategy had traditionally been highly localized, with independent IT infrastructures in all the manufacturing plants and businesses globally. These infrastructures were not integrated, leading to extensive duplication of effort and activities across the business.

In 2016, Usha Martin corporate started a project to integrate ICT across the business and establish centralized financial and technology controls.

“We established a program to integrate our communications infrastructure, security policies, and software licenses and implement a centralized enterprise resource planning system across our business,” says Jayanta Bhowmik, SVP-IT and CIO, Usha Martin. This program is being initiated primarily in Usha Martin’s Indian businesses before being extended to international markets.

In parallel with these initiatives, Usha Martin decided to consolidate the disparate email infrastructures and systems used by its corporate team, plants, and business units.

“We faced security threats and control problems managing and interconnecting all our very different email systems,” Bhowmik says.

“For example, we experienced on average about three to four ransomware attacks every year. We decided there was no alternative but to deploy a centralized email system.”

Usha Martin weighed its options and went so far as to purchase a license to run a single email system on its in-house infrastructure. However, the challenges of migrating a 4,000-strong workforce from up to seven existing email systems to an in-house platform proved difficult to overcome.

“We would have had to plan for server infrastructure, backups, security, and disaster recovery and execute smoothly, which would have been a time-consuming, expensive exercise,” Bhowmik says. “We estimated an in-house deployment would take seven to eight months to complete.”

“We looked at cloud-based services and Google presented a unique opportunity for us to consolidate our email without having to plan for our own infrastructure and worry about project planning, architectures, and deployment,” Bhowmik says.

“We also considered another service, but realized Google also gave us the opportunity to move our personal productivity applications to G Suite.”

A competitive evaluation regarding hosting and disaster recovery confirmed Usha Martin’s positive impressions. Google technology and processes in these areas outstripped the capabilities of the company’s own data centers.

“Google came up with a migration timeline and process that met our needs, with an expert partner to ease the transition,” Bhowmik says. “This was extremely important as the change represented a paradigm shift for a business that is very traditional and conservative.”

The Google partner worked closely with the internal Usha Martin team to complete phase one of the migration to the senior executive team. The partner also undertook training and worked with the IT team to hold meetings at various plants and locations to explain the changes. In addition, the partner conducted a skills transfer exercise to enable Usha Martin team members to complete the remaining phases of the project.

The business migrated the 1,500 team members in its Indian operations, as well as those in its Austrian joint venture, to the new platform.

“Using Google gives us wonderful alternatives to traditional systems,” Bhowmik says. “For example, using Google Hangouts Meet for video calls means we can reduce the number of video conferences that occupy large rooms and help ensure there are enough time-slots to meet demand.”

Improved Security of Information and Systems

One of the key differences between Usha Martin’s existing email systems and Gmail is the improvement in security and online safety.

“We had an anti-spam engine but, despite this, our employees received a lot of spam emails and messages carrying ransomware viruses,” Bhowmik says.

“With G Suite, we don’t receive these messages anymore and we minimize the risk of our network being compromised by malicious infections that could prevent us from accessing our files.”

Using G Suite has reduced team members’ use of USB drives to share large files that would otherwise be blocked due to email attachment limits.

“In addition, people are reducing the practice of printing documents for meetings. One person in each meeting can now steer and control documents, reducing duplication and the possibility of errors.”

“Document sharing is now happening much more in the cloud rather than through external media, improving control and security,” Bhowmik says.

Manage Calendars More Effectively

G Suite now enables Usha Martin team members to manage their calendars more effectively and share documents with multiple people without having to aggregate feedback or manage version control.

“Thanks to G Suite, our people are coming into a world of collaboration and modernization,” Bhowmik says.