For far too long, managing employee expenses has been a time-consuming process that requires manual data entry and reconciliation to bridge the gap between business bank accounts and ERP systems. In the absence of an integrated workflow, finance teams use multiple systems to manage credit card and cash payments, and finding receipts. In most cases, they also lack real-time visibility into company spending.

The complexity grows exponentially as businesses expand, especially into new regions. Extra administration required to manage new bank accounts, card issuers, and local accounting systems impedes decision making and negatively impacts revenues and growth. Businesses of all sizes struggle with this, but it can be especially challenging for medium to large enterprises.

Payhawk set out to help businesses overcome these challenges when we founded the company in 2018. We combine VISA company cards, reimbursable expenses, and accounts payable into a single product. Our customers can automate manual processes, maximize efficiency, and accelerate business expansion.

Setting up our first cloud cluster in less than a week

To support growth and attract investment we were keen to launch our solution on a scalable, future-proof IT architecture that didn’t require extensive technical support. This is where Google Cloud made a big impression, especially the user interface and documentation which massively reduces the resources required to set up clusters and put them into production.

I’m a CTO, not a DevOps specialist, but in less than a week I was able to set up a secure, reliable operating infrastructure. This enabled us to fast-track our application development and we were able to issue our first card in just eight months. Our Google Cloud partner, Cloud Office also gave us valuable assistance, guiding us through the deployment process and advising on Google Cloud’s extensive range of solutions.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) played a critical role, accelerating the deployment and management of our cloud native applications. We use Cloud SQL as our database while other important tools include Cloud Memorystore, Vision AI, Cloud Storage and Artifact Registry for our wider data storage and application needs. With Firebase we’ve been able to build a notification system for mobile devices.

Another incentive is that most other cloud solutions require add-on services to build and keep your product live. With Google Cloud, all the services that Payhawk needs including logging, metrics, monitoring of resources, and utilization of CPU memory come as standard.

For instance, I was really impressed by Google Cloud’s operations suite, which includes Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring. If there are any anomalies in our cloud architecture, we can track and resolve them with minimal disruption to our operations. This also removes the need to invest in an additional observability solution.

Reliability that builds customer trust

Google Cloud also supports Payhawk’s mission to put customers at the center of our organization. Thanks to Google Cloud error reporting and tracking and Google Cloud single sign on, Payhawk’s engineering team can anticipate customer issues and correct them in less than one hour. Trust is everything, and Google Cloud gives us the tools to boost customer satisfaction and build long-term relationships.

As a young business, managing costs is also a priority. The Google for Startups Cloud Program, which includes credits for Google software and tools, enabled us to push the business forward without having to worry about financing our infrastructure, especially in the first year. This gave us breathing room to work through funding, application development, and the onboarding of our first customers.

In addition, Google Cloud gives us confidence that we can grow the business fast. In most months we have seen more than 10% growth — in some cases it’s been 20%. In the first half of 2022, the business doubled in size, but Google Cloud gave us the flexibility to scale our infrastructure, adding storage, memory, and processing power as we onboarded new customers. The pricing model is also generous so that we can grow our revenues while keeping control of operational expenditure.

Since launch we have acquired a valuable mix of customers from startups to large businesses that want to reduce the costs of their expenses programs and increase employee satisfaction. They include ATU, a German automobile servicing company, which has successfully digitized its entire procurement process, and Discordia, a Bulgarian logistics business with 10,000 trucks, which has issued Payhawk cards to all its drivers.

Looking to the future, it’s no exaggeration to say that Google Cloud is a foundation of our business and has given investors confidence in our operations. From a first seeding round of €3 million, early this year we closed a Series B extension of $100 million. This gives us a valuation of $1bn and makes Payhawk the first ever Bulgarian unicorn.

We now operate in 32 countries in Europe and the US, and plan to double our team by the end of the year. It feels like we’ve come a long way since we first started using Google Cloud, and I’m thrilled that we have Google Cloud as a global technology partner supporting our mission to transform expense management and financial operations worldwide.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

Cloud computing is globally recognized as the single most effective, agile and scalable path to digitally transform and drive value creation. It has been a critical catalyst for growth, allowing private organizations and governments to support consumers and citizens alike, delivering services quickly without prohibitive capital investment. European organizations—in both the public and private sectors—want a provider to deliver a cloud on their terms, one that meets their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty, without compromising on functionality or innovation.

Last year, we set out an ambitious vision of sovereignty along three distinct pillars: data sovereignty (including control over encryption and data access), operational sovereignty (visibility and control over provider operations), and software sovereignty (providing the ability to run and move cloud workloads without being locked-in to a particular provider, including in extraordinary situations such as stressed exits). After extensive dialogue with customers and policymakers, we are today unveiling ‘Cloud. On Europe’s Terms’. As part of  this initiative, we will continue to demonstrate our commitment to deliver cloud services that provide the highest levels of digital sovereignty, all while enabling the next wave of growth and transformation for Europe’s businesses and organizations.

Google Cloud’s baseline controls and security features offer strong protections, meet current robust security and privacy requirements, and address many customer needs. Yet each country in Europe has its own characteristics and expectations. Certain customers in Europe may require more flexibility than current public and private cloud offerings may provide. We want to deliver a platform that allows customers to deploy workloads with the desired local control, without losing the transformational benefits of the public cloud.

We are now delivering on this new vision collaboratively with trusted local technology providers in Europe, starting with T-Systems in Germany. Today, together with T-Systems, we announced a partnership to build a Sovereign Cloud offering in Germany for private and public sector organizations. The offering will become available in mid 2022 with additional features being added over time.  

In this new joint offering, T-Systems will manage sovereignty controls and measures, including encryption and identity management of the Google Cloud Platform. In addition, as part of their offering, T-Systems will operate and independently control key parts of the Google Cloud infrastructure for T-Systems Sovereign Cloud customers in Germany.

We are committed to building trust with European governments and enterprises with a cloud that meets their digital sovereignty, sustainability and economic objectives. We are starting with T-Systems today and will continue by partnering with trusted technology providers in selected markets across the region. 

Customers in other markets across Europe will be able to use these trusted partner offerings or use Google Cloud’s controls to exercise autonomous control over data access and use; exercise choice over the infrastructure that is used to process that data; and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. 

With Google Cloud, our customers also automatically benefit from sustainable business transformation on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Today, we are the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, and by 2030, we aim to operate entirely on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all of our cloud regions worldwide. 

We’ll continue to listen to our customers and key stakeholders across Europe who are setting policy and helping shape requirements for customer control of data. Our goal is to make Google Cloud the best possible place for sustainable, digital transformation for European organizations on their terms—and there is much more to come.

Cloud engineers face a constant barrage of new cloud services, products, and innovations. By late 2021, Google Cloud alone had released thousands of new features across hundreds of services. Couple this with other technologies and service releases, and it quickly becomes a herculean task for engineers to navigate, consume, and stay current on the ever changing technology landscape. We have heard from engineers this often leads to anxiety and frustration as engineers struggle to keep up. They are faced with a plethora of training options but often lack the time and funding. 

Google Cloud has reinvigorated technical training to make it more informative and applicable to public sector customers and partners. We aim to maximize your training experience so you can get targeted training when you need it. The Google Cloud Public Sector Technical Learning Series addresses customer feedback and provides fun and practical training. Sessions are currently running every two weeks. 

“Short and sweet” technical topics geared to subjects you care about

Generic training doesn’t always resonate with public sector technologists. Our new curriculum targets specific public sector use cases, is delivered by customer engineers, and can be accomplished in less than two hours.  This means participants can apply the learnings directly to real-life challenges quickly. 

Easy to find, easy to enroll 

Training opportunities should always be at your fingertips. Our automated training platform will ensure that you only need to enroll once. The system will automatically notify you of upcoming sessions so you can plan in advance and at your convenience. Sessions will be offered on a recurring basis to meet the needs of your organization.

Fun and engaging

Typical training sessions often include a sea of glazed eyes, unresponsive to basic prompts, falling asleep at our desks, we have all been there. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Our goal is to infuse Google culture into our training through interactive exchanges and tangible rewards to keep participants inspired and engaged.

Traditional technology training doesn’t always help you navigate the nuts and bolts of how to effectively introduce a product into an organization. But we know that technology doesn’t operate in isolation; it supports and becomes part of a living organism, managed by humans and confined by other components of an organization’s structure (e.g. existing systems or decentralized business units). 

Part of a larger community of like-minded engineers

Learning with – and from – a community of peers is one way to overcome the challenges and complexities of applying new technology within a complex organization. We created the Public Sector Connect community for this very reason. It is one example of how we surface best practices for public sector innovators. During weekly “Coffee Hours” and working sessions, our community members share their journey and lessons learned with each other. We know that innovation evolves through iteration and diverse perspectives, and Public Sector Connect is committed to helping surface critical challenges and solutions, and connecting those who are solving similar problems. Join the community today.

Built for a CapEx world, most organizations’ finance systems aren’t set up to take advantage of cloud’s dynamic, OpEx-driven consumption patterns.

It may not be a household name yet, but chances are you’ve crossed paths with OpenX today. OpenX, a leader in programmatic advertising, operates one of the world’s largest ad exchanges, serving over 250 billion ad requests per day, connecting more than 30,000 brands and reaching nearly one billion consumers. To make it happen, in 2019, OpenX migrated entirely out of its data centers and became the first major ad-exchange platform to move completely to the cloud.

The OpenX CTO, Paul Ryan, knew that this cloud transformation initiative had the potential to increase costs faster than its revenues. To be successful, he needed his engineering, finance, and business teams to forge a new “cost-aware” culture, complete with effective cost visibility and controls. In other words, he needed Cloud FinOps — an operational framework and cultural shift that brings technology, finance, and business together to drive financial accountability and realize business benefits through cloud transformation.

Ryan laid out a cloud migration roadmap that included cost governance and controls around project ownership, established cost responsibility with engineering teams to accurately forecast cloud consumption, and challenged developers to lower per-unit costs — while at the same time improving performance, scalability, speed and global reach.

It worked! In just 9 months, OpenX reduced their per-unit cost by over 60%. The framework allowed OpenX to launch new regions in a matter of days, reduce their time to market for new features by over 50%, and complete their migration in record time — seven months! “We are now able to stop worrying about legacy infrastructure and focus more on our growth categories,” said Ryan. “Our tech stack is getting smarter and more sophisticated by the day, and we have the flexibility to scale our infrastructure in real-time as the business scales and evolves.”

Unblocking Cloud’s Potential

Cloud holds the key to a successful digital transformation. In fact, McKinsey forecasts that by 2030, the Fortune 500 alone may realize over $1 trillion of EBITDA value drivers associated with public cloud enablement. But unlike OpenX, many companies struggle to achieve near-term value objectives from their cloud investments. Surveys reflect that more than 30% of cloud spend in 2021 was wasted or inefficient, while upwards of 80% of CIOs have yet to achieve the business benefits of migrating to the cloud.

Traditional IT finance processes are ill-suited for cloud infrastructure: Traditional planning and budgeting processes are challenged to address dynamic consumption patterns and complex migrations. Centralized IT budgets using traditional allocations fail to provide the necessary visibility into sources of cost overruns. CapEx-focused cost controls have little ability to manage largely OpEx-driven spend. Trend-based forecasting often inaccurately predicts cloud costs. And developer teams lack access to cost-aware architecture patterns to deploy the applications more efficiently.

Enter Cloud FinOps

At Google we’ve worked with many companies, like OpenX, to help organizations realize the transformational benefits of the cloud by cultivating a culture of transparency and embedding agile processes to manage costs. We’ve distilled these learnings into a Cloud FinOps operational framework that gives organizations the financial governance and accountability they need to grow their business sustainably.

At a high level, a Cloud FinOps approach depends on five key areas:

1. Accountability and Enablement

Accountability and enablement aim at instilling a cost-conscious culture across the organization. Oftentimes, this means standing up a cross-functional and dedicated team with members from technology, finance and engineering to establish cloud financial best practices and governance. In various organizations, we’ve seen this through an extension of a Cloud Center of Excellence, a Cloud Business Office or simply a Cloud FinOps team. Enablement focuses on empowering IT, finance and business leaders through training to help them better understand the economics of cloud services and the strategies to efficiently deploy and manage them. Cloud financial training guides teams on how to design cost-effective cloud environments, for example, embracing ”cloud-native” design principles such as auto-scaling/elasticity and Infrastructure as a Code.

2. Measurement and Business Value Realization

Effective measurements not only create awareness and enable agile processes, but also support a culture that celebrates success and rewards teams for achieving business objectives. As such, measurement in the service of business value realization is about developing a comprehensive set of long-term benefits and cost KPIs to quantify the total net value of the return on digital transformation. Organizations often start with cost-related KPIs and eventually evolve those KPIs into business value metrics that are mapped to targeted business outcomes.

3. Cloud Cost Optimization

Cloud cost optimization is an iterative and continuous process that provides a consistent methodology to manage cloud consumption cost-effectively. There are three key areas of optimization:

Resource optimization – Model cost-effective cloud usage based on utilization and consumption patterns.
Pricing optimization – Manage cloud spend through a continuous analysis of various pricing models. In a Google Cloud context, that might mean Committed Use Discounts, BigQuery flat rate reservations, etc.
Architecture optimization – Build applications with a cost-aware architecture by leveraging newer generation compute instances (like Tau VMs, which offer an industry-leading 42% better price-performance versus comparable offerings), or using managed services and serverless technology to offload operational overhead.
For example, video hosting, sharing and services platform provider Vimeo built transcoding pipelines by using Google Cloud Spot VMs to optimize their infrastructure spend. To do so, they created fault-tolerant workloads that could withstand preemptions, and in exchange, got up to a 91% discount compared to using regular on-demand instances.

4. Planning and Forecasting

In the cloud, accurately forecasting your finances requires rethinking of traditional approaches to depreciation and trend-based forecasting of maintenance and licensing costs. One way to improve the accuracy of your dynamic cloud needs is to use workload-specific forecasting models that leverage a combination of trend-based models for steady-state workloads, driver-based models for scaling applications, as well as monthly variance analysis. In other words, you can define cloud budgets and forecasts by monitoring cloud consumption trends, allocating cloud cost pools with a proper tagging strategy that’s mapped to a chart of accounts in a general ledger, and conducting a cost-benefit analysis based on cloud infrastructure, implementation, and support costs.

5. Tools and Accelerators

Without the proper tools and processes in place, understanding and managing cloud costs can be complex — and this especially true as organizations scale their business in the cloud. By deploying proper cloud cost management tools and accelerators such as Looker Cloud Cost Management and automation scripts to set guardrails and enforce cost control policies, organizations can effectively manage and track cloud spend with access to near-real-time billing and cost data to make better informed business decisions.

The key objectives of Google Cloud Cost Management tools are to make it as simple as possible for organizations to get visibility into their current and forecasted costs with built-in reporting and customizable dashboards; help drive greater accountability for cloud spending across the organization by providing flexible ways to organize cloud resources and allocate costs; provide strong financial governance controls to reduce the risk of overspending; and offer intelligent recommendations for optimizing cloud costs and usage.

Start Saving with Cloud

Businesses are continuously seeking to better operate and manage their cloud environments and the need is ever increasing to transparently manage cloud spend, optimize costs, and obtain their desired business agility. By enhancing your Cloud FinOps capabilities and adopting principles of continuous cost optimization, you too can accelerate the business value of cloud computing.

Special thanks to Bruce Warner, Daniel Petibone, Nihar Jhawar and FinOps Foundation community for their contributions and sharing their domain expertise to this important Cloud FinOps topic.