We are excited to announce that as of April 1, 2021, Google Cloud VMware Engine is covered under the Google Cloud Business Associate Agreement (BAA), meaning it has achieved HIPAA compliance. Healthcare organizations can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications.

Healthcare organizations increasingly use cloud platforms to personalize patient care, analyze large datasets more effectively, enhance research and development collaboration, and share medical knowledge. Leveraging cloud platforms can also help healthcare organizations increase the privacy and security of information systems, including protected health information (PHI), and, as a result, better comply with applicable laws and regulations while reducing the burden of compliance. For PHI, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) set standards in the United States to protect individually identifiable health information. HIPAA applies to health plans, most healthcare providers, and healthcare clearinghouses that manage PHI electronically, and to persons or entities that perform certain functions on their behalf. 

With Google Cloud, organizations can leverage solutions that enable secure, continuous patient care and data-driven clinical and operational decisions with ease, while being empowered with collaboration and productivity tools. Further, Google Cloud Platform supports HIPAA compliance. We offer HIPAA-regulated customers the same products at the same pricing that is available to all customers, unlike many other cloud providers. 

For healthcare organizations that leverage VMware on-premises, having a consistent, cloud-integrated platform that provides seamless access to native cloud services unlocks the opportunity to extend, migrate, and modernize healthcare IT infrastructure and applications in a fast, low-risk manner at their own pace. This is especially important for mission-critical healthcare provider workloads, where having a low-risk way to adopt the cloud is important. Google Cloud VMware Engine offers that solution. By achieving coverage under Google Cloud’s BAA, Google Cloud VMware Engine enables healthcare organizations to realize the benefits of cloud computing and stay on track with their HIPAA compliance efforts without additional complexity. This is very relevant in hybrid scenarios, where customers would like to leverage other native cloud services such as analytics and big data processing, without having to enter into multiple BAAs.

Google Cloud VMware Engine offers dedicated, isolated software-defined datacenter environments with fully redundant and dedicated 100 Gbps networking that are suitable for healthcare organizations to run applications storing and processing PHI data. Customers have the ability to encrypt their virtual storage area network (vSAN) using an external key management server. Healthcare customers can run their workloads in a native VMware environment—vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX—while benefiting from Google Cloud’s highly performant infrastructure to meet the needs of their workloads. Customers can connect their VMware applications to native Google Cloud services such as BigQuery and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive new insights from existing data and quickly make informed decisions. 

Protecting against and mitigating the impact of ransomware attacks is top-of-mind for Healthcare organizations. This requires building a cyber resilience program and back-up strategy to prepare for how users can restore core systems or assets affected by a security (in this case, ransomware) incident. This is a critical function for supporting recovery timelines and lessening the impact of a cyber event so organizations can get back to operating their business.  Google Cloud VMware Engine in combination with Google Cloud first party solutions such as Actifio Go, or partner solutions such as NetApp CVO can provide an efficient way to recover incremental point-in-time backups along with on-demand provisioning of new compute to  recover both data and infrastructure from Ransomware attacks quickly and efficiently. 

Healthcare customers can also use Google Cloud VMware Engine as a disaster recovery (DR) target for their on-premises VMware workloads. Healthcare organizations also need a business continuity plan for their mission critical applications. When a disaster occurs, hospitals need their data protected so they can quickly get back to treating patients. It is a HIPAA requirement that healthcare organizations must be able to recover from a natural disaster. Google Cloud VMware Engine offers a like-for-like cost-effective DR target for these customers. The DR environment can be operated without new training using the same tools as their on-premises deployment. Google Cloud VMware Engine is currently available in 12 regions across the globe including three regions in the US, which means our regional and multi-national customers can take advantage of this service for geographic diversification as well. 

If you are interested in understanding more and taking advantage of Google Cloud VMware Engine, contact your Google sales team now.

For details, see HIPAA compliance on Google Cloud Platform.

With more than 2.5 million customers, Italian utility company A2A is committed to delivering electricity, gas, clean water, and waste collection every day. More recently, the company made another significant commitment: To incorporate the principles of the “circular economy” into its way of doing business — part of the UN 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable-Development Goals — all while also aiming to double its client base by 2030. Growing rapidly but sustainably requires operating as efficiently as possible at every level of the organization, from operating smart meters to generating accurate demand projections. That’s why A2A chose to deploy its SAP S/4HANA ERP and the SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse on Google Cloud.

Roadblocks to innovation

Instead of a linear consumption model that starts with raw materials and ends with use and disposal, the circular economy is a continuous cycle that emphasizes repair, recycling, and the creation of materials rather than their disposal. To take an example from A2A’s own success story: The company keeps 99.7 percent of collected waste out of landfills.1 Of the UN’s sustainability goals, A2A is committing to the three most relevant to its industries:

• Ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all
• Ensuring sustainable consumption and production patterns
• Protecting, restoring, and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems

Achieving A2A’s sustainability and customer-first strategies requires high scalability, rapid data ingestion, and rich, accurate analytics. None of this could be reliably supported with the company’s legacy on-premises SAP and Data Warehouse, especially given A2A’s projected growth and the increasing complexity of the data landscape, including IoT deployments and energy market liberalization.

Provisioning data infrastructure was also slow and complex. Simply adding a new metric could require increasing capacity by an order of magnitude. And analytical and transactional data lived in siloes, which created a fragmented and out-of-date view of each customer across sales and customer support teams. A2A’s fragmented data also made it difficult to take proactive action when changing priorities or processes required shifting focus from one data source to another.

With a data warehouse that refreshed only once every 24 hours, simple processes such as responding to a customer calling because their power has been cut off due to an unpaid bill became cumbersome.

Scalability was also a concern. With the on-premises solution, A2A needed to define the budget for its data warehouse over a two-year timeframe, but the rollout of new electricity meters — each sending data every 10 minutes — across Italy made those data requirements hard to predict.

The move to the cloud: From monolith to microservices

The move has been a giant step forward in A2A’s goal of meeting its data-driven, customer-centric strategy. In deploying its SAP systems to Google Cloud, A2A can take advantage of a highly flexible hybrid environment and powerful data management and analytics. It can replicate data from Salesforce, SAP, and other systems in BigQuery, which operates as a data lake with Google Cloud SQL, connected directly to Google Analytics and Google Ads for data-driven customer service, decision-making, and marketing.

“From BigQuery we can feed relevant information directly to the people who need it. Our customer operators work on Salesforce, so we use an OData protocol to embed real-time data in that platform. Elsewhere, we present the information through a dashboard, or with a BI component delivering one-page reports.” —Vito Martino, Head of CRM, Marketing and Sales B2C & B2B, A2A

By running SAP on Google Cloud, A2A can also count on an infrastructure platform that provides:

• Scalability. The robust data architecture on Google Cloud adapts to shifting and increasing demands without compromising on speed or availability, so A2A doesn’t have to worry about over- or under-provisioning as the rollout of smart meters proceeds.
• Speed. The new A2A data solution refreshes every five minutes instead of 24 hours, so the company can respond to its customers’ needs without delays. Customer operators working in Salesforce now receive real-time data from Google BigQuery so that, when a customer calls, operators can see accurate information in seconds. They can now offer value-added services and sustainable options tailored to the customer’s needs, from energy consumption to their preferred method of communication.
• Availability. With microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine, the team can update the solution through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), eliminating the need for downtime when changes are required.
• Security and control. The A2A IT team uses Google Kubernetes Engine to orchestrate clusters of instances on Google Compute Engine, with Google Cloud Load Balancing and backups on Google Cloud Persistent Disk. Google Cloud Anthos ensures operational consistency across on-premises and cloud platforms.

Ready to grow the sustainable way

By moving to Google Cloud — the industry’s cleanest cloud, with zero net emissions — A2A is ready to grow quickly while locking down the efficiency it will need to meet its ambitious sustainability goals. “To bring sustainable utilities to market, we need to be both responsive to our customers and responsive to the internal needs of A2A,” explains Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy at A2A. “Understanding what customers need in detail means we can improve their services and reduce their environmental impact at the same time.”

Learn more about the ways Google Cloud can transform your organization’s SAP solutions with scalability, speed, and advanced analytics capabilities.

^{1.  Circular Economy: one of the four founding pillars of A2A’s 2030 sustainability policy | Drupal}

In order to be successful, research needs to be replicable, so scientists can build on past work and insights. However, an article in Nature warned that as much as 50% of published drug development research could not be reproduced in subsequent trials. As a result, promising drug candidates sometimes led to disappointment, as well as wasted time and money, when key findings could not be replicated. 

The shift to cloud computing helps solve this problem because it allows researchers to use open-source tools that work across platforms. As demand for cloud computing rises, our customers have asked us for more ready-made solutions to assure reproducibility of results by their collaborators, regardless of the platform they are using. They asked for secure and effective collaboration tools as well as faster time-to-insight from any type of data.

We listened. Google’s new research and data insights solution includes three sets of functionalities to address these key challenges. Each can be activated on demand and may be eligible for subscription pricing. “HPC in a box” offers abstract complexity to run high performance computing (HPC) workloads by automatically managing your cluster in the most effective manner. It integrates seamlessly with some of the industry’s most-used schedulers like Slurm and PBS. It makes it easier than ever to answer bigger questions faster by accessing Google’s fast, powerful hardware like TPUs and GPUs, all for one predictable flat fee for eligible workloads. Healthcare Innovation Hub provides healthcare-specific functionality to help ingest, aggregate, and de-identify any type of healthcare data in its original format. It unlocks cross-modality analysis and collaboration and empowers researchers with harmonization tools to overcome healthcare interoperability issues. Google Cloud Real-World Insights (formerly FDA MyStudies) accelerates and streamlines drug development and clinical trials to address urgent medical challenges with reproducible results.

The solution enables researchers to ask new questions, get answers more quickly, and work more collaboratively–with no wait times or down times. Institutions can scale to more ambitious projects and generate actionable, real-time insights from any data source–all while staying within budget.

Many top research centers have already found it faster and more cost effective to shift from downloading and storing data on their own servers to storing and analyzing data on Google Cloud. Here are some of the real-world projects already yielding breakthroughs:

• Clemson analyzed 8,500 hours of traffic camera feeds with 2.1M vCPUs in three hours to improve evacuation routes for disaster planning.
• The Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine saved $2.9M by building their Compass data warehouse on Google Cloud rather than on on-prem.
• The Broad Institute slashed costs of genomic sequencing by 90% with Google Cloud.

Our partners, such as Atos, Burwood, Omnibond, Mavenwave, Quantiphi, and Deloitte, can help you first design and develop, then install and implement your own solution, including training. To assess your institution’s needs and develop a customized plan for your next-generation research solution with research and insights, contact our sales team.