For many nations, gross domestic product is the primary measure of a society’s success. The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan gauges achievement by a different standard: gross national happiness (GNH).

The Royal Government of Bhutan’s GNH index measures a “holistic and sustainable approach to development,” prioritizing factors such as community, education, mental health, cultural heritage, and ecology. It’s a model that was endorsed by the U.N. General Assembly in 2011. Focus on GNH has enabled Bhutan to become a carbon-negative nation; nurture habitats for Bengal tigers, clouded leopards, and red pandas; and provide free healthcare to all of its 735,553 citizens.

One of the pillars of GNH in Bhutan, ranked South Asia’s least-corrupt country, is good governance. Yet as one of Asia’s least-developed nations, Bhutan needed to draw every last bit of value from public funds, while maximizing the potential of its civil servants. Turning to G Suite, it discovered powerful tools enabling communication, accountability, and cost-savings that have been vital to the mission of promoting a well-balanced society.

“G Suite collaboration tools are providing a framework that allows us to foster citizens’ happiness,” says Lobzang Jamtsho, Head of Application Division, Ministry of Information & Communication. “It’s the three C’s: collaboration, coordination, and communication. This has improved significantly with G Suite adoption.”

Freeing up resources for positive change

“When we started using Sites, we found a powerful yet simple tool that’s really a one-stop shop for sharing. You don’t have to know the development side; you just drag, drop, and build.”

—Kuenga Zam, Dy. Chief ICT Officer, Royal Civil Service Commission

From wildlife conservation, to keeping hospitals well-supplied, to the development of human resources, ensuring a correct balance between well-being and development demanded smooth coordination in the civil service. Meanwhile, everything from the cost of printing meeting agendas to investing in email servers and staff to maintain them drained resources from vital tasks such as sourcing medication.

G Suite marked a fundamental shift in the way the Royal Government of Bhutan pursued its mission, as tools such as Docs, Sheets, and Sites came together to provide a unified platform where team contributions could be seamlessly integrated in the cloud. It sparked a surge of cooperative vigor.

“In writing, for example, we collaborate in terms of drafting a proposal. And we collaborate with other parties,” says Lobzang. “It’s really helped us in terms of analyzing the decision-making process and promoting accountability, ownership, and transparency.”

G Suite is used today by 9,500 civil servants across all 67 government agencies. The benefits have been dramatic. In a survey of more than 800 civil servants, roughly 78% of respondents reported G Suite boosted productivity by more than 50%. About 80% said collaboration with colleagues increased more than 50%. And 85% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, “my organization is more innovative.”

“G Suite has empowered both education and hospitals. We have our entire education system on the platform, all teachers and students. And processes have improved in hospitals, translating directly into an increase of happiness among citizens.”

—Lobzang Jamtsho, Head of Application Division, Ministry of Information & Communication

The Royal Civil Service Commission of the Royal Government of Bhutan organizes scholarships for civil servants to pursue long-term studies as a part of human resource development. It’s vital to the nation’s pursuit of sustainable development while preserving a unique cultural heritage.

G Suite inspired the Royal Civil Service Commission to build its own internal platform using Sites to manage scholarships, streamline processes, and boost overall HR Development Management.

“When we started using Sites, we found a powerful yet simple tool that’s really a one-stop shop for sharing,” says Kuenga Zam, Dy. Chief ICT Officer, Royal Civil Service Commission. “You don’t have to know the development side; you just drag, drop, and build. And since it’s an internal site, it helps us share from one division to another what scholarships are available for renewal.”

Human connectivity for enhancing quality of life

For the Royal Government of Bhutan, G Suite is a tool that doesn’t just facilitate better communication, it enables the whole of government to work better together. “G Suite has empowered both education and hospitals. We have our entire education system on the platform, all teachers and students,” says Lobzang. “And processes have improved in hospitals, translating directly into an increase in happiness among citizens.”

“When services are delivered better, people are happier,” adds Kuenga. “So it aligns in that way with GNH.”

Motivating team members to build a better future

Today, the Royal Government of Bhutan is writing the next chapter of its journey with G Suite, motivating civil servants to tap the platform’s creative possibilities through training programs that demonstrate why you don’t need to be an IT expert to be a digital innovator.

“We did a demo at a conference to show how we are using Sites. Our users then went forward and took that idea and built their own site,” says Kuenga. “After we show the possibilities, they have the motivation to go forward and explore.”

The next step for the Royal Government of Bhutan is to begin experimenting with Apps Script to create applications for automating workflow processes: “There’s so much potential that we haven’t explored,” says Kuenga.

Whether they’re reading the newspaper on the way to work, or catching up on the latest headlines on their smartphones, readers expect up-to-the-minute news wherever and whenever makes the most sense for them. As a result, media companies are increasingly looking for ways to improve, expand, and simplify their offerings, and they’re increasingly looking to the cloud to do it.

For more than 160 years The Telegraph has been counted on by readers across the United Kingdom and globally for award-winning news and journalism. An early adopter of cloud technology, it’s been a G Suite customer since 2008 and has already been using Google Cloud Platform to analyze digital behaviors to improve engagement and advertising performance since 2016.

Recently, The Telegraph announced it’s migrating fully to Google Cloud. By migrating all their production and pre-production services, they aim to deliver content faster, provide compelling experiences to readers, and reduce environmental impact.

“We are delighted to announce our newest collaboration with Google Cloud,” said Chris Taylor, Chief Information Officer, The Telegraph. “We have always worked closely with Google as they help us to provide our readers with great experiences on our digital products, collaboration software and internet scale through search. Their continued leadership in projects such as Kubernetes are enabling us to build flexible development environments that truly support DevOps.”

Powering the Digital Publishing Ecosystem

The Telegraph produces large volumes of digital content every day. It was imperative for them to find a cloud provider they could trust to support this ecosystem. By working with Google Cloud they have changed the way they see and engage with data: they can collect new information about their products every second and use that to continually hone their strategy. The Telegraph are placing more confidence and trust in the data captured about their content and now have one of the best available pieces of technology for capturing and analyzing the stories they publish in real-time.

Leveraging AI to support journalists

Time is critical when journalists are on a story, and The Telegraph wants to put important data in the hands of its journalists right when they need it. To do this, it will be using AutoML to classify content for journalists and make it more discoverable. For example, a reporter will be able to bring up relevant assets that link to their stories. It will also apply AutoML to classify Telegraph stock photos to help journalists attach compelling visual content to their stories faster.

Building compelling reader experiences with the help of APIs

Readers have an ever-increasing expectation of personalization. To meet this need, The Telegraph launched My Telegraph, currently live in beta, to offer registered readers personalized news experiences based on their interests or the particular journalists they want to follow. My Telegraph was developed on an API management platform provided by Google Cloud’s Apigee. You can learn more about how it’s applying API management to My Telegraph, in this blog post.

Working for environmental good

The Telegraph is the biggest selling quality newspaper in the UK, an accolade which requires it to print and distribute hundreds of thousands of copies each day. Optimal management of print production is important, and by using a combination of the cloud and machine learning, The Telegraph is better able to predict demand for physical newspapers, maximizing sales and minimizing waste. This makes great business sense for The Telegraph but also has great environmental benefit.

All over the world, businesses, schools and users depend on G Suite to help them stay connected and get work done. Google designs, builds, and operates our products on a secure foundation, aimed at thwarting attacks and providing the protections needed to keep you safe. G Suite and Google Meet are no exception.

Google Meet’s security controls are turned on by default, so that in most cases, organizations and users won’t have to do a thing to ensure the right protections are in place. Here, we’ll summarize the key capabilities of Google Meet that help protect you.

Proactive protections to combat abuse and block hijacking attempts

Google Meet employs an array of counter-abuse protections to keep your meetings safe. These include anti-hijacking measures for both web meetings and dial-ins. 

Google Meet makes it difficult to programatically brute force meeting IDs (this is when a malicious individual attempts to guess the ID of a meeting and make an unauthorized attempt to join it) by using codes that are 10 characters long, with 25 characters in the set. We limit the ability of external participants to join a meeting more than 15 minutes in advance, reducing the window in which a brute force attack can even be attempted. External participants cannot join meetings unless they’re on the calendar invite or have been invited by in-domain participants. Otherwise, they must request to join the meeting, and their request must be accepted by a member of the host organization. 

In addition, we’re rolling out several features to help schools keep meetings safe and improve the remote learning experiences for teachers and students, including:

• Only meeting creators and calendar owners can mute or remove other participants. This ensures that instructors can’t be removed or muted by student participants.
• Only meeting creators and calendar owners can approve requests to join made by external participants. This means that students can’t allow external participants to join via video, and that external participants can’t join before the instructor.
• Meeting participants can’t rejoin nicknamed meetings once the final participant has left. This means if the instructor is the last person to leave a nicknamed meeting, students can’t join later without the instructor present.

Secure deployment and access controls for admins and end-users

To limit the attack surface and eliminate the need to push out frequent security patches, Google Meet works entirely in your browser. This means we do not require or ask for any plugins or software to be installed if you use Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Microsoft Edge. On mobile, we recommend that you install the Google Meet app. 

To help ensure that only authorized users administer and access Meet services, we support multiple 2-Step Verification options for accounts that are secure and convenient. These include hardware and phone-based security keys and Google prompt. Additionally, Google Meet users can enroll their account in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which provides our strongest protections available against phishing and account hijacking and is specifically designed for the highest-risk accounts. 

For G Suite Enterprise and G Suite for Education customers, we offer Access Transparency, which logs any Google access to Google Meet recordings stored in Drive, along with the reason for the access (support team actions that you might have requested, for example). Customers can also use data regions functionality to store select/covered data of Google Meet recordings in specific regions (i.e. US or Europe). 

Secure, compliant, and reliable meeting infrastructure 

In Google Meet, all data is encrypted in transit by default between the client and Google for video meetings on a web browser, on the Android and iOS apps, and in meeting rooms with Google meeting room hardware. Meet adheres to IETF security standards for Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) and Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP). For every person and for every meeting, Meet generates a unique encryption key, which only lives as long as the meeting, is never stored to disk, and is transmitted in an encrypted and secured RPC (remote procedure call) during the meeting setup.

Security is an integral part of all our operations at Google. Our team of full-time security and privacy professionals supports our software engineering and operations to ensure that security is always a part of how we build and run our services. All of our Google Cloud and G Suite customers benefit from these capabilities, including: 

• Secure-by-design infrastructure: Google Meet benefits from Google Cloud’s  defense-in-depth approach to security, which utilizes the built-in protections and global-private network that Google uses to secure your information and safeguard your privacy.
• Compliance certifications: Our Google Cloud products, including Google Meet, regularly undergo independent verification of their security, privacy, and compliance controls, including validation against standards such as SOC, ISO/IEC 27001/17/18, HITRUST, and FedRAMP. We support your compliance requirements around regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA, as well as COPPA and FERPA for education. 
• Incident management: We have a rigorous process for managing data and security incidents that specifies actions, escalations, mitigation, resolution, and notification of any potential incidents impacting customer data.
• Reliability: Google’s network is engineered to accommodate peak demand and handle future growth. Our network is resilient and engineered to accommodate the increased activity we’ve seen on Google Meet.
• Transparency: At Google Cloud, we’re clear about our commitments regarding customer data: we process customer data according to your instructions; we never use customer data for advertising purposes; and we publish the locations of our Google data centers, which are highly available, resilient, and secure.  

During COVID-19 and beyond, we will continue to protect Google Meet users and their data, and keep innovating with new features to make our tools helpful, secure, and safe.