Google Cloud is Every Retailer’s Most Trusted Cloud
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Whether they were ready for it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed many retailers into digital businesses. Retailers made huge investments into commerce technologies, customer experience tools, sales and fulfillment technology, and improving digital experiences to continue providing their goods and services to their customers. Now, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, digital retail is the new normal. In fact, many retailers are planning on expanding their digital investments. However, as their digital footprint expands, so do their threats and security concerns.
As a digital-focused retailer, your website is the most visible part of your attack surface. Your website is where your customers search for goods or services, make payments, or learn more about your brand. However, your website does not operate in isolation. There is an underlying infrastructure as well as the services that run on top of it that need protection from a wide array of attacks that may seek to compromise your data, internal employees, business, and customers. During this week’s Google Cloud Retail Summit, we’ve shared why Google Cloud is built to be the most trusted cloud for retailers. From providing you with control over your data as you move from your own data centers to the public cloud to giving you built-in technology to protect your applications all the way to your end users, Google Cloud helps you safely migrate to and operate in our Trusted Cloud.
Trusted Cloud Gives You Control, Transparency, and Sovereignty
- Access Transparency: We offer the ability to monitor and approve access to your data or configurations by Google Cloud support and engineering based on specific justifications and context, so you have visibility and control over insider access.
- Certificate Authority Service (CAS): CAS is a highly scalable and available service that simplifies and automates the management and deployment of private CAs while meeting the needs of modern developers and applications. With CAS, you can offload to the cloud time-consuming tasks associated with operating a private CA, like hardware provisioning, infrastructure security, software deployment, high-availability configuration, disaster recovery, backups, and more, allowing you to stand up a private CA in minutes, rather than the months it might normally take to deploy.
- Confidential Computing: We already encrypt data at-rest and in-transit, but customer data needs to be decrypted for processing. Confidential Computing is a breakthrough technology which encrypts data in-use—while it’s being processed. Confidential VMs take this technology to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. With the beta launch of Confidential VMs, we’re the first major cloud provider to offer this level of security and isolation while giving you a simple, easy-to-use option for your newly built and “lift and shift” applications.
- Cloud Key Management: We allow you to configure the locations where your data is stored, where your encryption keys are stored, and where your data can be accessed from. We give you the ability to manage your own encryption keys, even storing them outside Google’s infrastructure. Using our External Key Management service, you have the ability to deny any request by Google to access encryption keys necessary to decrypt customer data at rest for any reason.
Trusted cloud Helps You Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Threats
- BeyondCorp Enterprise is Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering. Google has over a decade of experience managing and securing cloud applications at a global scale, and this offering was developed based on learnings from our experience managing our own enterprise, feedback from customers and partners, as well as informed by leading engineering and security research. We understand that most customers host resources across different cloud providers. With this in mind, BeyondCorp Enterprise was purpose-built as a multicloud solution, enabling customers to securely access resources hosted not only on Google Cloud or on-premises, but also across other clouds such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Cloud Armor: We’re simplifying how you can use Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, you will get access to DDoS and WAF services, curated rule sets, and other services for a predictable monthly price.
- Chronicle: Chronicle is a threat detection solution that identifies threats, including ransomware, at unparalleled speed and scale. Google Cloud Threat Intelligence for Chronicle surfaces highly actionable threats based on Google’s collective insight and research into Internet-based threats. Threat Intel for Chronicle allows you to focus on real threats in the environment and accelerate your response time.
- Google Workspace Security: Used by more than five million organizations worldwide, from large banks and retailers with hundreds of thousands of people to fast-growing startups, Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education include the collaboration and productivity tools found here. Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education are designed to help teams work together securely in new, more efficient ways, no matter where members are located or what device they use. For instance, Gmail scans over 300 billion attachments for malware every week and prevents more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching users. We’re committed to protecting against security 1 threats of all kinds, innovating new security tools for users and admins, and providing our customers with a secure cloud service.
- Identity & Access Management IAM: Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage Google Cloud resources centrally. For enterprises with complex organizational structures, hundreds of workgroups, and many projects, IAM provides a unified view into security policy across your entire organization, with built-in auditing to ease compliance processes.
- reCAPTCHA Enterprise: reCAPTCHA has over a decade of experience defending the internet and data for its network of more than 5 million sites. reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds on this technology with capabilities, such as two-factor authentication and mobile application support, designed specifically for enterprise security concerns. With reCAPTCHA Enterprise, you can defend your website against common web-based attacks like credential stuffing, account takeovers, and scraping and help prevent costly exploits from malicious human and automated actors. And, just like reCAPTCHA v3, reCAPTCHA Enterprise will never interrupt your users with a challenge, so you can run it on all webpages where your customers interact with your services.
- Security Command Center: With Security Command Center (SCC), our native posture management platform, you can prevent and detect abuse of your cloud resources, centralize security findings from Google Cloud services and partner products, and detect common misconfigurations, all in one easy-to-use platform. We have Premium tier for Security Command Center to provide even more tools to protect your cloud resources. It adds new capabilities that let you spot threats using Google intelligence for events in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) logs and containers, surface large sets of misconfigurations, perform automated compliance scanning and reporting. These features help you understand your risks on Google Cloud, verify that you’ve configured your resources properly and safely, and document it for anyone who asks.
- VirusTotal: VirusTotal inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content. Any user can select a file from their computer using their browser and send it to VirusTotal.
- Web Risk API: With Web Risk, you can quickly identify known bad sites, warn users before they click infected links, and prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site. Web Risk includes data on more than a million unsafe URLs and stays up to date by examining billions of URLs each day.
Trusted cloud Plays an Active Role in Our Shared Fate
Our trusted cloud provides a shared-fate model for risk management. We stand with retailers from day one, helping them implement best practices for safely migrating to and operating in our trusted cloud.
We hope you enjoy the sessions we’ve created for you with Google Cloud Retail Summit and that they help you understand the ways our trusted cloud can help secure retailers all over the world.
PaGaLGuY Turns to Google Cloud Platform to Power Leading India Education Network
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Founded in 2006, PaGaLGuY started as a forum that enabled students, typically aged between 20 and 30 to discuss and seek advice on academic issues. By 2011, PaGaLGuY had increased its traffic to about 250,000 page views per month. The business is now one of India’s largest education networks and provides an app that users can download to their Android and iOS devices.
Over the past six years, PaGaLGuY has extended its service to include video advice from experts on education topics and grown the number of views of its pages to 1.5 million per day. As Head of Technology for the business, Sandeep Kalidindi has played a key role in ensuring PaGaLGuY is as engaging as possible to users. “Because the product is advertising based, the greater the user engagement, the greater the advertising revenue,” Kalidindi explains.
Google Cloud Platform Results
- Supported growth to 1.5 million page views per day and demand spikes that see requests increase from about 90 per second to about 1,200 per second
- Reduced API latency from about 1 second to about 40 milliseconds
- Reduced system administration time from three to four days per week to 30 minutes every two weeks
In 2015, PaGaLGuY’s senior management team decided to deliver an even more relevant experience for users of the education network. “The core thing we had to do was personalise the experience for each and every student that visited PaGaLGuY,” Kalidindi says. “So we had to capture each student’s data to customise what they see when they open the site.”
The business also found traffic to the network was straining its infrastructure. During demand peaks, created by exams involving as many as 5 million students, PaGaLGuY would be inaccessible for periods of 30 minutes to one hour. Furthermore, average API latency had climbed to an unacceptable 1 second, compromising performance.
PaGaLGuY needed to access extensive compute resources to undertake its planned change. Had the business relied on a physical technology architecture to undertake the transformation, it would have had to purchase capacity equivalent to 16 new servers. “There was no way with a small team we could grow to that extent in a short time,” Kalidindi says. “This was the right moment for us to explore cloud services.”
The business established two primary requirements the selected cloud service needed to meet. First, PaGaLGuY had to be able to scale the platform with costs rising only in proportion to the increase in resources consumed. Accordingly, the business would have to minimise the number of employees required to manage the cloud environment. Second, the platform had to give PaGaLGuY easy access to student data and the ability to undertake prompt, granular analysis.
PaGaLGuY reviewed available public cloud services and determined that Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was the best fit for its business. “Google Cloud Platform was considerably more mature than the alternatives, with a high degree of automation and a suite of managed services,” Kalidindi says. PaGaLGuY management then discussed with Google how to optimise cost, performance and availability of its personalised education network on GCP.
With assistance from Google and business transformation specialists Searce, PaGaLGuY was able to deliver the platform into production on GCP in 10 months. “Searce was very proactive in ensuring the environment met our needs and allowing us to gain priority access to Google services in development,” Kalidindi says. “Their team was integral to the success of the migration.”
PaGaLGuY has been running in production in GCP for two years. The education network’s GCP architecture comprises a scalable back-end built on Google App Engine; a managed environment for its containerised applications in Google Kubernetes Engine; messaging-oriented middleware through Google Cloud Pub/Sub; a relational database in Google Cloud SQL; a managed data analytics warehouse running in Google BigQuery; stream and batch data processing through Google Cloud Dataflow; and object storage in Google Cloud Storage.
PaGaLGuY has leveraged GCP services to break down its platform application from a monolithic build to a series of microservices running in Google App Engine that enable independent deployment cycles, minimise test and quality assurance overheads and provide clearer monitoring and logging.
Running on GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to add new personalisation features and grow fourfold without having to add any new engineers or administrators to accommodate the increased traffic. The business has also used the platform to seamlessly collect and aggregate students’ data for analysis, reporting and delivering a more targeted user experience. Furthermore, PaGaLGuY has been able to provide its management team with direct access to Google BigQuery to scrutinise data rather than require them to wait at least a day to view reports created by the product or technology teams.
Support demand peaks of 1,200 requests per second
“Thanks to Google Cloud Platform, we can easily support demand peaks that see requests per second rise from an average 90 per second to about 1,200 per second for as long as 45 minutes,” Kalidindi says. Due to GCP’s scalability, PaGaLGuY can ensure its education network remains available and performance remains consistent during those periods.
Latency cut to 40 milliseconds
The business has also reduced average API latency from 1 second to about 40 milliseconds. Furthermore, using GCP has enabled PaGaLGuY to automate most of its processes and reduce system administration requirements from three to four days a week across its team members to about half an hour per week.
The performance of GCP has transformed PaGaLGuY’s culture and processes. “Once our team was exposed to Google Cloud Platform and understood the superiority of the platform, our mindset changed from ‘let us do everything on our own’ to ‘let us do what we do best’ and delegate the remainder,” Kalidindi says. The quality of the service provided by GCP means PaGaLGuY effectively considers the cloud provider as part of its team. “We are always eager to see what new services are being launched and are extremely excited about what Google Cloud Platform can provide as part of its roadmap.” he concludes.
Google Announces New Cloud Region in Toronto
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For over a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications or the public sector, a rapidly growing number of organizations located or operating in Canada are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and deliver awesome experiences to their users, all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. To support this growing customer base, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open.
As you’d expect, we’re thrilled about this news, but we aren’t the only ones that have been looking forward to this launch. We asked some of our customers operating in Canada for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:
“Our alliance with Google is truly distinctive in the Canadian market as we are working together to co-innovate and create new services for key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, security, and the connected home. The new cloud region in Toronto marks another key milestone that will propel TELUS’ digital leadership by further leveraging the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of Google Cloud to support improved customer experience and build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities.”—Hesham Fahmy, Chief Development Officer, TELUS
“We’re simplifying, modernizing and digitizing Scotiabank to enhance the customer experience for our 25 million customers across the globe. By leveraging powerful cloud-based services including Google Cloud, we’re able to put the most advanced software engineering, data analytics and machine learning tools in the hands of our talented employees. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in Toronto and look forward to the opportunities the Toronto Cloud Region will present to our Technology team.”
—Michael Zerbs, Group Head Technology & Operations, Scotiabank
“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions. At Natural Resources Canada, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.”
—Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada
“At Accenture, we bring together technology and human ingenuity to create and respond to change. We’re thrilled to join forces with Google Cloud and their newest region in Toronto with an important mutual goal: to accelerate cloud innovation in Canada. Our clients already know us for our deep industry intelligence, cloud-first expertise and market-renowned delivery. We’re now combining that with Google’s human-centric design to bring even more opportunities to our clients across all industries.”
—Jeffrey Russell, President of Accenture in Canada.
“We are thrilled to see Google’s commitment to Canada. We look forward to helping our joint customers transform their operations, leveraging Google Cloud’s latest data center in Toronto. At Deloitte, we believe cloud is THE opportunity to reimagine everything.”
—Terry Stuart, Deloitte Chief Digital Officer, Canada.
“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”
—Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice
Toronto joins 27 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with our Montreal region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.
The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.
We’re working to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily—wherever you might be in the country. The past year has proved how important easy access to digital infrastructure, technical education, training and support are to helping businesses respond to the pandemic. We’re particularly proud of the teams who faced the unique challenges of building a cloud region during this time to help our customers and community accelerate their digital transformation.
To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions. We’re currently hosting our first ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada to bring the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’ve recently received Protected B accreditation with Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which is crucial for healthcare, education, and regulated industries adopting cloud services. We’re also pleased to announce the preview of Assured Workloads for Canada—a capability which allows you to secure and configure sensitive workloads in accordance with your specific regulatory or policy requirements.
For help migrating to Google Cloud, please contact our local partners. For additional details on Google Cloud regions, please visit our locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions. You can always contact us to help you get started or access our many educational resources. We’re excited to see what you build next with Google Cloud.
The Journey ahead for Google Cloud and SAP
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The partnership between Google Cloud and SAP is entering a new chapter. Over the years, our close partnership with SAP and our mutual dedication to customers has inspired us to do some of our most unique and innovative work—such as building Fast Restart and Memory Poisoning Recovery capabilities for S/4HANA workloads, offering real-time access to our advanced machine learning (ML) capabilities, and developing integrations with the industry’s best cloud security and network infrastructure.
With an expanded, strategic partnership, we are capitalizing on one of the cloud’s most valuable benefits: enabling customer choice without driving up cost or complexity. Customers have shared that they appreciate what Google Cloud has done over the years to support their ability to choose—from our support for multi-cloud environments to our track record with open-source technologies like Kubernetes, to name a couple of examples.
“We chose Google Cloud to support our SAP implementation. Our decision had a lot to do with the relationship between Google Cloud and SAP and also for the applications and services that are offered by Google Cloud, like BigQuery, which are helping to enable data and analytics within our organization.”— Sam Moses, Vice President of Corporate Systems, The Home Depot
Now, we’re placing this same emphasis on customer choice, flexibility, and freedom to help SAP customers get greater ROI from their cloud investments in three ways:
- Execute seamless business transformations that deliver all of the benefits of modern, cloud-native applications and services—quickly, economically, and without disrupting day-to-day operations
- Migrate critical business systems to the cloud, in order to lock in OpEx savings and refocus their IT teams on strategic business technology initiatives
- Augment existing business systems with cloud capabilities in AI, ML, and analytics
The cornerstone of our expanded partnership is the RISE with SAP program—a comprehensive set of tools, technology, and expert support for a fast, predictable, cost-effective path to business transformation with SAP in the cloud. RISE is also designed to meet every SAP customer on their own terms, whether they’re undertaking an enterprise-wide cloud migration or pursuing an incremental or hybrid-cloud approach.
To support customers taking advantage of RISE with SAP, Google Cloud will work even more closely with SAP to accelerate customers’ cloud migrations and business process modernization across several key areas. This includes ensuring global availability of multiple SAP services and products—such as SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP HANA Cloud—on Google Cloud’s reliable, scalable infrastructure and high-speed network. Google Cloud is also committed to bringing SAP’s solution for RPA in manufacturing to the Google Cloud Marketplace to support business process modernization.
Additionally, integrating our AI, ML, and analytics capabilities with key SAP solutions will help companies augment their business systems with sophisticated capabilities and technologies so they can draw more value out of the data stored with them.
“We can deliver our 160 key business insights two or three orders of magnitude faster with BigQuery. When you think about our marketing campaigns and month-end finance processes, we’re talking about jobs that used to take five to eight hours to complete that are now running in seconds.”— Dan Semmens, Head of Data and AI, ATB Financial
Join us on the journey ahead
There’s so much more to come from SAP and Google Cloud. Learn more about our commitment to enabling digital transformation and hear more from customers about their SAP on Google Cloud deployments.
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Modeling and Comparing Cloud Solutions, Costs, and Strategy
Sole-tenant nodes? VMaaS and CloudSimple? N1 vs N2 vs E2 instances? BYO Microsoft or Linux licenses? Understand how the choices available with Google Cloud can maximize your savings while expanding your migration scenarios.
Watch this webinar and learn how to assess your on-premises private cloud and compare your per-VM costs and complete solution against differing Google and third-party cloud solutions to find the best fit based on cost and features.
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Through customer interviews, a survey, and data aggregation, Forrester concluded that migrating and running SAP on Google Cloud has a number of benefits, including financial benefits.
Download this Forrester infographic to understand the 3-year financial impact it can have on your organization.
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