Launched in 2013, Canva is a free online design platform with a mission to empower everyone in the world to design. Featuring a simple drag-and-drop user interface and a vast range of templates ranging from presentations, social media graphics, posters, apparel to videos, plus a huge library of fonts, stock photography, illustrations, video footage and audio clips, anyone can take an idea and create something beautiful. The Canva team is located across the globe with offices in the United States, China, the Philippines and Australia.

A long-term user

“To empower our team to undertake deep work, we have a recurring weekly Calendar invitation that keeps an entire day free of meetings across the business.” – Jeff Lai, Internal Infrastructure Specialist, Canva

A business that enables collaboration, innovation, and creativity is a natural fit for Google Workspace, an integrated suite of secure, cloud-native collaboration and productivity applications. Canva is a long-term user of the application suite and Jeff Lai, Internal Infrastructure Specialist, says “being a global business from day one, the company wanted to ensure any technology we used would be able to grow and scale with us.

“Google Workspace certainly met the brief. For example, creating new Google Workspace instances is very easy, you simply connect them to your domain and away you go.”

Canva has 1,850 Google Workspace licenses to cover its approximately 1,200-strong workforce, plus service accounts and shared accounts. The application suite covers the organization’s communication, connectivity and productivity needs, with enough storage to enable the business not to have to pay for supplementary storage services or deploy storage in-house. Canva’s team of designers, developers, marketers, investors and advisers uses Google Workspace for tasks such as scheduling meetings, emailing and chatting to internal and external parties, storing files and tracking activity on spreadsheets.

“Google Workspace is like air and water to us,” says Jeff. “it is part of the natural environment of our workplace.”

Reviewing licensing

With Google Workspace enabling Canva’s global workforce model, the business is exploring ways of further leveraging the features available through the application suite; Jeff reveals Canva is exploring the use of enterprise-class licenses that provide additional reporting and auditing capabilities.

Near-100% availability

“We expect Google Workspace to continue to play a key role in our operations and in supporting an increasingly international workforce.” – Jeff Lai, Internal Infrastructure Specialist, Canva

Supporting a distributed model with an increasing number of employees based outside Australia also requires Canva to use collaboration and productivity tools available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Google Workspace applications help the business drive continuous improvement from the bottom up, as well as the top down. Canva uses Forms to capture — in what Jeff describes as ‘no-judgement’ fashion — new ideas, callouts of broken processes, or areas of improvement. These comments and suggestions go directly to founders and senior management for action.

Furthermore, Google Workspace enables Canva to run a continuously productive working environment. “To empower our team to undertake deep work, we have a recurring weekly Calendar invitation that keeps an entire day free of meetings across the business,” says Jeff.

Growth example of ‘new normal’

Canva’s team believes the organization’s accelerated growth is indicative of the ‘new normal’, as more teams realize the need for a more scalable, more collaborative, more affordable and more user-friendly design platform.

Organizations of all sizes are doubling down on building a reliable remote workplace, and are turning to modern productivity and collaboration platforms like Canva to ensure they remain flexible and scalable.

Google Workspace and other Google Cloud products and services also enable Canva to increase the value of its own platform. The business uses Translation API to translate non-English searches into English, allowing it to display appropriate images and other elements.

Furthermore, the Canva editing tool enables users to pull files from Drive to be refined, while the platform also integrates with Google Maps and YouTube to give end users the ability to easily create items such as online brochures with these products integrated into them. Finally, Canva for Education — a tailored product to support student learning — integrates with Google Classroom, helping educators efficiently manage progress and connect with students at school, from home or on the go.

With Google Workspace, Canva is ideally positioned to continue growing its user base and build on the success of a platform that has thousands of templates and fonts, and millions of stock photos, icons and illustrations. Jeff says the business remains focused on the same goal as its founders had right at the start — making design accessible to everyone. “We expect Google Workspace to continue to play a key role in our operations and in supporting an increasingly international workforce,” he says.

Data continues to grow in volume and is increasingly distributed across lakes, warehouses, clouds, and file formats. As more users demand more use cases, the traditional approach to build data movement infrastructure is proving difficult to scale. Unlocking the full potential of data requires breaking down these silos, and is increasingly a top priority for enterprises.

Earlier this year, we previewed BigLake, a storage engine that extends innovations in BigQuery storage to open file formats running on public cloud object stores. This allows customers to build secure multi-cloud data lakes over open file formats. BigLake provides consistent, fine-grained security controls for Google Cloud and open-source query engines to interact with data. Today, we are excited to announce General Availability for BigLake, and a set of new capabilities to help you build a differentiated data platform.

“We are using GCP to build and extend one of the street’s largest risk systems. During several tests we have seen the great potential and scale of BigLake. It is one of the products that could support our cloud journey and drive application’s future efficiency” – Scott Condit, Director, Risk CTO Deutsche Bank.

Build a distributed data lake that spans across warehouses, object stores & clouds with BigLake

Customers can create BigLake tables on Google Cloud Storage (GCS), Amazon S3 and ADLS Gen 2 over supported open file formats, such as Parquet, ORC and Avro. BigLake tables are a new type of external table that can be managed similar to data warehouse tables. Administrators do not need to grant end users access to files in object stores, but instead manage access at a table, row or a column level. These tables can be created from a query engine of your choice, such as BigQuery or open-source engines using the BigLake connector. Once these tables are created, BigLake and BigQuery tables can be centrally discovered in the data catalog and managed at scale using Dataplex.

BigLake extends the BigQuery storage API to object stores to help you build a multi-compute architecture. BigLake connectors are built on the BigQuery storage API and enable Google Cloud DataFlow and open-source query engines (such as Spark, Trino, Presto, Hive) to query BigLake tables by enforcing security. This eliminates the need to move the data to a query engine specific use case and security only needs to be configured at one place and is enforced everywhere.

“We are using GCP to design datalake solutions for our customers and transform their digital strategy to create a data-driven enterprise. Biglake has been critical for our customers to quickly realize the value of analytical solutions by reducing the need to build ETL pipelines and cutting-down time-to-market. The performance & governance features of BigLake enabled a variety of data lake use cases for our customers.” – Sureet Bhurat, Founding Board member – Synapse LLC

BigLake unlocks new use cases using Google Cloud and OSS Query engines

During the preview, we saw a large number of customers use BigLake in various ways. Some of the top use cases include:

Building secure and governed data lakes for open-source workloads – Workloads migrating from Hadoop, Spark first customers, or those using Presto/Trino, can now use BigLake to build secure, governed and performant data lakes on GCS. BigLake tables on GCS provide fine-grained security, table management (vs giving access to files), better query performance and integrated governance with Dataplex. These characteristics are accessible across multiple OSS query engines when using the BigLake connectors.

“To support our data driven organization, Wizard needs a data lake solution that leverages open file formats and can grow to meet our needs. BigLake allows us to build and query on open file formats, scales to meet our needs, and accelerates our insight discovery. We look forward to expanding our use cases with future BigLake features” – Rich Archer, Senior Data Engineer – Wizard

Eliminate or reduce data duplication across data warehouses and lakes – Customers who use GCS, and BigQuery managed storage had to previously create two copies of data to support users using BigQuery and OSS engines. BigLake makes the GCS tables more consistent with BigQuery tables, reducing the need to duplicate data. Instead, customers can now keep a single copy of data split across BigQuery storage and GCS, and data can be accessed by BigQuery or OSS engines in either places in a consistent, secure manner.

Fine-grained security for multi-cloud use cases – BigQuery Omni customers can now use BigLake tables on Amazon S3, and ADLS Gen 2 to configure fine grained security access control, and take advantage of localized data processing, and cross cloud transfer capabilities to do multi-cloud analytics. Tables created on other clouds are centrally discoverable on Data catalog for ease of management & governance

Interoperability between analytics and data science workloads – Data science workloads, using either Spark or Vertex AI notebooks can now directly access data in BigQuery or GCS through the API connector, enforcing security & eliminating the need to import data for training models. For BigQuery customers, these models can be imported back into BigQuery ML to produce inferences.

Build a differentiated data platform with new BigLake capabilities

We are also excited to announce new capabilities as part of this General Availability launch. These include:

• Analytics Hub support: Customers can now share BigLake tables on GCS with partners, vendors or suppliers as linked data sets. Consumers can access this data in place through the preferred query engine of their choice (BigQuery, Spark, Presto, Trino, Tensorflow).
• BigLake tables is now the default table type BigQuery Omni, and has been upgraded from the previous default of external tables.
• BigQuery ML support: BigQuery customers can now train their models on GCS BigLake tables using BigQuery ML, without needing to import data, and accessing the data in accordance to the access policies on the table.
• Performance acceleration (preview): Queries for GCS BigLake tables can now be accelerated using the underlying BigQuery infrastructure. If you would like to use this feature please get in touch with your account team or fill out this form.
• Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP) profiling support (coming soon): Cloud DLP can soon scan BigLake tables to identify and protect sensitive data at scale. If you would like to use this feature please get in touch with your account team.
• Data masking and audit logging (Coming soon): BigLake tables now support dynamic data masking, enabling you to mask sensitive data elements to meet compliance needs. End user query requests to GCS for BigLake tables are now audit logged and are available to query via logs.

Next steps

Refer to BigLake documentation to learn more, or get started with this quick start tutorial. If you are already using external tables today, consider upgrading them to BigLake tables to take advantage of above mentioned new features. For more information, reach out to the Google cloud account team to see how BigLake can add value to your data platform.

Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection

Since the early days of the pandemic, we’ve partnered with government organizations and academic institutions to serve communities at scale with Contact Center Artificial Intelligence (CCAI). I sat down with Bill MacKenzie, IT liaison for the Upper Grand School District in Ontario, and Marco Palermo, director of digital government and modernization, to discuss how they embraced CCAI to introduce scalable service delivery to residents and students alike. I’m sharing more on their stories below, and for the full overview, check out our Google Cloud Public Sector Summit session, Scaling Virtual Support in the Pandemic Era: The AI Connection.

Upper Grand School District: Answering questions with speed and accuracy

Bill MacKenzie described the Upper Grand School District’s struggles at the beginning of the pandemic, particularly helping parents with IT issues. The staff-oriented help desk was not equipped to assist parents trying to securely login for students as young as kindergarten. Without sufficient support for parents, the District was struggling to handle thousands of phone calls a day.

To alleviate the manual strain, they turned to Quantiphi, a Google Cloud partner, to implement Google Cloud Dialogflow. They were fully functional within a few weeks. The new website provided real-time responses as well as clear documentation to help parents get up and running quickly.

“In the first 10 days, we had over 5,000 hits, and the accuracy rate was 92%,” MacKenzie said. 

The district doesn’t know what the future holds, but now that they have been through the process, they are confident they now understand how to create their own bots to meet critical needs.

City of Toronto: Getting critical information to the community

Marco Palermo explained how the city of Toronto was facing a very rapid and fluid situation at the beginning of the pandemic. Getting information to constituents was extremely important, and they needed alternative channels to deliver that information.

Toronto has been committed to workforce equity and inclusivity in order to best represent the diversity of its residents. As a result, solutions had to be accessible to all. The bot handled 25,330 unique users and addressed 20,174 total questions with an 80% accurate response rate in the first four months. It’s been a huge success for the city, with plans to expand its capabilities.

Personalized response to the pandemic challenge

I noted that even before the pandemic, government leaders were asking for a way to provide more flexible personal experiences and better support outside of normal business hours. Around 60% of constituents want more self-service options and 75% would happily interact with digital resources if they could get the answers they needed.

Google Cloud CCAI  addresses these needs with a single core of intelligence that provides a consistently high-quality conversational experience—human or virtual—across all channels and platforms. It can be deployed on legacy infrastructure without upgrades in an average of two weeks.

CCAI operates with a conversational core that centralizes the ability to talk, understand, and interact, orchestrating high-quality conversations at scale. It provides services in three different ways:

• Virtual Agent AI allows natural conversation with customers to identify and address their issues effectively
• Agent Assist AI helps human agents by providing real-time turn-by-turn guidance so they can better serve constituents
• Insight AI determines metrics and trends in real-time to enable faster and more accurate insights

CCAI provides consistency across every application. It can go off-script when answering complex questions, adjusting human conversation with the capacity to handle unexpected stops and starts, odd word choices, or implied meanings. It can also handle multiple use cases for the customer, such as taking payments, updating information, providing information, and more. By allowing agencies to automate routine tasks and reduce the amount of time employees need to dedicate to answering calls, the solution created cost savings for the agency.

Explore more on this session by visiting the Public Sector Summit on-demand video.

There were several reasons why Suddora and CustomOnIt shouldn’t have been successes. My friend Adam and I were working in a Michigan video store and knew next to nothing about running a business. We started with an idea to sell sweatbands, like the ones I used to wear in my band, and over several months managed to launch it legitimately. This led us to bail on the video store and move to Vegas—smack in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. We lived on ramen noodles and little else for two years while we got the company going. Our friends took bets on how long we’d stay in business. 

But 11 years later, we have not one but several successful sports apparel businesses, I’m running a bunch of other e-commerce companies (including SweatBands.com), and we’re selling in the United Kingdom and soon in Asia Pacific. 

How did two broke-but-determined guys working in a video store get this far? We always believed in moving ahead, no matter what obstacles came our way—and we learned a lot about how technology like G Suite can make a small business look and operate like a bigger one, and how searching Google for business resources can pay off.

Starting with an idea, a domain and…ramen noodles
In my band days in Michigan, we tried to think of ways to get our name out there. Instead of the usual T-shirts or stickers, I pitched the idea of custom sweatbands since I wore sweatbands when I played guitar. I figured other people might like sweatbands with the names of their bands.

We knew we needed a web domain and email addresses so we could sell online. We found out about G Suite during a Google search, and it seemed like the most pain-free way to get started by buying the domains Customonit.com and Suddora.com (Adam made up that name. “Sudor” is Spanish for “sweat,” which is what the businesses were about, and we added the “d” and the “a” to make the name stand out.).

Even though the company was just me and Adam, we needed to look professional (and also a bit bigger than we actually were). With G Suite, we set up email aliases for various business functions, like help@suddora.com and sales@suddora.com, and arranged to route email from these addresses into our regular Gmail inboxes; that way, customers could easily reach us.

Scaling our business in the Las Vegas heat
Next, we decided to move to Las Vegas because, in the aftermath of the recession, we could live cheaply there. When we got our first big sweatband order from a major NCAA football team,  the momentum started. Now we had to scale up the business so we could handle more orders and deal with suppliers, even though we were still working out of our living room.

We grew to a five-person team, including a customer service person and a designer, and G Suite made it easy to onboard everyone quickly. In addition to giving new employees their own email addresses with the Suddora.com or STbands.com domain names, we routed emails to various people from the “help” and “sales” email aliases we had set up. We also made sure that all of our employees were set up on G Suite, too.

Once orders started to roll in from major fast-food restaurants, football teams, and sports apparel companies, our roles constantly changed. G Suite helped us shave off precious time by helping us manage email less manually—we automatically re-routed emails depending on who’s working on what. If I wanted to take on more sales work, I forwarded emails from sales@suddora.com to my inbox with one click. Same thing with customer service: We never want to lose track of customer service inquiries, which are a high priority.

In 2009, a year after starting the business, Adam and I left our part-time jobs at a local department store to run the business full-time. We promised ourselves that when we hit a revenue target of $15,000 in one month we’d buy a TV for the apartment—and we got that TV!

Going international (without leaving our office)
The business was taking off. We decided to split STbands.com into two websites: Suddora.com for sports sweatbands and CustomOnIt.com for custom apparel and party goods. We recognized that half our customers wanted athletic wear and accessories, while the other half wanted custom items like T-shirts and wristbands. It was a move that would allow each business to thrive.

Creating products and managing suppliers was getting more complicated. Once again, G Suite helped us move our business forward. We used Google search to find suppliers in China, and were able to set up supplier relationships and talk one-on-one with the people making our products—without extensive and time-consuming travel to China. You can accomplish so much with video meetings and chat.

With more suppliers and more customers, we needed to constantly up our game in terms of product design. When we create new designs it generates a ton of files and iterations, which get shared back and forth between pattern designers, photo editors, writers, and marketing professionals. To help centralize these files, we store everything in Google Drive so they can be shared and accessed anytime, from anywhere. For example, we use Sheets to house updated data on our products across all of our e-commerce platforms. 

Lessons learned
Eleven years on, I’m still learning every day about what it takes to run and grow a business. I think what helps is finding tools like G Suite that are so easy to use, you don’t need much ramp-up time to get started—nor do your employees. That means we’re all productive much faster. 

Also, you might be thinking about a million ideas for starting a business. But the truth is, you only need one—an opportunity that makes you think, “Okay, this is going to be big.” So go for it. You can’t afford not to.