Google’s New Climate Innovation Challenge to Fight Energy Crisis and Build Climate Resilience
3419
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
At Google, we believe that when it comes to solving a problem as big and urgent as climate change, we get more done when we collaborate. From beekeepers in Germany to urban foresters in Los Angeles, we support the work of nonprofits, scientists, and organizations that are working to mitigate the impact of climate change globally, and increase communities’ resilience to its effects.
To this end, we are proud to launch the Climate Innovation Challenge, which will provide Google Cloud research credits to advance a better understanding of climate resilience and promising solutions to address urgent climate challenges. I’m excited about this launch. We need to get smarter about the inevitable impact of our changing climate and how it will reshape our lives, supply chains, and business. Sustainability is a business-critical agenda, and we need intelligent technologies, leadership, and collaboration to drive industry transformations and reach a net-zero world.
The innovation and scale required to solve the toughest climate challenges will come from technology. At Google Cloud, we’re working across industries to increase climate resilience, applying cloud technology to help solve key challenges in the fight against climate change. Nonprofits, scientists, and organizations will be key in developing new research and innovations that will help us better understand how we can accelerate action on climate.
Through the new program, individual climate researchers in higher education and not-for-profit research organizations can apply for Google Cloud credit grants of up to $100,000 to accelerate their projects with Google’s state-of-the-art, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) cloud services, from Google Earth Engine (EE) to Google Public Datasets like the one from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We will work with specialist partners in environmental organizations, agriculture, and carbon reduction to help evaluate proposals and select participants. Our first partner is the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). Alongside the cloud credits, we will also provide researchers with access to technical training and mentoring, to help jumpstart their work.
From idea to insight to impact
In 2021, researchers at 500 universities in 47 countries received Google Cloud research credit grants. Others received funding through the Google Cloud Research Innovators Program, which promotes collaboration among a global cohort of scientists and provides them with professional opportunities and technical expertise. Here are some of the Research Innovators who have already advanced their climate research with Google Cloud:
- At CalTech Tapio Schneider and his team built Climate Machine, a next-generation open-source Earth System Model that will integrate more earth and atmospheric data than ever before.
- At UCLA, Bo Zhou uses EE for remote sensor modeling to help bureaus of land management make conservation decisions.
- At the University of New England, James Brinkhoff conducts spatial and temporal analysis for agriculture crop modeling and water use with data from EE.
- At Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), Richard Fernandes is developing the LEAF toolbox to map and assess vegetation with satellite data from EE.
- At the University of Toronto, Yuhong He uses EE to map changes occurring in natural and managed ecosystems systems using remote sensing, machine learning, and ecosystem modelings.
- At UCLA, Henry Houskeeper uses machine learning with EE’s satellite imagery to automate detection of kelp forests.
- At the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Jonghyun Lee conducts numerical modeling for water resources with Google Colab.
- At Technical University in Dublin, Santos Fernández Noguerol runs functions to collect weather data from governmental agencies, then automatically stores them in Google Cloud Storage buckets for future spatial analysis.
- At the University of Colorado at Denver, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani conducts data science projects with applications for Intelligent Transportation and Earth Sciences.
To apply for a Climate Innovation Challenge grant, click here and include “Climate Innovation Challenge” as the first line of your proposal. We will announce additional focus areas, partnerships, and recipients throughout the year. Click here to learn more about Google Cloud sustainability.
Evernote Ditches Private Cloud for Google Cloud and Improves Performance and Uptime
DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY4376
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
More than 200 million Evernote users now more securely store billions of notes and attachments—the equivalent of roughly 10 copies of every modern book ever published. The company’s private cloud was no longer enough to scale to support such a dynamic infrastructure, so Evernote migrated its service to Google Cloud Platform and closed its data center, allowing employees to focus on product innovation instead of maintenance.
Evernote moved 5 billion notes and 12 billion attachment files to Google Cloud Platform, an endeavor that was expected to take 9-12 months. Evernote used the Google Professional Services team to guide it through solution planning, architecting, and migrating 3.5PB of data in only 70 days, and with minimal customer impact.
Customers benefit from the data processing power of Google Cloud Platform and are enjoying noticeable performance boosts. And because Google Cloud Platform encrypts customer data stored at rest by default, Evernote offers increased security, giving customers peace of mind that their data is safe.
And rather than pouring resources into day-to-day infrastructure maintenance and monitoring, Evernote’s employees can now focus more time and energy into developing new features and responding to customer needs.
3585
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Sky News live streamed the results from 150 of the 650 constituency counts in the U.K. while competitors, who did not have live video from as many counts, had to wait for slower independent data services to report the results. Sky News also delivered all the live streams over the Internet via YouTube, providing a service that none of its competitors offered.
Sky News faced a unique set of technical challenges in order to stream video from the constituency counting stations to YouTube and for TV broadcast. For streams to be used on air and be made simultaneously live via YouTube, each stream needed to be delivered to both Youtube and the Sky News studios. The streams from the field could not simply be sent to a receive server in the Sky News studios, as would be done for a regular news live.
So the company turned to Google Compute Engine, because it could quickly and affordably create virtual servers to process all incoming data streams. Sky News didn’t have to set up physical servers and connections.
8 Must-Have Google Cloud Products for Startups
3180
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Startups worldwide turn to Google Cloud tools to build fast on a strong and easy to use platform that helps them get to market and launch products faster, all while building on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Startups leverage Google Cloud and our Google for Startups Cloud Program to go from idea to IPO, and there are a variety of products on Google Cloud that can help them.
Here are the 8 top products that startups use on Google Cloud to innovate and grow:
Firebase for app development
Speed up innovation with Firebase, a mobile development platform that’s fully integrated with Google Cloud. Work in a simpler cloud environment, easily pull in products or services, and build your apps faster.
Cloud SQL for database needs
Build your startup’s foundation with Cloud SQL, a fully managed relational database solution that integrates with Google Cloud services. Create and connect to your first database in minutes and scale with a single API call.
AI and machine learning products
Solve tough problems with AI and machine learning products, built with the best of Google’s technology. Train deep learning and machine learning models cost-effectively so you can iterate and innovate faster.
BigQuery for data analytics
Drive agility with BigQuery, a serverless, cost-effective, multi-cloud data warehouse. Query streaming data in real time, predict business outcomes with built-in machine learning, and share analytics with just a few clicks.
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for containers
Unlock faster, more secure app development with GKE, the most scalable Kubernetes platform. Streamline operations with release channels that fit your business needs and leave cluster monitoring to Google engineers.
Looker for data visualization
Get more from your data to keep moving ahead of the competition with Looker, a trusted business intelligence and data platform. Generate real-time reports and get insights at the right time with proactive alerts.
Cloud Run for serverless computing
Create scalable containerized apps in any programming language on Cloud Run, a fully managed compute platform. Pair it with container tools like Cloud Build and Docker, and only pay when your code is running.
Cloud Armor for security
Protect your startup from Web attacks with Cloud Armor, a leading Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDOS) defense service. Use it with an HTTP Load Balancer for Managed Instance Groups across regions to keep your workloads highly available and secure.
To learn more about products best-suited to the unique demands of startups, check out our startups solution page. Our team is looking forward to discussing how these products can help you. If you’re not already in the program, you can get started here.
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.
Finding Your Favorite Google Cloud Product is Now Easy!
3319
Of your peers have already read this article.
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Welcome to a new way of exploring Google Cloud products. Finding your favorite products and discovering new ones requires a user interface that’s easy-to-use, clear, informative, and delightful. Google Cloud users have primarily used our side menu to navigate, but with almost one hundred products and growing, it’s safe to say our product list has outgrown the side menu. Over time, we have listened long and hard to feedback from Google Cloud users, who have highlighted challenges navigating the console to explore our products. We’ve heard over and over that it’s difficult and time consuming to scroll through the long list of products and remember what each one offers.
That’s why we created a new All products page to help you easily navigate to your favorite Google Cloud products. This page showcases all of the Google Cloud products as well as our key partner products in one, easy-to-navigate place. With one click, you can discover the right product that is right for your solution.
Explore all Google Cloud products
The page is organized into different categories, including Management (ie. IAM, Billing), Compute, Storage, Operations, Security, CI/CD, Artificial Intelligence, Support, and more. Quickly jump to the category of interest through the panel on the left, or you can scroll the entire page. Then you can click each product name to navigate directly to the product homepage. Each product listing also includes a short and long description so you can quickly understand what a product does and whether it fits your needs. This lets you compare categories at-a-glance, saving you the hassle of digging up product overviews elsewhere.
Under each product, you’ll also find a link to documentation and Quickstarts so you can understand it in more depth and try it out right away, removing the extra step of navigating to documentation in another tab.
Customize your navigation
To make navigation even easier, you can pin products directly from the All products page, and they will show up at the top of your side menu. You can also customize your navigation by reordering your pins in the side menu. That way, you can quickly access your most-used products directly from the side menu instead of scrolling through the panel or the All products page.
Save time and get more done faster
With the new All products page you can save time scrolling and cut straight to the good stuff – finding your products, discovering new ones, learning, and getting hands on. Try it out for yourself by heading to the Google Cloud Console. Click the side panel and click “View All products,” or on the home dashboard you’ll see a call out to try out the All products page.
If you have any feedback about this new experience, I want to hear! Reach out to me on Twitter at @stephr_wong or on Linkedin at stephrwong.
G R Infraprojects Limited Turns to Google Cloud to Run Business-Critical SAP S/4HANA
3488
Of your peers have already read this article.
4:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Road construction is booming in India. A recent report prepared by the India Brand Equity Foundation—a trust established by the Department of Commerce—pointed out that in FY 2019 alone, the country added 10,855 kilometers of highways to a road network that spans 5.89 million kilometers. This network is the second largest in the world and transports 90% of passenger traffic and 64.5% of all goods in the country.
The Indian Government has also earmarked road construction as key to plans to increase the nation’s GDP to $5 trillion in coming years, targeting road construction worth $212.8 billion in the two years from April 2020.
G R Infraprojects Limited is well positioned to support the government’s program. The business, which started as a contractor building roads in rural villages in India, now specializes in road engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), a model whereby private construction firms build roads funded by the government.
The business now undertakes the processing of bitumen, manufacture of thermoplastic road-marking paint and road signage, and fabrication and galvanizing road-crash barriers. Its in-house integration model includes a design and engineering team, as well as manufacturing facilities in Rajasthan, Assam, and Gujarat.
The business recently expanded into rail—another area expected to benefit from extensive government investment—with its competencies including earthworks, materials supply, track lining, and bridge construction.
In this environment—and despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic—G R Infraprojects Limited aims to substantially increase turnover and manpower over the next five years.
Best-in-class infrastructure key to success
Digital transformation is key to enabling growth while best-in-class IT infrastructure is one of the foundations on which the business seeks to build success.
G R Infraprojects Limited’s digital initiatives include deployment of a new document management system and corporate systems that enable remote monitoring, live tracking, effective real-time communication, and efficient data management.
Providing a scalable, reliable cost-effective infrastructure
But most important of all is providing a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure to support a business-critical SAP enterprise resource planning system. Over the last few years, versions of SAP have enabled the organization to digitize processes and seamlessly run business-critical functions such as inventory management and finance.
G R Infraprojects Limited initially went live with SAP ECC6.0, with a few hundred team members using the system for business-critical tasks such as tracking stock level and movement and generating financial statements and reports for review and action.
“Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Lowering maintenance costs
However, as G R Infraprojects Limited grew, projects proliferated, and new markets emerged, the business elected to move to the cloud from an on-premises infrastructure. “We wanted to move because there were so many maintenance costs in on-premises solutions and cloud provided convenience to IT and the broader organization,” explains Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation at G R Infraprojects Limited.
The business also wanted to move to SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of features such as AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning to transform business processes. The system runs on the HANA database, an in-memory database with fast processing speeds and a simplified data model.
G R Infraprojects Limited selected Google Cloud to run SAP S/4HANA because, Sachin says, it is “much better than any other platform,” incorporates a wide range of features, and meets uptime requirements. The cloud service could also scale to support forecast growth without a sharp increase in cost.
Furthermore, Sachin adds, “Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”
“With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day. With such a scalable and dynamic platform, we are very happy with the performance.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Successful transition with Infrabeat
G R Infraprojects Limited completed the project with assistance from partner InfraBeat over three months and SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud went live mid-2019. “Our dedicated SAP team worked closely with Infrabeat to deliver the project successfully,” says Sachin. “We needed an experienced partner to assist with the implementation process and Infrabeat performed that role admirably. Both teams supported each other and worked to plan to deliver a great result.”
SAP S/4HANA runs on an infrastructure comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud NAT to enable the secure transmission and receipt of packets to and from the internet.
G R Infraprojects Limited estimates the cost of running SAP S/4 HANA in Google Cloud is significantly lower than on alternative infrastructure options—freeing up budget for other business priorities.
In addition, moving SAP S/4 HANA to infrastructure as a service through Google Cloud has eliminated the need to assign internal team members to infrastructure management, allowing them instead to focus on higher-value activities.
Google Cloud also incorporates the security needed to protect the data and processes of SAP S/4 HANA from intrusion or disruption and ensure the uptime and continuity required of a business-critical system.
Optimized speed and availability
G R Infraprojects Limited’s decision to run SAP S/4 HANA on Google Cloud is delivering benefits on a daily basis. “With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day,” says Sachin. “We are very happy with the performance.”
Success with SAP S/4HANA has helped the business decide to move its remaining apps and data to the cloud when its on-premises servers and other equipment reach end of life. G R Infraprojects Limited is already running Active Directory in Google Cloud and Sachin says the cloud platform’s “fast and excellent services” made the decision easy.
“There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited
Adding value
As G R Infraprojects Limited grows, Sachin adds, the business expects Google Cloud to continue to add value. “There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
Google Cloud’s Role in Minimizing Memory Errors Impact for SAP Customers
Every cloud system begins with high-quality hardware infrastructure. Sometimes, however, hardware breaks — and when it happens, our most important goal is to minimize the impact on our customers and their cloud workloads. Memory errors are the most common type of hardware failure, and they're also one of the most
Dataflow Guarantees 50+% Increase in Developer Productivity and Infrastructure Cost Savings: Read More
In our conversations with technology leaders about data-driven transformation using Google Data Cloud - industry’s leading unified data and AI solution - , one important topic is incorporating continuous intelligence to move from answering questions such as “What has happened? to questions like “What is happening?” and “What might happen?”.
WPP Innovates with the Cloud
Unlocking the Power of Data and Creativity withthe Cloud: The WPP Story
The Indian COO’s Guide to Modernizing the Business for 2021
Everything COOs need to know to make an informed decisionabout migrating and modernizing their businesses’ coretechnology estate to the cloud.
