Many people start a small business that aligns with their passions, but soon discover the day-to-day running of a business is very different than anticipated. Dealing with accounting, finance, and other daily activities can quickly overwhelm even the most promising of new businesses.

Recognizing the unique challenges facing small businesses, we founded Beany. With our personalized accounting platform, small business owners can relax knowing that we will look after all their compliance and advisory needs. Business owners who use Beany also benefit because they end up freeing more time to focus on what they enjoy and do best—likely the main reasons they started their business in the first place. We prepare financial statements, minimize tax and keep an eye that our clients are paying the right amount at the right time. We also advise on business purchase and sale, valuations and forecasting for banks. In fact, we do everything that a business owner needs from their accountant, including a help desk filled with domain experts to provide free & unlimited advice and support. 

As we expand our team, we’ll continue to introduce new solutions, services, and integrations that make it even easier for small businesses to prioritize business planning, balance budgets, and keep up with ever-changing tax laws. We also plan to launch Beany in new markets and extend our global footprint beyond New Zealand, Australia, and the UK.    

Migrating and scaling Beany

Beany was initially developed and hosted on a virtual private server (VPS) with limited capabilities. As our subscriber base grew, we realized we needed a more scalable, secure solution to eliminate downtime and deliver a reliable customer experience. We also understood it would be challenging for our small engineering team to cost-effectively test and deploy new features without a more agile development environment. 

With that in mind, we chose the secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud to power Beany and help us scale our innovative accounting platform. We now use Compute Engine to cost-effectively create virtual machines (VMs) that automatically select optimal amounts of processing and memory. 

In addition, we encrypt, store, and archive everything on highly secure Cloud Storage, leveraging a combination of solid-state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs) for hot, nearline, and coldline data. With Cloud Storage, we can replicate data between regions in under 15 minutes to enable rapid recovery and business continuity. This has been really useful moving images to data centers on the other side of the planet quickly as we primarily operate out of Sydney and London. 

We also connect, create, and collaborate on Google Workspace using Google Gmail, Docs, Calendar, and Meet. Beany smoothly integrates with Google Sheets to provide live reporting from our application direct to our sales, marketing and support staff. It also makes sharing account data with our accounting clients easy and secure.

Analyzing financial data with Google Cloud AI and machine learning

Joining the Google for Startups Cloud Program gave us immediate access to Google Cloud credits which we use to cost-effectively trial and deploy additional Google Cloud solutions. We continue to evaluate Cloud Code which will help our developers more efficiently create, deploy, and integrate applications directly on Google Cloud. We’re also exploring how Google Cloud AI and machine learning products such as Vertex AI and AutoML can further revolutionize accounting with advanced financial analyses and end-to-end automation of business processes.

We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we grow our team and introduce new services and solutions that enable small businesses to streamline operations, lower costs, and increase profits. It’s exciting to help small business owners manage accounting and financial planning so they can spend more time doing what they love and realize their business vision.

Beany team members

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.

Organizations across industries are looking to AI to turn troves of data into intelligence, powered by the latest advances in generative AI. Yet for many organizations, there is a barrier to adopting the latest models because they can be costly to train or serve. A new class of cloud GPUs is needed to lower the cost of entry for businesses that want to tap the power of AI. 

Today, we’re introducing G2, the newest addition to the Compute Engine GPU family in Google Cloud. G2 is the industry’s first cloud VM powered by the newly announced NVIDIA L4 Tensor Core GPU, and is purpose-built for large inference AI workloads like generative AI. G2 delivers cutting-edge performance-per-dollar for AI inference workloads that run on GPUs in the cloud. By switching from NVIDIA A10G GPUs to G2 instances with L4 GPUs, organizations can lower their production infrastructure costs up to 40%. We also found that customers switching from NVIDIA T4 GPUs to L4 GPUs can achieve 2x-4x better performance. As a universal GPU offering, G2 instances also help accelerate other workloads, offering significant performance improvements on HPC, graphics, and video transcoding. Currently in private preview, G2 VMs are both powerful and flexible, and scale easily from one up to eight GPUs. 

Currently organizations require end-to-end enterprise ready infrastructure that will future proof their AI and HPC initiatives for a new era. G2s will be ready to be deployed on Vertex AI, GKE, and GCE, giving customers the freedom to architect their own custom software stack to meet their performance requirements and budget. With optimized Vertex AI support for G2 VMs, AI users can tap the latest generative AI models and technologies. With an easy to use UI and automated workflows, customers can access, tune and serve modern models for video, text, images, and audio without the toil of manual optimizations. The combination of these services with the power of G2 will help customers harness the power of complex machine models for their business.

NVIDIA L4 GPUs with Ada Lovelace Architecture

G2 machine families enable machine learning customers to run their production infrastructure in the cloud for a variety of applications such as language models, image classification, object detection, automated speech recognition, and language translation. Built on the Ada Lovelace architecture with fourth-generation Tensor Cores, the NVIDIA L4 GPU provides up to 30 TFLOPS of performance for FP32, and 242 TFLOPs for FP16. Newly added FP8 support, on top of existing INT8, BFLOAT16 and TF32 capabilities, makes the L4 ideal for ML inference. 

With the latest third-generation RT Cores and DLSS 3.0 technology, G2 instances are also great for graphics-intensive workloads such as rendering and remote workstations when paired with NVIDIA RTX Virtual Workstation. NVIDIA L4 provides 3x video encoding and decoding performance, and adds new AV1 hardware-encoding capabilities. For example, G2 can enable gaming customers running game engines such as Unreal and Unity with modern graphics cards to run real-time applications. Likewise, media and entertainment customers that need GPU-enabled virtual workstations can use the L4 to create photo-realistic, high-resolution 3D content for movies, games, and AR/VR experiences using applications such as Autodesk Maya or 3D Studio Max.

What customers are saying

A handful of early customers have been testing G2 and have seen great results in real-world applications. Here are what some of them have to say about the benefits that G2 with NVIDIA L4 GPUs bring:

AppLovin

AppLovin enables developers and marketers to grow with market leading technologies. Businesses rely on AppLovin to solve their mission-critical functions with a powerful, full stack solution including user acquisition, retention, monetization and measurement.

“AppLovin serves billions of AI powered recommendations per day, so scalability and value are essential to our business,” said Omer Hasan, Vice President, Operations at AppLovin. “With Google Cloud’s G2 we’re seeing that NVIDIA L4 GPUs offer a significant increase in the scalability of our business, giving us the power to grow faster than ever before.”

WOMBO

WOMBO aims to unleash everyone’s creativity through the magic of AI, transforming the way content is created, consumed, and distributed. 

“WOMBO relies upon the latest AI technology for people to create immersive digital artwork from users’ prompts, letting them create high-quality, realistic art in any style with just an idea,” said Ben-Zion Benkhin, Co-Founder and CEO of WOMBO. “Google Cloud’s G2 instances powered by NVIDIA’s L4 GPUs will enable us to offer a better, more efficient image-generation experience for users seeking to create and share unique artwork.”

Descript

Descript’s AI-powered features and intuitive interface fuel YouTube and TikTok channels, top podcasts, and businesses using video for marketing, sales, and internal training and collaboration. Descript aims to make video a staple of every communicator’s toolkit, alongside docs and slides. 

“G2 with L4’s AI Video capabilities allow us to deploy new features augmented by natural-language processing and generative AI to create studio-quality media with excellent performance and energy efficiency” said Kundan Kumar, Head of Artificial Intelligence at Descript.

Workspot

Workspot believes that the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model is the most secure, accessible and cost-effective way to deliver an enterprise desktop and should be central to accelerating the digital transformation of the modern enterprise.

“The Workspot team looks forward to continuing to evolve our partnership with Google Cloud and NVIDIA. Our customers have been seeing incredible performance leveraging NVIDIA’s T4 GPUs. The new G2 instances with L4 GPUS through Workspot’s remote Cloud PC workstations provide 2x and higher frame rates at 1280×711 and higher resolutions” said Jimmy Chang, Chief Product Officer at Workspot.

Pricing and availability

G2 instances are currently in private preview in the following regions: us-central1, asia-southeast1 and europe-west4. Submit your request here to join the private preview, or to receive a notification as when the public preview begins. Support will be coming to Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Vertex AI, and other Google Cloud services as well. We’ll share G2 public availability and pricing information later in the year.

Did you know that by 2025, enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake traditional IT spending? In fact, 51% of IT spend in application software, infrastructure software, business process services, and system infrastructure will transition to the public cloud, compared to 41% in 20221.. As enterprises continue to rapidly shift to the cloud, government agencies must prioritize and accelerate security and compliance implementation.

In May 2021, the White House issued an Executive Order requiring US Federal agencies to accelerate cloud adoption, embrace security best practices, develop plans to implement Zero Trust architectures, and map implementation frameworks to FedRAMP. The Administration’s focus on secure cloud adoption marks a critical shift to prioritizing cybersecurity at scale. Google Cloud’s Public Sector Professional Services Organization (PSO) has committed to helping customers meet security and compliance requirements in the cloud through specialized consulting engagements.

Accelerating Authority to Operate (ATO)

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) was established in 2011 as a government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across the federal government. FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies. US Federal agencies are required to utilize and implement FedRAMP cloud service offerings as part of the “Cloud First” federal cloud computing strategy.

While Google Cloud provides a FedRAMP-authorized cloud services platform and a robust catalog of FedRAMP-approved products and services (92 services and counting), customers are still tasked with achieving Agency ATO for the products and services they use, and Google Cloud provides many resources to assist customers with this journey. Google Cloud’s FedRAMP package can be accessed by completing the FedRAMP Package Access Request Form and submitting it to info@fedramp.gov. Additionally, customers can use Google’s NIST 800-53 ATO Accelerator as a starting point for documenting control implementation. Finally, Google Cloud’s Public Sector PSO offers the following strategic consulting engagements to help customers streamline the Agency ATO process.

• Cloud Discover: FedRAMP is a six-week interactive workshop to support customers that are just getting started with the ATO process on Google Cloud. Customers are educated on FedRAMP fundamentals, Google’s security and compliance posture, and how to approach ATO on Google Cloud. Through deep-dive interviews and design sessions, PSO helps customers craft an actionable ATO plan, assess FedRAMP readiness, and develop a conceptual ATO boundary. This engagement helps organizations establish a clear understanding and roadmap for FedRAMP ATO on Google Cloud.
• FedRAMP Security Review is a ten to twelve week engagement that aids customers in FedRAMP operational readiness. PSO consultants perform detailed FedRAMP architecture reviews to identify potential gaps in NIST 800-53 security control implementation and Google Cloud secure architecture best practices. Findings from the security reviews are shared with the customer along with configuration guidance and recommendations. This engagement helps organizations prepare for the third-party or independent security assessment that is required for FedRAMP ATO.
• Cloud Deploy: FedRAMP is a multi-month engagement designed to help customers document the details of their FedRAMP System Security Plan (SSP) and corresponding NIST 800-53 security controls, in preparation for Agency ATO on Google Cloud at FedRAMP Low, Moderate, or High. PSO collaborates with customers to develop a detailed technical infrastructure design document and security control matrix capturing evidence of the FedRAMP system architecture, security control implementation, data flows and system components. PSO can also partner with a third-party assessment organization (3PAO) or an independent assessor (IA) to support customer efforts for FedRAMP security assessment. This engagement helps customer system owners prepare for Agency ATO assessment and package submission.

Developing a Zero Trust Strategy

In addition to providing FedRAMP enablement, Public Sector PSO has partnered with the Google Cloud Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) team to assist organizations with developing a zero trust architecture and strategy.

Zero Trust Foundations is a seven-week engagement co-delivered by Google Cloud’s CISO and PSO teams. CISO and PSO educate customers on zero trust fundamentals, Google’s journey to zero trust through BeyondCorp, and defense in depth best practices. The CISO team walks customers through a Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA) to understand the organization’s current security posture and maturity. Insights from the ZTA enable the CISO team to work with the customer to identify an ideal first-mover workload for zero trust adoption. Following the CISO ZTA, PSO facilitates a deep-dive Zero Trust Workshop (ZTW), collaborating with key customer stakeholders to develop a NIST 800-207 aligned, cloud-agnostic zero trust architecture for the identified first-mover workload. The zero trust architecture is part of a comprehensive zero trust strategy deliverable that is based on focus areas called out in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Federal Zero Trust Strategy released January 2022.

Scaling Secure Cloud Adoption with PSO

Public Sector PSO enables customer success by sharing our technical expertise, providing cloud strategy, implementation guidance, training and enablement using our proven methodology. As enterprise IT, operations, and organizational models continue to evolve, our goal is to help government agencies accelerate their security and compliance journeys in the cloud. To learn more about the work we are doing with the federal government, visit cloud.google.com/solutions/federal-government.

1 Gartner Says More Than Half of Enterprise IT Spending in Key Market Segments Will Shift to the Cloud by 2025

Want to know the latest from Google Cloud? Find it here in one handy location. Check back regularly for our newest updates, announcements, resources, events, learning opportunities, and more. 

Tip: Not sure where to find what you’re looking for on the Google Cloud blog? Start here: Google Cloud blog 101: Full list of topics, links, and resources.

Week of May 24-May 28 2021

• Google Cloud for financial services: driving your transformation cloud journey–As we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’re sharing more on how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. Read more or watch the summit on demand.
• Introducing Datashare solution for financial services–We announced the general availability of Datashare for financial services, a new Google Cloud solution that brings together the entire capital markets ecosystem—data publishers and data consumers—to exchange market data securely and easily. Read more.
• Announcing Datastream in Preview–Datastream, a serverless change data capture (CDC) and replication service, allows enterprises to synchronize data across heterogeneous databases, storage systems, and applications reliably and with minimal latency to support real-time analytics, database replication, and event-driven architectures. Read more.
• Introducing Dataplex: An intelligent data fabric for analytics at scale–Dataplex provides a way to centrally manage, monitor, and govern your data across data lakes, data warehouses and data marts, and make this data securely accessible to a variety of analytics and data science tools. Read more. 
• Announcing Dataflow Prime–Available in Preview in Q3 2021, Dataflow Prime is a new platform based on a serverless, no-ops, auto-tuning architecture built to bring unparalleled resource utilization and radical operational simplicity to big data processing. Dataflow Prime builds on Dataflow and brings new user benefits with innovations in resource utilization and distributed diagnostics. The new capabilities in Dataflow significantly reduce the time spent on infrastructure sizing and tuning tasks, as well as time spent diagnosing data freshness problems. Read more.
• Secure and scalable sharing for data and analytics with Analytics Hub–With Analytics Hub, available in Preview in Q3, organizations get a rich data ecosystem by publishing and subscribing to analytics-ready datasets; control and monitoring over how their data is being used; a self-service way to access valuable and trusted data assets; and an easy way to monetize their data assets without the overhead of building and managing the infrastructure. Read more.
• Cloud Spanner trims entry cost by 90%–Coming soon to Preview, granular instance sizing in Spanner lets organizations run workloads at as low as 1/10th the cost of regular instances, equating to approximately $65/month. Read more.
• Cloud Bigtable lifts SLA and adds new security features for regulated industries–Bigtable instances with a multi-cluster routing policy across 3 or more regions are now covered by a 99.999% monthly uptime percentage under the new SLA. In addition, new Data Access audit logs can help determine whether sensitive customer information has been accessed in the event of a security incident, and if so, when, and by whom. Read more.
• Build a no-code journaling app–In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, Google Cloud’s no-code application development platform, AppSheet, demonstrates how you can build a journaling app complete with titles, time stamps, mood entries, and more. Learn how with this blog and video here.
• New features in Security Command Center—On May 24th, Security Command Center Premium launched the general availability of granular access controls at project- and folder-level and Center for Internet Security (CIS) 1.1 benchmarks for Google Cloud Platform Foundation. These new capabilities enable organizations to improve their security posture and efficiently manage risk for their Google Cloud environment. Learn more.
• Simplified API operations with AI–Google Cloud’s API management platform Apigee applies Google’s industry leading ML and AI to your API metadata. Understand how it works with anomaly detection here.
• This week: Data Cloud and Financial Services Summits–Our Google Cloud Summit series begins this week with the Data Cloud Summit on Wednesday May 26 (Global). At this half-day event, you’ll learn how leading companies like PayPal, Workday, Equifax, and many others are driving competitive differentiation using Google Cloud technologies to build their data clouds and transform data into value that drives innovation. The following day, Thursday May 27 (Global & EMEA) at the Financial Services Summit, discover how Google Cloud is helping financial institutions such as PayPal, Global Payments, HSBC, Credit Suisse, AXA Switzerland and more unlock new possibilities and accelerate business through innovation. Read more and explore the entire summit series.
• Announcing the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th–With a surge of new gamers and an increase in time spent playing games in the last year, it’s more important than ever for game developers to delight and engage players. To help developers with this opportunity, the games teams at Google are back to announce the return of the Google for Games Developer Summit 2021 on July 12th-13th. Hear from experts across Google about new game solutions they’re building to make it easier for you to continue creating great games, connecting with players and scaling your business. Registration is free and open to all game developers. Register for the free online event at g.co/gamedevsummit to get more details in the coming weeks. We can’t wait to share our latest innovations with the developer community. Learn more.