COVID-19 drastically changed the way consumers purchased goods and services, but these changes merely accelerated trends that were well underway. While many retailers were caught off guard with the suddenness of the transition, most are stepping up their cloud transformation initiatives in response to changes in consumer behavior and expectations — changes that are likely to be permanent. These retailers realize they need to migrate on-premises workloads to the cloud to achieve the speed and responsiveness required to better promote their products, expand customer support, predict demand levels, and meet ever-rising customer expectations. The trick will be to do so as quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively as possible while minimizing disruption.  By leveraging solutions such as Google Cloud VMware Engine, retailers can move their on-premises applications to the cloud, where they can achieve the scale, intelligence, and speed required to stay relevant and competitive. 

Gaining the cloud advantage

In a recent survey from MIT¹, 75% of retail IT leaders said the pandemic had accelerated their digital transformation projects to improve business processes, increase operational efficiency, and enhance customer experience. Cloud computing is at the heart of digital transformation. It gives retailers the scale, analytical power, and agility they need to respond to the increasing pace of change. By migrating IT resources to the cloud, retailers can develop and deploy innovative mobile apps, virtualize costly services such as call centers, automate business processes, and analyze massive volumes of data to improve the speed and accuracy of demand forecasts. Running applications in the cloud enables business managers and IT departments to replicate the functions of their on-premises system without changes, so that employees, customers, and partners can access those systems from anywhere and at any time. Operating in the cloud also allows retailers to avoid many of the limitations of legacy systems that may have been holding them back. 

These are just some of the capabilities that retailers gain when they migrate their applications and data to the cloud: 

• Build new revenue streams with omnichannel shopping that runs on the speed and reliability of cloud infrastructure.
• Leverage artificial intelligence and data analytics available in the cloud. Use Google Cloud’s BigQuery to run AI-powered forecasting models to predict demand and plan sales, orders, and other activities with greater precision. Deploy Recommendations AI, to deliver highly personalized product recommendations to your customers at scale.
• Improve operational efficiency with a highly scalable and elastic environment that lets you pay for the compute and storage you need instead of making major investments in physical infrastructure up front.
• Improve customer experience by analyzing behavior and other data to offer customers what they want, when they want it; build personalized mobile and web applications and provide real-time information to customer service and floor staff so they can address customer concerns quickly and effectively.
• Reduce costs by deploying AI-powered agents to help customers solve straightforward issues on their own and automate mundane back-office processes to let your team focus on more value-add work. 
• Safeguard customer data with Google Cloud’s multi-layer, secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network.
• Improve control with integrated cloud management tools that enable IT staff to oversee the whole stack — across on-premises systems and cloud in a single location.

Easy lift and shift with Google Cloud VMware Engine

Retailers do not need to deploy entirely new applications to take advantage of Google Cloud. Rather, they can move their back-office applications and other business systems into the cloud as-is, without the need to rewrite a line of code. 

Google Cloud VMware Engine enables businesses to migrate or extend their on-premises workloads and applications seamlessly to the cloud. This means that IT managers can move their existing applications into the cloud in just a few minutes without having to rebuild them. From there, retailers can run their existing applications — including point-of-sale (POS) systems, virtual desktops, and other devices — just as they did when those applications were installed in the store or office. 

Google Cloud VMware Engine creates a software-defined infrastructure that natively runs VMware workloads without any changes to current tools. That infrastructure includes computing power, storage, network connections, and security services that are dedicated to the individual customer.

Cloud infrastructure for new retail realities

COVID-19 was a wakeup call for many retailers who realized they needed to energize their transformation initiatives in response to permanent shifts in consumer behavior and expectations. Essential to this transformation is getting to the cloud as quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible, without creating costly disruptions or downtime. Google Cloud VMware Engine lets retailers do exactly that with a straightforward lift-and-shift process that takes just a few minutes. Once in the cloud, retailers can take advantage of the many capabilities Google Cloud offers, including sophisticated data analytics, improved customer experience, enterprise-grade security, and reduced cost.

Read our retail white paper to learn more about how easy it is to migrate your retail IT systems to the cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine

^{1. MIT Technology Review Insights’ survey on COVID-19 and its impact on technology, in association with VMware; N=100 Retail Senior Technology and Business leaders Worldwide.}

Reliably executing tasks on a schedule is critical for everything from data engineering, to infrastructure management, and application maintenance. Today, we are thrilled to announce that Google Cloud Scheduler, our enterprise-grade scheduling service, is now available in more GCP regions and multiple regions can now be used from a single project removing the prior limit of a single region per project.

With many enterprise customers deploying complex distributed cloud systems, Cloud Scheduler has helped solve the problem of single-server cron scheduling being a single point of failure. With this update you are now able to create Scheduler jobs across distinct cloud regions that can help satisfy cross-regional availability and fail-over scenarios. 

Furthermore, you are no longer required to create an AppEngine application in order to use Cloud Scheduler. For existing Cloud Scheduler jobs, it is safe to disable the AppEngine application within the project. Jobs will continue to function without an AppEngine application. 

Creating jobs in different regions is easy. You simply pick the location where you would like your job to run. For example you can specify a location when creating a job through the gcloud command line :

HTTP Targets

  gcloud scheduler jobs create http <job-name> 
--location <cloud-region>
--schedule <cron-schedule> 
--uri <target-uri>

Pub/Sub Topics

  gcloud scheduler jobs create pubsub <job-name> 
--location <cloud-region>
--schedule <cron-schedule>
--topic <topic-name>
(--message-body <message-body> | --message-body-from-file <file-path>)

AppEngine Services

  gcloud scheduler jobs create app-engine <job-name>
--location <cloud-region> 
--schedule <cron-schedule>

Or you can pick a location when creating a job through the Cloud Console:

Google Cloud Scheduler is now available in 23 GCP Regions,  and this number is expected to grow in the future. You can always find an up-to-date list of available regions by running:

  gcloud scheduler locations list

We hope you are as excited about this launch as we are. Please reach out to us with any suggestions or questions in our public issue tracker.

Google Cloud’s partnership with Sky Group, one of Europe’s largest media and entertainment companies, dates back more than four years to when Sky first became a Google Cloud customer moving diagnostic data from millions of its Sky Q TV boxes to its Google Cloud data platform.

In June 2019, a few years into their cloud adoption journey, Sky was faced with a challenge they had anticipated from the start. Their recent bill across all major cloud providers had been increasing rapidly, reaching their planned yearly budget after only six months. Sky wasn’t sure if they’d undershot their forecasts, if they were overspending, or both.

“In the beginning, we were given a brief to investigate internal cloud spend with the aim of finding out where we could make savings, but in reality we didn’t know what we would expect to find,” said Nathan King, a cloud architect in the Cloud Enablement Center and now Head of Cloud Financial Management (FinOps) at Sky since the start of 2020.

Nathan assembled a small team who started to explore Google Cloud spend using the Cloud Billing tool. At first, they drilled into their biggest Google Cloud cost categories and discovered some immediate cost optimizations with BigQuery, Compute Engine and Cloud Storage. Over the course of the next six months, through careful analysis, they managed to find over $1.5m in immediate savings, exceeding expectations.

Yet they soon realized this was just the tip of the iceberg—it was clear there were millions of pounds more savings to be made, but actually achieving them at scale would require careful planning. “We formed a FinOps function to target these savings, but with 600 to 700 projects for Google Cloud alone, spanning four Google Cloud organizations, it would have been a manual process and difficult for teams to digest our recommendations,” Nathan said.

After attending a Google-led FinOps workshop and shaping their FinOps strategy, Nathan’s team focused on iterating through the FinOps lifecycle phases of Inform, Optimize, Operate and generating savings over time. Here’s how they did it:

Inform: Make Information Visible

The first step was focused on developing a clear vision for cost allocation and recharge, which required partnering closely with the finance, procurement and tax teams (particularly for international and affiliates) to understand the supporting business logic and processes. With a lot of hard work, the team managed to break down barriers to implement and embed new processes into broader business functions like finance.

WIth the recharge model in place, the team ran a number of pilots to find the right FinOps tooling to meet their needs. They ran a number of pilots, including using Data Studio and visualizing BigQuery exports. Given their ambitions to scale across the enterprise globally, the team chose Google Cloud’s Looker to realize their vision, building intuitive dashboards to visualize spend and recommendations across all cloud providers. “We wanted one view across all clouds, where customers can dynamically see cloud spend and intelligent optimization recommendations in just one place,” Nathan said.

After less than three weeks of development, the Looker dashboards were ready to go and have been a game changer ever since. “The moment our leadership and different departments started seeing the Looker dashboards, the value we were adding as a FinOps team became immediately clear,” Nathan said.

There are different report pages for each stakeholder group, each custom developed and automated using Looker and BigQuery. The BigQuery Optimization page, for example, provides insights on Slots consumed across the organization, down to granular query data like the cost of each query, how it was written, who submitted it and number of slots utilized. The dashboards also highlight potential areas of optimization, like BigQuery datasets without retention policies set or where data isn’t partitioned.

A recent breakthrough has been building pages for business teams, showing the related cloud spend contributing to a business unit of value, such as the cost per live stream or per subscriber in Sky’s case. Although this is an inherently difficult metric to capture, the opportunity has been made possible with the FinOps team’s progress and is starting to drive business investment decisions.

Optimize: Drive Cloud Efficiency

The second stage of the FinOps lifecycle focuses on delivering optimizations. As Sky’s FinOps dashboards were operationalized and highlighted savings opportunities, they enabled users to generate more than $3 million in Google Cloud savings alone in 2020 and over $800,000 in other cloud providers.

The team began with focusing on the top four products by spend: BigQuery, Compute Engine, Cloud Dataflow and Cloud Storage. Working with their Google account team and studying Google whitepapers and blog posts like Cloud cost optimization: principles for lasting success, they developed their own best practice guidance and embedded recommendations into the dashboards.

Creating their own recommenders and leveraging Google Cloud’s recommenders, the team discovered a plethora of cost optimization opportunities. “Key examples were overly expensive queries, storage buckets set without retention policies, and VMs without autoscaling enabled,” Nathan said. Teams were then empowered to make their own savings, like the NowTV business unit that had been forecast to overspend for the year until they received their dashboard with thousands of optimization recommendations. After just three weeks, the team had implemented more than 90% of recommendations and brought their spend under budget for the year, saving more than 50%.

The FinOps team still searches for new recommendations every day and have been collaborating with Google product managers to take their insights to the next level. “We’ve loved partnering with Google product managers, who encourage us to give feedback on new features before they go to market. We’ve also shared some of our in-house recommenders to influence the features being developed by Google, including the Idle VM and Idle Persistent Disk Recommenders as part of Active Assist,” Nathan said.

Operate: Embed FinOps & Drive Self-Sufficiency

Now that teams could visualize their cloud spend and make real-time decisions based on cost optimization recommendations, the FinOps team has begun working on embedding processes, leveraging machine learning, and improving efficiency in their own ways of working.

Looker’s extensive capabilities continue to play a role in this. “Before we started using Looker, our most popular report was an electricity bill showing customers’ detailed monthly cloud spend, previous month comparisons and forecasts for months ahead,” Nathan said. “This report took days, sometimes weeks to run. With Looker, we’ve automated the entire process and brought that time down to just minutes.”

More teams are embedding the dashboards into their own processes, like finance, which now uses the interactive dashboards in meetings instead of static report snapshots, or in-house Google Cloud architects, who use the recommendations to optimize their cloud spend before deploying any technology.

As the FinOps team continues to operate like a product function, designing with CX/UX in mind and iteratively releasing new features like anomaly reporting, budget alerts, and forecasting based on machine learning, it’s becoming clear that Cloud Financial Management is a key capability and mindset that can impact wide-reaching parts of the business at scale.

Elevating Sky’s FinOps journey to the next level
Indeed, as more business teams collaborate with the FinOps function, the opportunities are growing. “The FinOps team has changed the way we view and manage cloud spend, enabling us to partner with finance and show digestible reports to the CFO. We’re now looking further to broaden our range of insights, like elevating our dashboards to understand how using Google Cloud is supporting Sky’s Net carbon zero ambitions by incorporating Google’s data center sustainability metrics,” says Vince Marco, Architecture Manager at Sky.

So, after being unsure of drivers for their increasing cloud spend in 2019, 18 months later Sky is far more confident about its investment decisions. The team knows that every dollar spent is being used optimally and driving maximum value for its investment.

If you’re an enterprise using cloud, but want to better manage cloud costs, consider setting up a FinOps capability and creating a FinOps mindset. Looker can help you get started by providing reporting and insights into cloud expenditures to identify initial savings. As you learn more and scale, empower teams to make their own savings utilizing built-in actionality for monitoring and customizing for business billing activity nuances and department-specific chargebacks. Reimagine how cloud finances can be managed and optimized as Sky is doing.

To learn more about Looker’s Cloud Cost Management Block visit Looker Marketplace.