At Google Cloud, we want to provide you with the access to all the tools you need to grow your business. Through the Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups, leverage industry leading solutions with how-to video guides and resources curated for startups.

This multi-series contains 3 chapters: Start, Build and Grow, which matches your startup’s journey:

• The Start Series: Begin by building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish.
• The Build Series: Optimize and scale existing deployments to reach your target audiences.
• The Grow Series: Grow and attain scale with deployments on Google Cloud.

Additionally, at Google we have the Google for Startups Cloud Program, which is designed to help your business get off the ground and enable a sustainable growth plan for the future. The start of the Build Series delineates the benefits of the program, the application process, and more to help your business get started on Google Cloud.

A quick recap of the Build Series

Once you have applied for the Google for Startups Cloud Program, there’s so much to explore and try out on Google Cloud.

Figuring out a rapid but solid application development process can be key to many businesses in reducing time to market. Furthermore, learning what database to use to handle application data can be tricky. Deep dive into our Firestore video which walks through how Firestore can help you unlock application innovation with simplicity and speed.

We then move on to a deep dive into BigQuery and how it can help businesses. BigQuery is designed to support analysis over petabytes of data regardless of whether it’s structured or unstructured. This video is the goto video for getting started on BigQuery!

If you are someone looking to run your Spark and Hadoop jobs faster and on the cloud, look to Dataproc. To learn more about Dataproc and how this has helped other customers with their Hadoop clusters, click the video below to learn all things Dataproc related.

Next, we find out what Dataflow can bring to your business; some advantages, sample architectures, demos on the console, and how other customers are using Dataflow.

We also talked about Machine Learning, starting from selecting the right ML solution to Machine Learning APIs on cloud to exploring Vertex AI. Following that we look into API management in Google Cloud and how Apigee helps operate your APIs with enhanced scale, security, and automation.

We ended the series with the last two episodes focusing around security deep-dive and using Cloud Tasks and Cloud Scheduler.

Coming up next – The Grow Series

Dive into the next chapter of this multi-series, with our upcoming Grow Series, where we will be focusing on growing and attaining scale with deployments on Google Cloud.

Check out our website and join us by checking out the video series on the Google Cloud Tech channel, and subscribe to stay up to date. 

See you in the cloud!

Last year, we announced our most ambitious sustainability goal yet: to operate everywhere on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. We’ve set this goal to ensure that Google Cloud continues to be the cleanest cloud in the industry, and to show that full-scale decarbonization of electricity use is possible. 

Since setting our target, we’ve made tremendous progress in how we track, buy, and use electricity; advocate for clean energy policies; and support the development of new technologies to help us reach this goal. And we’ve done it all while maintaining a commitment to transparency that we hope will make it easier for other organizations wishing to fully decarbonize their operations as well.

In the spirit of transparency, today we’re releasing the 2020 carbon-free energy percentages (CFE%) for all Google data centers, as well as overall progress on the road to our 2030 goal: In 2020, Google achieved 67% round-the-clock carbon free energy across all its data centers, up from 61% in 2019. In other words, of all the electricity consumed by Google data centers in 2020, two-thirds of it was matched with local, carbon-free sources on an hourly basis.

Though we saw a significant jump in global CFE% in 2020, we expect the numbers to vary from year to year. Ultimately, CFE% is dependent on the amount of new clean energy that comes online in a given year; we may even occasionally see short-term drops in the numbers. What’s most important is that we continue to maintain a long-term trajectory toward our 2030 goal. With meaningful progress in clean energy policy, technologies, and transactional models, we believe 24/7 carbon-free energy is achievable.

Tracking these numbers also allows us to give Google Cloud customers greater control in their own sustainability efforts. Earlier this year we announced Google Cloud Region Picker, a system that helps our customers assess factors like cost, speed, and CFE% as they choose where to run their applications. 

To outline some of the events that have helped us get to 67% CFE%, we’ve developed an animation that shows every hour of electricity use in 2020, at all our Google data centers around the world. 

Visualizing clean energy: every hour, every day, everywhere

Imagining what every hour in a year looks like is hard enough (there are 8,760 of them, in case you’re wondering). With 23 data centers and 25 cloud regions around the world, we’re aiming to source clean energy for over 200,000 operational hours each year.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=f9ecEokcFlk%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26

The “A year in carbon-free energy” animation points out significant projects that came online in 2020 to bring our data centers closer to operating entirely on round-the-clock carbon-free energy. It also reflects an unparalleled level of transparency about our carbon-free energy data, showing hour-by-hour where we need to develop new clean energy projects, advocate for policy changes, and in some cases, look to new technologies that can help fill in the gaps left by variable renewable resources. 

In the animation, you’ll notice sites with a lot of green at midday (e.g. in Chile or the U.S. Southeast) – a sign that solar is making a big contribution. Other data centers, such as our facilities in the U.S. Midwest, rely more heavily on wind power and are subject to seasonal fluctuations in wind speed. 

Preventing the worst impacts of climate change will require decarbonizing the world’s electric grids, as fast as possible. Google is committed to doing as much as possible to clear a path for others and drive collective action to achieve this goal. We’re thrilled to be in good company as we move, together, toward a carbon-free future.

Editor’s note: In February 2021, Google Cloud and TELUS announced a 10-year strategic alliance to drive innovation of new services and solutions across data analytics, machine learning, and go-to-market strategies that support digital transformation within key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, and connected home. By December 2021, TELUS had completed a pilot for a use case that leveraged Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning solutions and Telco Edge Anthos to increase safety in the workplace and save lives in manufacturing facilities. The use case leverages Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) to move the processing and management of traffic from a centralized cloud to the edge of TELUS’ 5G network, making it possible to deploy applications and process content closer to its customers, and thus yielding several benefits including better performance, security, and customization. Today, we invite Samer Geissah, Head of Technology Strategy and Architecture at TELUS, to share how the company is delivering on its promise to use this technology to drive meaningful change, starting with workers’ well-being.

Whenever a new technology buzzword comes along I think: what problems does this solve, and for whom is this going to make a real difference? That’s because at TELUS, we see innovation as a means to act on our social purpose to drive meaningful change, from modernizing healthcare and making our food supply more sustainable, to reducing our environmental footprint and connecting Canadians in need. Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) is a buzzword that offers an opportunity to do just this. That’s why we want to leverage cloud capabilities and optimize our network’s edge computing potential, tapping into our award-winning high-speed 5G connectivity to help solve some of industry’s most complex challenges.

The reason why this presents such a great opportunity is that companies across industries still rely on maintenance-heavy on-premises systems to manage core computing tasks. But, with cloud capabilities delivered at the edge of our 5G network, we open a new world of possibilities for them. For example, manufacturers who currently rely on IoT-enabled equipment in their facilities can deliver new experiences by running advanced AI-based visual inspections directly from 5G-enabled devices–all without the need for local processing power or extra on-site space. In fact, it’s this example that inspired our new use case, where our Connected Worker Safety solution can be applied across a range of business verticals to help improve safety, prevent injury, and save lives, demonstrating how the perfect combination of skilled people and digital technology can make the world a safer place.

Empowering intelligent decision making at the edge

Be it a farm, manufacturing facility, hospital, or a factory floor, workers should be able to work in environments where their health and safety are held as the highest priority. But how can employers ensure that their remote, frontline, and in-office employees are safe and healthy at all times? We’ve found the answer by combining Google Cloud AI/ML capabilities and Anthos as a platform for delivering workloads, with our network’s infrastructure.

Together with Google Cloud, we have been leveraging solutions with the power of MEC and 5G to develop a workers’ safety application in our Edmonton Data Center that enables on-premise video analytics cameras to screen manufacturing facilities and ensure compliance with safety requirements to operate heavy-duty machinery. The CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras we used are cost-effective and easier to deploy than RTLS (real time location services) solutions that detect worker proximity and avoid collisions. This is a positive, proactive step to steadily improve workplace safety. For example, if a worker’s hand is close to a drill, that drill press will not bore holes in any surface until the video analytics camera detects that the worker’s hand has been removed from the safety zone area.

A few milliseconds could make all the difference when you are operating heavy equipment without guards in place. So, to power the solution’s predetermined actions with immediate response times, we worked with Accenture and hosted the application on an Anthos bare metal Google Cloud environment running on our TELUS multi-edge access computing.

Because all the conditions in our model are programmable, this solution can be replicated at scale across a variety of practical scenarios other than factory floors. The actions in response to the analysis are also programmable, which means companies can use this technology to look at workers’ conditions and decide the best course of action to educate, assist, and protect them. All this is done through a single pane of glass ecosystem, making it easy to customize this solution to meet various business needs.

Meanwhile, leveraging our existing global networks to process data and compute cycles at the edge eliminates the need to transport data to a central location for real-time computation. This means that we can offer this solution to partners while optimizing latency and lowering costs.

Powering blink-of-an-eye communication with Anthos

To put the importance of lowering speed into perspective, consider that the average latency of blinking your eye is about 300 milliseconds. From a safety point of view, preventative processes need to be much faster than that. For this use case, our machine learning models running on edge are currently processing data at a tenth of the time it takes for you to blink your eyes, and we’re aiming to lower that latency further to help build even safer systems.

Our plan is to deploy Anthos clusters on bare metal to our customers across Canada to take advantage of our existing enterprise infrastructure, making it possible for us to run our solution closer to partners and eventually enable just one millisecond of latency.

At that point, we’ll be able to power new use cases that require near real-time feedback, leaving absolutely no room for error. This could include remote surgery, platooning of fleets on autonomous vehicles, and many other cellular vehicle-to-everything (V2X) solutions that require high-speed communication for platform operators to manage remote edge fleets in far-away places.

Improving workers’ safety while enabling new sources of revenue

Although edge computing and 5G have been around for a while, we believe that use cases like this are only just starting to demonstrate the incredible speed of change and high potential that these models provide. The next step for us is to develop our workers’ safety solution and get it to market, making TELUS an early adopter of new 5G solutions at the edge that can help our business and industry partners make workplaces safer.

It’s a great win to be able to combine efforts with Google Cloud and reduce latency in a context where timing can impact and save lives, and I’m confident that workers’ safety is just the beginning of a series of industry challenges that we’ll address together.

Cloud migration is top of mind for most companies with SAP applications. While the advantages of the cloud for SAP customers is generally understood, the move itself can be complicated and disruptive. So what actually are the business benefits and cost savings? How long will it take to recoup such an investment? Two recently published reports from Forrester and IDC can help to quantify the benefits and ROI. 

Getting answers to the million-dollar questions
Forrester and IDC bring different methodologies to the table; they asked somewhat different questions and used different models to calculate their financial KPIs. This allows you to get two different points of view on the same basic questions about value, risk, and ROI.

As it turns out, both reports found that customers who migrate their SAP environments to Google Cloud see an impressive return on their investments. From uptime and infrastructure to efficiency and productivity—both Forrester and IDC identified major benefits to companies that have made the move to Google Cloud.

Let’s walk through some of the highlights from both reports.

Forrester’s TEI model spotlights the power of uptime improvements
Based on in-depth conversations and quantitative research with six companies, here are the key findings from the Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study for companies running SAP systems on Google Cloud: 

• Direct cost savings. When they compare cloud subscription and related costs to what they spent on legacy systems and infrastructure, most IT leaders expect a cloud migration to deliver up-front savings. But according to Forrester, the companies interviewed reported average savings of more than $3 million a year, including eliminated hardware purchases, right-sized software licensing, staffing efficiencies, and other operational cost savings.

• Dramatically improved uptime. Customers told Forrester that migrating SAP to Google Cloud pretty much eliminates downtime—planned or unplanned—as a significant IT concern. According to Forrester, companies realized an average of $1.5 million in savings per year by avoiding the revenue and user productivity losses that had once been a fact of life for their IT teams.
• Significant efficiency gains. Because Google Cloud works to mitigate performance bottlenecks, infrastructure mishaps, network delays and more, the companies Forrester interviewed reported a yearly average of $500,000 in productivity gains for SAP business users and frontline workers.

Companies also reported an annual average of $500,000 in additional IT efficiency gains after migrating SAP to Google Cloud. This quantifies what happens when IT practitioners no longer have to deal with the bottlenecks that come with legacy systems, and are able to spend their time on tasks that actually build value and help the business. Based on the Forrester analysis, the companies interviewed could expect average three-year net benefits of about $15.4 million.

“We benefit from any technical innovation in the infrastructure area because Google Cloud is doing that for us,” one customer told Forrester. “So, whenever there’s new hardware available or new processes or whatever, I don’t have to run the specific project to migrate from A to B.” 

IDC finds that good things happen when SAP downtime is reduced 
The IDC report highlights four areas where Google Cloud generates the most value for customers:

1. Cutting infrastructure costs. According to IDC, customers running SAP on Google Cloud spent 31% less on infrastructure each year, or an average of $233,000 less per company. The ability to scale SAP environments dynamically and to keep them right-sized was a major factor; so were the advantages of automated infrastructure monitoring and savings on software licenses once these companies could stop overprovisioning.

2. Giving a team better things to do. IDC found that the infrastructure, database, and security teams of the companies they interviewed reduced the time they need to maintain and manage SAP environments by an average of 66% per year, for a savings of $443,000, per company. As a result, these companies got the equivalent of a major staff expansion from their SAP migrations—giving them both the staff time and the expertise to focus on far more valuable activities.

3. Limiting unplanned downtime. These companies reported to IDC an average 98% reduction in unplanned downtime. Migrating SAP to Google Cloud significantly reduces the threat of downtime and saves the business an average of nearly $770,000 per year in lost revenue and user productivity. For some firms, the downtime savings topped $1 million per year.

4. Making users more productive. The companies interviewed told IDC that by avoiding downtime and disruptions associated with upgrade and maintenance tasks for their legacy SAP systems, they saved an average of $363,000 annually in user productivity. But there’s an even more interesting under-the-hood stat contributing to these gains: These companies reduced the time required to deploy new SAP compute and storage resources from an average of 8.8 days to 1 hour.

When IDC added up these and other savings associated with running SAP on Google Cloud, it found an average three-year savings of more than $3.5 million and a five-month payback period. 

“We acquired another company, so basically overnight we needed to be able to deal with that increase,” said one customer IDC spoke with. “We doubled our footprint overnight, and we had to take on hundreds of additional employees. We needed a platform that we could easily scale up if we required, and that’s the benefit of running SAP on Google Cloud for us.” 

Explore the reports
There is a lot to think about when considering a move of SAP systems to the cloud. The cloud has many advantages, but migration can seem complicated and tricky; we appreciate that you are looking to understand the full picture. These papers are a great place to start. 

Download the reports—Forrester’s “Total Economic Impact of SAP on Google Cloud” and IDC’s “Business Value of SAP for Google Cloud Environments.” Then, get in touch.

The financial services industry is evolving at a rapid pace, with shifting consumer expectations, new technologies, and developing regulatory requirements. Financial services firms need the right technology to help them stay agile and prepare for the future. 

The cloud is a key point of leverage for firms looking to improve performance across a broad range of activities. Moving to the public cloud can advance operational resiliency, improve staff productivity, increase regulatory compliance and enhance business model innovation. 

However, there are a number of financial services companies that are still hesitant in their cloud journeys. The barriers to adoption vary, from the complexity of legacy systems, to trust and skills gaps, regulatory uncertainty, and fragmentation of compliance requirements. Although many companies have embraced the benefits of cloud technology, more robust cloud adoption—especially around core back-office functions—will require additional facilitation, including through regulatory harmonization and streamlining.

A new comprehensive study on cloud adoption in financial services

To better understand the challenges and opportunities of cloud adoption in financial services Google Cloud, together with the Harris Poll, surveyed more than 1,300 leaders from the financial services industry across the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and Australia. 

There were five noteworthy takeaways from the study:  

1. A vast majority of financial services companies are already using some form of public cloud. A large number of surveyed financial services companies (83%) report they are deploying cloud technology as part of their primary computing infrastructures. Of those using cloud technology, the most popular architecture of choice is hybrid cloud (38%), followed by single cloud (28%), and multicloud (17%). Notably, of respondents without a multicloud deployment, 88% reported they are considering adopting a multicloud strategy in the next 12 months.

2. Financial services institutions in North America are leading in cloud adoption. Of the financial services companies who are implementing a cloud strategy, the highest levels of cloud workload adoption were reported in North America, with institutions in the U.S. (54%) and Canada (52%) leading the way. The lowest level of cloud adoption was reported in Japan (42%).

3. As financial services companies continue to use the cloud, more core functionalities can and will be migrated. While many financial services companies have migrated substantial workloads to the cloud, the industry is far from full adoption when it comes to core, back-office workloads. Of financial services companies currently using a majority cloud strategy in the United States, for example, only half (54%) of their workloads are fully deployed in the cloud. Data and IT security (74%), regulatory reporting (57%), and fraud detection and prevention (57%) rank among the highest workload adoption. Core underwriting activity (40%) and data reconciliation (48%) ranked lowest. Across Europe, cloud usage for core activities like underwriting also scored low with the UK listing only 30% adoption.

4. Among respondents, there is a very strong positive perception of the potential for cloud technology to assist in business operations and regulatory compliance. Nearly all respondents (>88%) agreed that cloud adoption can:

1. help adapt to changing customer behaviors and expectations,  
2. enhance operational resilience, 
3. support the creation of innovative new products and services, 
4. enhance financial services institutions’ data security capabilities, and 
5. better connect siloed legacy software infrastructure within financial services institutions. 

5. Certain regulator-induced challenges, including the complexity of sectorial compliance frameworks and fragmentation, create hurdles to cloud adoption for financial services companies. While 88% of respondents had a positive view of current regulatory efforts to provide guidance and clarity for cloud implementation, the results showed that more needs to be done to facilitate adoption. Most respondents (84%) agree that regulatory reviews and approvals take too long because of regulatory fragmentation across regulatory bodies. And 78% say that regulatory uncertainty over the use of public cloud prevents their organizations from adopting cloud technologies that would otherwise provide benefit to them. Additionally, a third of all on-premises respondents (38%) say that the large investment of resources for the regulatory approval process is a reason why they’re not using cloud services.

“While many banks have already deployed hybrid cloud environments, others are still in various stages of planning and deploying,” said Jerry Silva, research vice president for IDC Financial Insights. “Clearly, hybrid infrastructure is a reality, and financial institutions must focus not only on leveraging the modern infrastructure model to gain efficiencies, resilience and agility, but also on taking the necessary steps to manage such environments, including the security and compliance of cloud services.”

Future recommendations for financial services regulators

Financial services firms should continue to maximize the potential of technology by migrating more core workloads to the cloud, and actively considering multicloud and hybrid-cloud strategies. Such strategies enhance resiliency of existing IT infrastructure and reduce concerns over vendor lock-in. 

The research also points to steps that regulators could take to provide additional clarity and guidance, such as aligning regulatory reviews across agencies to avoid fragmentation; developing regulatory “safe harbors” for cloud adopters based on adherence to accepted standards and best practices; training regulatory staff on emerging tech; and advancing data reporting requirements via cloud and related technologies.

In the past few years, many regulators across the globe have taken a robust approach to rationalizing rules and guidance to cloud adoption in the financial sector, which has helped significantly stimulate adoption. But further assurances and harmonization of best practices around supervision is needed to advance risk-based and secure digital innovation.  

At Google Cloud, we’re committed to working with financial services customers and regulators to provide them with controls and assurances on risk management, data locality, transparency, and compliance. We are constantly engaging with regulators to share information, respond to their considerations and concerns, and address questions in the interest of transparency and building trust. 

To learn more about these findings and more, download our infographic and our full report. 

^{Research methodology}

^{The survey was conducted online by the Harris Poll on behalf of Google Cloud, from December 7, 2020, to January 4, 2021, among 1,363 senior executives in France (n=113), Germany (n=178), the UK (n=192), Hong Kong (n=99), Indonesia (n=100), Japan (n=142), Singapore (n=71), Australia (n=134), Canada (134), and the United States (n=200) who are employed full-time, part-time, or self-employed whose main functional role is in risk/compliance or IT at a company in the banking, finance, or financial services industry with a title of director level or higher. The data in each country were weighted by the number of employees to bring them into line with actual company size proportions in the population. A global post-weight was applied to ensure equal weight of each country in the global total.}