IT Team Figures Out Easiest Way to Build Data Pipelines and Create ML Models
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Building a strong brand in today’s hyper-competitive business environment takes vision. It also requires a flexible, easily managed approach to digital asset management (DAM), so marketing professionals and other stakeholders can easily share, store, track, and manipulate assets to build the brand.
Many of today’s leading companies, including JetBlue, Slack, TripAdvisor, Lyft, and HealthONE, rely on Brandfolder to deliver consistent, organized, and efficient brand experiences. Brandfolder provides an easy-to-use platform that can scale across an entire company with little end-user training, empowering customers to distribute digital assets wherever they are needed. Customers also gain much greater insight into how those assets are used, and how to use them more effectively in marketing campaigns and brand messaging.
“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform.”
—Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science, Brandfolder
Brandfolder is constantly advancing its development efforts to introduce new data-driven features without complicating the user experience. Big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are key to meeting customers’ unique business needs, and essential for Brandfolder to compete in the fast-moving DAM industry. To enhance these capabilities, Brandfolder sought a public cloud provider that could help it scale its data pipeline cost effectively while providing access to advanced AI technologies.
After graduating from the Techstars startup accelerator program in 2013, Brandfolder tried two other cloud providers before standardizing on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
“We saw a difference with Google Cloud from the very beginning because the interactions felt like a strategic relationship,” says Jim Hanifen, Head of Product at Brandfolder. “Google gave us startup credits and a lot of face-to-face support, which we hadn’t experienced with other cloud providers. We decided to move our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform.”
Building an ML platform for brand intelligence
After performing an initial lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines (VMs) onto Compute Engine, Brandfolder built an ML platform using GCP managed services to seamlessly deliver its data products. The platform leverages Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage as the data lake, Cloud Dataproc for cloud-native Apache Spark computing clusters, Cloud Composer as the batch job scheduler, Cloud Pub/Sub as the backbone data pipeline, Container Registry to store Docker images, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the application orchestrator. Cloud Dataflow brings data into the data lake and into BigQuery for analysis.
“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform,” says Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science at Brandfolder, who describes the architecture in a detailed blog. “We simply ingest raw application and event data on one end and output an ML service on the other.”
“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost. We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”
—Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering, Brandfolder
For many general use cases, Brandfolder does not need to build custom ML models, and instead relies on pre-trained API models from GCP. For example, it uses Vision API and Video Intelligence API to auto-tag creative assets on import to enable fast, intuitive searches across images and videos. When more product- and brand-specific modeling is required to address unique customer use cases, Brandfolder builds and trains custom ML models using its GCP pipeline or Cloud AutoML, a suite of products built on Google transfer learning and neural architecture search technology. For example, if a Brandfolder customer makes different types of grills, Brandfolder can use AutoML Vision to train a model to recognize the different grills.
“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost,” explains Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering at Brandfolder. “We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”
Industry-leading security and performance
Google Cloud’s security model helps Brandfolder give existing and prospective customers peace of mind that their data will be protected. Cloud Identity & Access Management (Cloud IAM) provides enterprise-grade access control, while Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) enables remote users to work more securely without the hassles of a VPN client. GCP also isolates cloud resources into projects, making it easy to assign permissions and keep data and VMs organized and segregated.
“With Google Cloud, everything begins and ends with security, which makes things very easy for us,” says Jim. “If we’re under a security review, we can submit a Google security white paper. If a potential customer has security concerns, we tell them we are hosted on GCP, and those concerns go away.”
To give customers even better application performance for accessing their brand assets, Brandfolder uses Cloud Memorystore, an in-memory data store service for Redis, to cache data and provide sub-millisecond data access for production applications.
“It was much easier for us to use Cloud Memorystore versus running Redis on our compute instances,” says Brett. “The high availability, replication across zones, and automatic failover with no data loss are big for us.”
Global private network interconnects between Google Cloud and the Fastly content delivery network (CDN) dramatically reduce latency, allowing Brandfolder’s customers to deliver and update even very large creative assets quickly around the world.
“What’s beautiful about the relationship between Google and Fastly is that if one of our customers uploads a new version of an asset, we can propagate that out to Fastly, and the new version will automatically show up in all the places where it’s referenced,” says Brett.
“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter. Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”
—Jim Hanifen, Head of Product, Brandfolder
Improving employee and customer productivity
Brandfolder also uses Google solutions for real-time collaboration and productivity, using G Suite to connect employees with intuitive, cloud-based apps. Teams use Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts Meet every day to move the business forward. Many of Brandfolder’s customers are also G Suite users, and Brandfolder offers a plug-in that allows them to view their creative assets inside of Docs and pull images in as needed. Customers can also log into Brandfolder with their G Suite credentials, making the solution even easier to use.
“We’ve been using G Suite since the beginning, and it’s helped us collaborate efficiently to build a successful, growing company,” says Jim. “Our teams expect to have that kind of close collaboration, and everyone here enjoys the G Suite experience.”
Driving 99 percent annual business growth
With automated tagging and other innovative AI-based features, Brandfolder is helping customers locate and distribute assets faster. As a result, Brandfolder is building customer loyalty and increasing sales, growing its business by 99 percent year-over-year. Since moving to GCP, Brandfolder has been able to scale its analytics and data pipeline 50x without a corresponding increase in costs and has not had to expand its development team.
“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter,” says Jim. “Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”
Google Workspace and Chrome Enterprise Integral for Colgate-Palmolive’s Flexible Work-Culture
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Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Roger Lim, IT Manager of Collaboration Infrastructure Development, and Jim Arcure, Director of Infrastructure Development, both with Colgate-Palmolive, the multinational consumer products company. Colgate-Palmolive is in the midst of a multiyear project to create a collaborative, flexible work culture, leveraging Google Workspace and Chrome Enterprise.
Colgate-Palmolive Company is a caring, innovative growth company reimagining a healthier future for all people, their pets, and our planet. Focused on Oral Care, Personal Care, Home Care, and Pet Nutrition, and reaching more than 200 countries and territories, Colgate teams are developing and selling product offerings essential to society through brands such as Colgate, Palmolive, elmex, meridol, Tom’s of Maine, hello, Sorriso, Speed Stick, Softsoap, Irish Spring, Protex, Sanex, Filorga, eltaMD, PCA Skin, Ajax, Axion, Fabuloso, Soupline and Suavitel, as well as Hill’s Science Diet and Hill’s Prescription Diet.
Colgate-Palmolive has been accelerating growth and delivering meaningful innovation and attracting new and diverse talent in areas such as ecommerce, innovation and digital. That speed and agility comes in large part from the Chrome Enterprise tools that allow the business to move faster and stay competitive.
Changing out software and hardware for 30,000 employees in 70+ countries is a massive project. Early on, we chose Chrome Enterprise as our partner. We had to move away from our dependency on legacy platforms, software, and devices if our business was going to thrive. We knew cloud-based tools like Chrome and Google Workspace would do what on-premises solutions can’t—ease the IT workload while keeping employees happy and productive.
Why we’re escaping legacy apps and embracing the cloud
We don’t want Colgate-Palmolive’s size and geographical breadth to get in the way of people working together and maintaining its strength in global teamwork. That’s why we’re replacing bulky, hard-to-maintain, on-premises applications and software with cloud versions that everyone can securely access in a web browser.
As an IT team, we thought about how much work time we spent installing, updating, and troubleshooting software (up to 30 percent of work hours during big upgrades!). As we were looking at ways to work together better, we had our eyes on the cloud revolution—and, specifically, Chrome Enterprise and Google Workspace.
First step, switch to a new browser
Back in 2016, the IT team was working to move everyone to Google Workspace and away from legacy productivity applications. Once you start Google Workspace adoption, it’s time to take a closer look at browser options.
We chose Chrome Browser for several reasons. It updates automatically, so we could cross lengthy upgrade tasks off our list. An even bigger benefit is that Chrome Browser’s management tools, data protection, and malware detection are all built in. We anticipate a lot of synergy here by leveraging these features and having our users go all Chrome.
Chrome Browser also gave us tools to manage and grant access to apps across our multi-platform device fleet. We call Chrome Browser Cloud Management our “golden nugget” because every browser gets enrolled automatically in browser management.
It’s now much easier to push out new extensions and apps (and allowlist or blocklist them) compared to the time-consuming process of using our existing desktop policy management settings. The ability to easily manage extensions is a huge benefit since it enabled IT to provide new and safe functionality to our end users.
Next, share new ways of working together
Our IT team wants workers to see the benefits of Google Workspace and Chrome Browser on their own, but sometimes we have to guide them toward the finish line. At the beginning of the project, we developed “Going Google” tools to notify users to consider Google Workspace when opening legacy applications that are no longer needed.
As Chrome Enterprise and Google Workplace became our primary productivity tools, it was also important to ensure our users did not fall back on old habits. Our “Going Google” tools gave our IT organization the ability to not only notify, but turn off specific legacy apps per user. Though IT could easily restore access to these legacy apps on a temporary basis, we have seen a significant dropoff in these types of requests over the past few months. Our goal is to give Colgate people a gentle and consistent reminder that we will be a Google Workspace-only company. By taking these active and decisive steps, we ensure that our users and teams are migrating to Google Workspace today.
To that end, we’ve provided lots of support. We use over 1,000 Colgate “Google Guides” around the world who run on-site classes and webinars on Google Workspace, and are available for one-on-one help, as well as roughly 700 “Google Gurus” who are savvy early-adopters and can lend a hand to colleagues with questions about Google Workspace. Our training classes and webinars are playing to packed houses, and we’re scheduling sessions that focus on specific skills, like a class about using Google Sheets attended by 250 people via Google Meet.
Finally, start rolling out new devices
If we can get everyone at Colgate-Palmolive working in Google Workspace and Chrome Browser, then offering Chromebooks is another natural fit: Chromebooks and the Chrome OS are built for the cloud world we want to work in. We’re pilot testing about 200 Chromebooks for employees, mostly in our customer development department. The Chromebooks are in high demand in challenging locations because they’re easier to deploy for new hires. When employees eventually get back to their offices, we are eager to expand Grab-and-Go racks for people that need a temporary loaner. These Grab-and-Go racks in our New York City and Piscataway, N.J. offices will provide another way for people to test drive Chromebooks.
Two hundred-odd years after Colgate-Palmolive started doing business, we’re excited about the modern focus of our workplace tools. The Google tools that allow us to collaborate also allow the company to succeed well into our third century.
Google Cloud VMware Engine Achieves HIPAA Compliance
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We are excited to announce that as of April 1, 2021, Google Cloud VMware Engine is covered under the Google Cloud Business Associate Agreement (BAA), meaning it has achieved HIPAA compliance. Healthcare organizations can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications.
Healthcare organizations increasingly use cloud platforms to personalize patient care, analyze large datasets more effectively, enhance research and development collaboration, and share medical knowledge. Leveraging cloud platforms can also help healthcare organizations increase the privacy and security of information systems, including protected health information (PHI), and, as a result, better comply with applicable laws and regulations while reducing the burden of compliance. For PHI, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) set standards in the United States to protect individually identifiable health information. HIPAA applies to health plans, most healthcare providers, and healthcare clearinghouses that manage PHI electronically, and to persons or entities that perform certain functions on their behalf.
With Google Cloud, organizations can leverage solutions that enable secure, continuous patient care and data-driven clinical and operational decisions with ease, while being empowered with collaboration and productivity tools. Further, Google Cloud Platform supports HIPAA compliance. We offer HIPAA-regulated customers the same products at the same pricing that is available to all customers, unlike many other cloud providers.
For healthcare organizations that leverage VMware on-premises, having a consistent, cloud-integrated platform that provides seamless access to native cloud services unlocks the opportunity to extend, migrate, and modernize healthcare IT infrastructure and applications in a fast, low-risk manner at their own pace. This is especially important for mission-critical healthcare provider workloads, where having a low-risk way to adopt the cloud is important. Google Cloud VMware Engine offers that solution. By achieving coverage under Google Cloud’s BAA, Google Cloud VMware Engine enables healthcare organizations to realize the benefits of cloud computing and stay on track with their HIPAA compliance efforts without additional complexity. This is very relevant in hybrid scenarios, where customers would like to leverage other native cloud services such as analytics and big data processing, without having to enter into multiple BAAs.
Google Cloud VMware Engine offers dedicated, isolated software-defined datacenter environments with fully redundant and dedicated 100 Gbps networking that are suitable for healthcare organizations to run applications storing and processing PHI data. Customers have the ability to encrypt their virtual storage area network (vSAN) using an external key management server. Healthcare customers can run their workloads in a native VMware environment—vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and HCX—while benefiting from Google Cloud’s highly performant infrastructure to meet the needs of their workloads. Customers can connect their VMware applications to native Google Cloud services such as BigQuery and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive new insights from existing data and quickly make informed decisions.
Protecting against and mitigating the impact of ransomware attacks is top-of-mind for Healthcare organizations. This requires building a cyber resilience program and back-up strategy to prepare for how users can restore core systems or assets affected by a security (in this case, ransomware) incident. This is a critical function for supporting recovery timelines and lessening the impact of a cyber event so organizations can get back to operating their business. Google Cloud VMware Engine in combination with Google Cloud first party solutions such as Actifio Go, or partner solutions such as NetApp CVO can provide an efficient way to recover incremental point-in-time backups along with on-demand provisioning of new compute to recover both data and infrastructure from Ransomware attacks quickly and efficiently.
Healthcare customers can also use Google Cloud VMware Engine as a disaster recovery (DR) target for their on-premises VMware workloads. Healthcare organizations also need a business continuity plan for their mission critical applications. When a disaster occurs, hospitals need their data protected so they can quickly get back to treating patients. It is a HIPAA requirement that healthcare organizations must be able to recover from a natural disaster. Google Cloud VMware Engine offers a like-for-like cost-effective DR target for these customers. The DR environment can be operated without new training using the same tools as their on-premises deployment. Google Cloud VMware Engine is currently available in 12 regions across the globe including three regions in the US, which means our regional and multi-national customers can take advantage of this service for geographic diversification as well.
If you are interested in understanding more and taking advantage of Google Cloud VMware Engine, contact your Google sales team now.
For details, see HIPAA compliance on Google Cloud Platform.
Ease Your Migration and Modernization Journey with Microsoft and Windows on Google Cloud Demo Center
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If you’re looking to migrate and modernize your Microsoft and Windows workloads, Google Cloud is your premiere destination. No matter what migration strategy you’ve selected or what value you’re looking to achieve, with Google Cloud you’re able to:
- simplify your migration and modernization journey
- reduce your on-prem footprint and increase agility
- optimize license usage to reduce costs
- modernize to reduce single-vendor dependencies
- rely on enterprise-class support backed by Microsoft
Whether you’re looking to migrate applications running on Windows virtual machines, adopt Windows containers in Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), convert SQL databases to Cloud SQL, or something else, Google Cloud offers you the first-class experience you need.
But we don’t want you to take our word for it. Try it out yourself with our new online Microsoft and Windows on Google Cloud Demo Center without any commitment or friction.
The demo center uses hands-on guided simulations to walk you through several scenarios for solving business critical challenges with Google Cloud’s Microsoft and Windows solutions. Because these are all simulated, you’ll see how it works without any deployment, configuration, or commitment. It’s a seamless way for you to see exactly how Google Cloud can help you.
Run dedicated hardware and optimize with sole tenant
Sometimes you might want to run your workloads on dedicated hardware (with oversubscription options) for compliance, licensing, and management. Google Cloud provides sole-tenant nodes that allow you to easily deploy your virtual machines onto dedicated machines to avoid “noisy neighbor” issues, address regulatory or licensing constraints, and optimize inter-VM communications.
Plus, the CPU Overcommit option allows oversubscribing sole-tenant node resources by up to 2x, therefore helping save on per-physical core licensing for many licensed workloads like SQL Server.
Learn how to set up a sole tenant group and node.
Optimize license costs with premium images & custom VMs
One of the easiest ways to optimize your cloud experience with virtual machines (VM) is to pick the right VM image. Google Cloud provides premium license-included VM images that are thoroughly tested and optimized, including SQL Server options with pay-as-you-go licensing. These are great for workloads that don’t need to run all the time or when you do not have spare licenses for bring your own license (BYOL).
Explore some Windows & SQL images and learn how CPU/Memory options can help optimize deployment and save on licensing.
Modernize your databases with Managed SQL Server
Sometimes you need to manage your SQL Server instance to achieve certain business or operational goals. But more often, managing SQL Server deployments can be undifferentiated: backups, high-availability, updates, and patching are just some of the many things you have to take care of when going the do-it-yourself route. One way to modernize your database tier is to migrate to a managed service like Cloud SQL, which is a fully managed Relational Database service for SQL.
Explore the process of creating an instance in just a few clicks!
Extract apps from VMs and move to containers in GKE with Migrate for Anthos
Many Windows workloads running on virtual machines such as Internet Information Services (IIS) are ideal candidates for migrating to containers without major changes like rewriting or rearchitecting. However, doing this migration manually can be tedious, which is why Migrate for Anthos can help easily re-platform a .NET app running on IIS into a container-based app.
Simulate intelligently extracting, migrating, and modernizing applications to run natively on containers in GKE and Anthos clusters.
Move .NET applications to GKE on Windows without code changes
When you’re looking to go fully cloud native, you can leverage Windows containers in GKE without rewriting your .NET applications. Simply create clusters with Windows nodes and deploy containerized Windows workloads in a few clicks, even alongside Linux containers. These deployments reduce operational overhead with features such as auto-upgrade, auto-repair, and release channels.
Learn how easy it is to build a GKE cluster with a Windows node and deploy an app.
Now that you’ve gotten a feel for what’s available, go check out the Demo Center. You can also visit us at Windows and Microsoft on Google Cloud to learn more.
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Boosting Chrome OS adoption with effective change management
Can you remember the last time you asked a child to do something how did you convince them to do what you wanted? How many times did they ask you why probably more than once, right? So we know change is hard when we ask someone to make a change we’re asking a lot from them. Very often with IT projects we expect people to change, we don’t really think through the implications of this.
The purpose of this video is to guide you to migrate to Chromebooks and help you understand the reason why. When putting together your change management plan there’s a much larger chance of your project being able to deliver on its business objectives.
Introducing new technology into your organization is an exciting step. However, change management and workforce adoption of the new technology can be challenging. Get insights from Google’s Chrome Enterprise expert on change management strategies and best practices for increasing Chromebook adoption in your organization.
An Expert’s Guide to Productivity and Well-being while Embracing WFH and Hybrid Style
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Driving impact over output in a new era of work
As Google’s productivity advisor, I spend a lot of time coaching executives on ways they can make the most of their work day. Over the years, people have come to me with very different ideas about what productivity is, why it matters, and how to achieve it. Often, they think it’s about extracting every last ounce of output from a day—likely because the idea of productivity comes from economics and is most closely associated with factory conveyor belts and efficiency.
My definition of personal productivity is different. It’s less about getting as much as you can out of each day and more about achieving the things you set out to accomplish and making an impact.
Productivity is grounded in understanding yourself as a whole person. What makes you happy at work and outside of work? What are your natural rhythms and peak times for creativity, focus, or efficiency? When are you most engaged in meetings? What makes you feel unstoppable when responding to emails? And when do you need to take a break, do some uninterrupted thinking, or deepen social connections with your colleagues?
When people don’t understand these aspects of productivity, they struggle to make an impact—no matter how well they manage their calendars and inboxes.
During the global pandemic, we’ve realized the importance of sustaining the wellbeing of ourselves and our families, setting healthy boundaries, and bringing intention to the work day. Among those lucky enough to have the flexibility to work from home, many had to juggle new obligations, from homeschooling to caregiving. And without a solid plan in place, people often found themselves working longer hours and facing burnout.
Now, even as the pandemic enters new and unforeseen phases, many organizations are gearing up for a hybrid work model, Google included. As we make those plans, it’s important that people take a fresh look at personal productivity and plan to maximize wellbeing and impact across all the places they work.
I developed this new guide with these challenges in mind. It gathers up all my best productivity and wellbeing tips from over the years, including how to:
- Rethink your time and your calendar
- Transform your inbox
- Make meetings more meaningful
- Bring productivity and wellbeing together
As we embrace new ways—and places—of working, all these areas feel more important than ever.
Download The Google Workspace guide to productivity and wellbeing.
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