Project to Platform: Financing Digital Transformation
4214
Of your peers have already read this article.
3.45 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Financing digital transformation poses a significant problem for many enterprises we work with. It’s not because the C-suite doesn’t support it: the need to become more agile, digital, and data-driven is nearly ubiquitous in executive public pronouncements. But most large organizations look at IT investment in a way that’s ineffective for a successful digital transformation effort.
A varied combination of factors affect an organization’s success in the digital ecosystem, and a lack of alignment between IT and business leaders can hamper even the most digitally sophisticated organizations. Empirical research by the Apigee Institute shows clear evidence that a solid digital transformation effort, aligned across business and marketing, whose progress is carefully tied to core enterprise metrics, must be supported by an investment strategy that uses a “real options” portfolio approach.
Let’s explore ways to think about funding digital transformation.
Planning for the Unimaginable
Common IT investment strategies are focused on straight-line net present value (NPV) business case calculations, which emphasize linear solutions and impacts. These methods ignore the value of enabling a range of options and potential future use cases, which an API program, with its reusable, highly consumable digital assets, makes available for the enterprise. In addition, these methods often ignore the value of the new categories of business data generated by such programs, as well as business capabilities that were impossible to imagine before the capabilities came online.
One media company we’re working with was astounded by a project that now makes key sales provisioning available to large distribution partners within two months, when previous estimates predicted two years and many millions of dollars, each.
More importantly, that functionality will now be reused across all of their numerous current partners and sales channels, and is enabling exciting new partnerships that were too costly before. This functionality was an unexpected by-product of their original API effort—it wasn’t even the main focus of the initial project.
There was no way that the impact of this capability or its implications on new business could have been predicted at the outset, and no way to formally model the outsized impact this functionality will have on the enterprise. Any attempts to do so would have been deemed ludicrous.
Breaking from the Status Quo
So how do you fund an API-driven digital transformation, which by nature emphasizes speed and optionality to unlock new ways of doing business, instead of the business-as-usual single-use, point-to-point integrations that perpetuate status quo thinking? For a world where the latter is the dominant paradigm and you don’t have a clear C-level mandate, here are three suggestions.
1. Enable your web/e-commerce teams. Many such teams find their responsibilities expanded to include mobile, kiosk, and many other digital initiatives, while being trapped in the traditional web server, do-it-yourself paradigm. These teams are actually quite open to technology, and often harbour weekend hackers who love to explore the new capabilities that are expanding the digital ecosystem at light speed. Tapping this passion by funding new approaches and quickly realizing immediate projects can create first the technical, and then the business proof points that resonate with a strategy team. These capabilities must be nurtured to move out of the lab into production, where real results are created.
2. Focus on partnerships. Opening and accelerating your relationships with partners via APIs (read more about partner API initiatives here) is high-impact and relatively easy to model. This business area can prove out an API platform, and in our experience creates clear business value that can support future justifications for other business units. What’s best about these wins is that sales operations groups are typically very tactical and demanding, so when they see the value, these groups will send a message to the rest of the organization that APIs have business value. Further, your enterprise’s core partnerships have the focus of executive attention. Adding value here will elevate the stature of the API program in the C-suite.
3. Work on your CFO/financial organization. Using your successes in e-commerce and partnerships, you can propose a more robust investment using a real options approach that leads to treatment of APIs as products. This path is predicated on what research has proven to work: the adoption of a digital KPI target, coupled with a portfolio of programs whose net result is to achieve the target KPI.
Building Toward the Big Vision
But what about the visions of ground-breaking business models, ubiquitous connectivity, and enablement of an ever-shifting set of opportunities on big platforms and with unlimited partnership possibilities? Yes, these are still the endpoints to work toward, and fundamentally comprise the strategic reasons to embark on a digital transformation. If your enterprise has the C-Level leadership (in the form of a CDO or CDO-like figure), supported by a well-funded, sophisticated investment approach, by all means, build that new world now.
However, should that vision be shared only within your business unit, a forward-thinking IT group, or a dedicated innovation team, the most important thing to do is to build your team’s capability—and your program’s credibility—while delivering value along the way. The approach we suggest here has been proven in many of the organizations we work with; once your organization begins working faster and at lower costs by orders of magnitude, you’ll have created enough leverage to change the way your organization invests in its API program.
3944
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
1:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
One of the great opportunities of cloud technology is the ability to combine and integrate different tools, services, and platforms. But, the question of which cloud tools and platforms to use—and how to ensure they work together seamlessly and securely still persists.
According to recent research, 82 percent of enterprises have a hybrid cloud strategy, running applications in an average of 1.5 public clouds and 1.7 private clouds; and IDC predicts increasing adoption of hybrid cloud architectures. As a result, many large organizations already depend on mixed networks composed of multiple cloud service providers, third-party cloud platform vendors, and on-premises systems.
So, how do organizations implement a successful multi-cloud strategy while deriving the full benefits of the cloud?
What enterprises need is an open-source strategy and consistent governance that will help companies use multi-clouds to compete in the digital world. Download this Harvard Business Review whitepaper to know more.
Three Reasons Why Enterprises Must Think Next-gen Serverless
4924
Of your peers have already read this article.
2:00 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
As we reflect on the past year, Heraclitus’ phrase “The only constant in life is change” has never rang more true. With the pandemic, companies had to shift operations, launch new products and adapt to extreme demand patterns, sometimes within a matter of weeks.
To respond to customer needs faster and more efficiently, many companies turned to serverless technology, designing applications with real-time signals and intelligence built in. From apps and sites for healthcare appointments and vaccinations, public-sector employment benefits, contact tracing, retail logistics, curbside delivery, hotel and travel booking—you name it, companies built it with serverless.
Redefining serverless
The world changed, the market changed, our lives changed and we here at Google Cloud also changed, introducing new products to meet our customers’ needs and grow with them.
Serverless technology, in particular, has changed a lot since it was first introduced. Google first launched serverless compute in 2008 with the launch of App Engine, helping customers scale their applications faster and seamlessly. We then added the ability to run Functions as a Service with Cloud Functions, giving customers a simple developer experience with integrated telemetry and observability. In parallel, we also introduced innovations to the container market with Kubernetes. Pretty soon, customers started asking us if we could combine the awesome serverless attributes of auto-scaling and developer experience with the flexibility of containers.
Enter Cloud Run, the next generation of serverless. Serverless is now no longer just about event-driven programming or microservices. It’s also about running complex workloads at scale while still preserving a delightful developer experience. In fact, serverless with Cloud Run is about having a true developer platform with the flexibility to run any language, any library, any binary.
There are three capabilities that make Cloud Run the next-generation of serverless, and not the same ‘serverless’ you find elsewhere:
- A great developer-centric experience
- Versatility: expanding to a broader set of containerized apps
- Built-in DevOps and security
Let’s take a look at the attributes in greater depth.
A great developer experience
Being developer-centric comes from having fully-managed self-operating infrastructure and a great developer experience. We want everyone to be able to develop smart applications and for that we have to make it easy. We also want to be sure we are bringing your technical talent closer to where you generate your business value.
To make things easy, last year we introduced buildpacks, which creates container images directly from source code. No need to learn Docker or containers. Although there are containers underneath, they’re transparent to the developer.
To simplify things further, we also introduced a single “gcloud run deploy” command to build and deploy code to Cloud Run. These types of features are some of the reasons why 98% of Cloud Run users deploy an application on their first try in less than 5 minutes.
In fact, in the past year alone, we added over 25 new features and services to our serverless stack, making development of complex apps easier. One of our main launches was Workflows, which lets you combine Cloud Run with any Google Cloud product or any HTTP-based API service. As a developer, this is very useful when automating complex processes, or integrating GCP’s analytic services across a variety of systems.
Taken together, all these new features make the Cloud Run developer experience far easier than its competitors’, according to a recent report by User Research International.
Versatility
Next-generation serverless is also about versatility. It supports a wider variety of applications and caters to enterprise requirements. Functions and web apps of course, but also heavyweight applications, and in the fullness of time, also brownfield and third-party containerized apps. This versatility is enabled by the container primitive, which removes restrictions on languages, run times, and hardware.
Being able to run a greater variety of apps on our serverless stack means you can optimize for predictable usage. Today, we announced new spend-based committed use discounts for Cloud Run. Enterprises with stable, steady-state, and predictable usage can now purchase committed use contracts directly in the billing UI. There are no upfront payments, so these discounts are a perfect way to reduce your spend by as much as 17%. RELATED ARTICLEMaximize your Cloud Run investments with new committed use discountsCommitted use discounts in Cloud Run enable predictable costs—and a substantial discount!
Another way we provide versatility is with support for WebSockets and gRPC in Cloud Run. With these new additions, you get the benefits of serverless infrastructure to build responsive, high-performance applications. We also added the use of min instances with Cloud Run. This feature allows you to cut cold-start times and run latency-sensitive applications on Cloud Run! At the same time, you can still scale to zero, or keep a minimum amount of compute available, for example when running brownfield Java applications.
Built-in DevOps
Serverless doesn’t just make it faster for developers to set up their apps—it also helps once the application is up and running, taking a big management load off of operations teams. Notably, serverless systems take care of “scaling” an application up or down. That means that if your application suddenly starts fielding a lot of traffic, the serverless platform automatically spins up more resources to handle the load. No more dreaded timeouts, wheels or hourglasses—or work for your operations team. Likewise, as soon as demand goes down, the platform takes care of decommissioning resources, i.e., scaling down, so that you’re not paying for resources that you no longer need. Want to run your service globally with low latency, without an operations team, and zero stranded costs? Cloud Run takes care of global load balancing and autoscaling to zero for you in every Google Cloud region.
Further, features like support for gradual rollouts and rollbacks allow developers to experiment and test ideas quickly, as well as sophisticated traffic management in Cloud Run. Likewise, Cloud Run provides access to distributed tracing with no setup or configuration, allowing developers to find performance bottlenecks in production.
Next up: serverless security
As part of DevOps best practices, we build in security for your serverless applications at every layer: deployment time, runtime and networking. For example, built-in vulnerability scanning ensures you only deploy artifacts you trust.
Today, we are announcing Cloud Run support for Google Secret Manager and customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), making it easy to protect data at rest and store sensitive data. We’re also integrating Cloud Run with Binary Authorization, which lets you enforce specific policies to make sure only verified images make it to production. And finally, we added a new integration with Identity-Aware Proxy, support for VPC-SC, and egress controls that you can use to enforce a security perimeter, limiting both who can access specific services and what resources can be accessed when these services run in production. You can read more about these security enhancements here. RELATED ARTICLE4 new features to secure your Cloud Run servicesWe’re improving the security of your Cloud Run environment with things like support for Secret Manager and Binary Authorization.
In summary, the next generation of serverless combines the best of serverless with containers to run a broad spectrum of apps, with no language, networking or regional restrictions. The next generation of serverless will help developers build the modern applications of tomorrow—applications that adapt easily to change, scale as needed, respond to the needs of their customers faster and more efficiently, all while giving developers the best developer experience. Learn more by attending The Power of Serverless, a two-hour virtual event where we’ll lay out our vision for serverless compute, and where serverless subject matter experts will present on in-depth serverless development topics. Hope to see you there!
Want to learn even more about serverless and cloud-native application development? Check out the upcoming Modern App Dev & Delivery workshop, and our Ask the Experts roundtable.
3691
Of your peers have already watched this video.
3:35 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
APIs Help Cleveland Clinic Revamp their IT Infrastructure and Deliver High Quality Healthcare
Cleveland Clinic is one of the largest and most respected hospitals in the United States. Its mission is to provide better care of the sick, investigate their problems, and deliver further education of physicians.
The clinic deployed electronic medical records (EMR) to help doctors deliver greater quality healthcare. But the challenge was, it was not being used at it to its full potential.
“To understand how to use APIs it’s important to understand the challenges that we face. We use the electronic medical record. It’s a great investment we made and it is a great delivery tool but it only gets us so far. For the nurses and the doctors that is not good enough as they are focused in delivering the best possible care,” says Beth Meese, Administrative Director of Technology and Innovations at Cleveland Clinic.
To ensure that the EMR was being used at its full potential the clinic added APIs on top of it.
“Using the Apigee platform, we have been able to write APIs on top of our EMRs and then fill the gap for what the medical records was not able to deliver. APIs help us run analytics, run predictive models, and then surface the data back in a way to the clinicians that they can use to deliver high-quality healthcare,” says Meese.
Leveraging Apigee, Cleveland Clinic was also able to securely give developers access to APIs and reduce a considerable amount of burden from the rest of the IT team.
Optimizing Cloud Load Balancing in Hybrid and Multicloud Architectures
2771
Of your peers have already read this article.
3:30 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
Today’s enterprise applications are often assembled across distributed environments. This includes the integration of services across multi-cloud, multi-SaaS and on-premises environments. While the approach has the advantage of enabling enterprises to choose the best service available to support their applications, it adds the complexity of delivering services across heterogeneous environments. To solve this, Cloud Load Balancing supports an open cloud strategy, which includes:
- Supporting universal traffic management policies across heterogeneous environment by leveraging open source and open standards
- Enabling a global front-end so applications can leverage a common set of policies and security postures
- Providing tools that give your users the highest possible performance and reliability
Universal traffic management with open source and open standards
Kubernetes is a great solution for managing containers across environments. We believe that traffic management policies should also be supported across environments. Cloud Load Balancing creates homogeneous traffic policies across highly distributed heterogeneous environments by supporting standard-based traffic management in a fully managed solution, and allowing open source Envoy Proxy sidecars to be used on-premises or in a multi-cloud environment, using the same traffic management as our fully managed Cloud Load Balancers.
As enterprises start modernizing services and refactor monolithic applications, they require solutions that can provide consistent traffic management across distributed systems at scale. But organizations want to invest their time and resources innovating and building new applications — not on the infrastructure and networking required to deploy and manage these services. Envoy is an open-source high-performance proxy that runs alongside the application to deliver common platform-agnostic networking capabilities, including:
- New load balancing algorithms, (e.g. round robin, ring hash, least conns)
- Weighted traffic splitting
- Fault injection
- Request mirroring
- Outlier detection
- Additional header transformation options
- Request retries
- Additional backend session affinity options
- Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS)
Hybrid Load Balancing across multi-cloud and private clouds
Over the years Google has deployed Load Balancers across 173+ Edge Pop locations, delivering customer applications at massive-scale on Google infrastructure. And now Google Cloud has introduced Hybrid Load Balancing, extending our Load Balancing capabilities beyond Google’s network to on-premises private clouds and multi-cloud solutions. This allows our customers to migrate applications to the cloud iteratively, or build hybrid applications that are assembled from services that are running across heterogeneous environments.
Supporting modern application delivery with HTTP3/QUIC
Cloud Load Balancing is a fully distributed load balancing solution that balances user traffic (HTTP(s), HTTPS/2, HTTPS/3 with gRPC, TCP/SSL, UDP, and QUIC) to multiple backends to avoid congestion, reduce latency, increase security, and reduce costs. It is built on the same frontend-serving infrastructure that powers Google services, supporting millions of queries per second with consistent high performance and low latency.
To serve massive amounts of traffic, Google built the first scaled-out software-defined load balancing, Maglev, which has been serving global traffic since 2008. It has sustained the rapid global growth of Google services, and it also provides network load balancing functions for Google Cloud Platform customers. To accommodate ever-increasing traffic, Maglev is specifically optimized for packet processing performance with Linux Kernel Offload. Maglev is also equipped with consistent hashing and connection tracking features, to minimize the negative impact of unforeseen faults and failures on connection-oriented protocols.
Another key enabler to support this global-scale is that our Cloud Load Balancers are built on top of QUIC(RFC9000), a protocol developed from the original Google QUIC) (gQUIC). HTTP/3 is supported between the External HTTP(S) Load Balancer, Cloud CDN, and end clients. And once enabled, customers typically see dramatic improvements in performance and throughput.
Google Cloud already supports HTTP3 in Cloud Load Balancer. To use HTTP/3 for your applications, you can enable it on your external HTTPS Load Balancers via the Google Cloud Console or the gCloud SDK with a single click.
If your service is sensitive to latency, QUIC will make it faster because it establishes connections with reduced handshakes. When a web client uses TCP and TLS, it requires two to three round trips with a server to establish a secure connection before the browser can send a request. With QUIC, if a client has connected with a given server before, it can start sending data without any round trips, so your web pages will load faster.
QUIC has advantages over legacy TCP as follows.
Summary
Since 2008, Google has been an innovator in software-defined networking, supporting applications running at massive scale. Google Cloud Load Balancers support HTTP3 and QUIC as a next generation web transport protocol, which significantly improves customer traffic latency. Google Load Balancers also have incorporated the Envoy proxy as a foundational technology, providing our customers with advanced traffic management that’s compatible with the open source Envoy ecosystem. This allows our users to have the choice to combine Google’s fully-managed Cloud Load Balancers with open source Envoy Proxies, to enable consistent traffic management capabilities across a multi-cloud distributed environment. And with Hybrid Load Balancing, customers can leverage our 173+ world wide PoPs to seamlessly manage traffic across Google Cloud, on-premises and other cloud providers.
Google Cloud Load Balancers include all these capabilities natively. And when used together, they support globally-scaled applications that run seamlessly across the heterogeneous environments many enterprises deploy today.
4132
Of your peers have already downloaded this article
10:32 Minutes
The most insightful time you'll spend today!
While microservices are lauded as catalysts for speed and scale, the conversation is incomplete if it does not include APIs. Without APIs, microservices cannot be securely, reliably, and adaptably scaled across an organization or to outside partners. Moreover, because these APIs and their microservices are meant to be widely consumed and reused, it’s not enough for companies to merely create the APIs and move on. Rather, the APIs should be continually managed so the business can control how its microservices are accessed, generate insight into how they are used, and encourage reliability of its services.
As microservices grow beyond their original use cases and are being leveraged to share important functionality throughout the enterprises and even with external partners, the problem that arises is how this sharing creates challenges for teams trying to secure, monitor, understand usage of, and fully take advantage of microservices.
In this eBook we explore how leading enterprises are facing these challenges head-on and scaling their microservices strategies. Learn how APIs make it possible for microservices to be securely, reliably, and adaptably shared, and how an API management platform enables enterprises to ensure that they maintain control over their microservices as consumption grows.
More Relevant Stories for Your Company
Google’s Default Messaging Apps for AT&T Android Users Ensure Richer Conversations
Today, we’re announcing that we’re working with AT&T to establish Messages by Google as the default messaging application for all AT&T customers in the United States using Android phones. The collaboration aims to help accelerate the industry toward global Rich Communication Services (RCS) coverage and interoperability to offer a consistent, secure, and
Google Maps Platform Can Elevate FinTech Experience with Less Risks and Higher Security
The financial services industry is changing—an estimated $68 trillion in wealth transferring from baby boomers to millennials.1 This means financial service providers will have to deliver the speed, ease-of-use, technological sophistication, and tailored services that millennials have come to expect. In fact, half of all millennials are willing to switch to
How APIs Helped PWC Open New Revenue Streams Using Existing Data
PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, is well-known for professional services structured around auditing, insurance, tax, legal, and traditional management consulting. In Australia, the PwC Innovation and Ventures group has taken the global lead in building new, technology-based, turnkey lines of business outside of PwC’s traditional service areas.
Kaluza & Google Cloud: Committed to Powering Up 73 Million EVs by 2040
Electric vehicles already account for one in seven car sales globally, and with new gas and diesel cars being phased out across the world, global sales are forecast to reach 73 million units in 2040. But with power grids becoming increasingly dependent on variable energy sources such as wind and solar, rising demand from electric vehicles
