Road construction is booming in India. A recent report prepared by the India Brand Equity Foundation—a trust established by the Department of Commerce—pointed out that in FY 2019 alone, the country added 10,855 kilometers of highways to a road network that spans 5.89 million kilometers. This network is the second largest in the world and transports 90% of passenger traffic and 64.5% of all goods in the country.

The Indian Government has also earmarked road construction as key to plans to increase the nation’s GDP to $5 trillion in coming years, targeting road construction worth $212.8 billion in the two years from April 2020.

G R Infraprojects Limited is well positioned to support the government’s program. The business, which started as a contractor building roads in rural villages in India, now specializes in road engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC), a model whereby private construction firms build roads funded by the government.

The business now undertakes the processing of bitumen, manufacture of thermoplastic road-marking paint and road signage, and fabrication and galvanizing road-crash barriers. Its in-house integration model includes a design and engineering team, as well as manufacturing facilities in Rajasthan, Assam, and Gujarat.

The business recently expanded into rail—another area expected to benefit from extensive government investment—with its competencies including earthworks, materials supply, track lining, and bridge construction.

In this environment—and despite the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic—G R Infraprojects Limited aims to substantially increase turnover and manpower over the next five years.

Best-in-class infrastructure key to success

Digital transformation is key to enabling growth while best-in-class IT infrastructure is one of the foundations on which the business seeks to build success.

G R Infraprojects Limited’s digital initiatives include deployment of a new document management system and corporate systems that enable remote monitoring, live tracking, effective real-time communication, and efficient data management.

Providing a scalable, reliable cost-effective infrastructure

But most important of all is providing a scalable, reliable, and cost-effective infrastructure to support a business-critical SAP enterprise resource planning system. Over the last few years, versions of SAP have enabled the organization to digitize processes and seamlessly run business-critical functions such as inventory management and finance.

G R Infraprojects Limited initially went live with SAP ECC6.0, with a few hundred team members using the system for business-critical tasks such as tracking stock level and movement and generating financial statements and reports for review and action.

“Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited

Lowering maintenance costs

However, as G R Infraprojects Limited grew, projects proliferated, and new markets emerged, the business elected to move to the cloud from an on-premises infrastructure. “We wanted to move because there were so many maintenance costs in on-premises solutions and cloud provided convenience to IT and the broader organization,” explains Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation at G R Infraprojects Limited.

The business also wanted to move to SAP S/4HANA to take advantage of features such as AI, advanced analytics, and machine learning to transform business processes. The system runs on the HANA database, an in-memory database with fast processing speeds and a simplified data model.

G R Infraprojects Limited selected Google Cloud to run SAP S/4HANA because, Sachin says, it is “much better than any other platform,” incorporates a wide range of features, and meets uptime requirements. The cloud service could also scale to support forecast growth without a sharp increase in cost.

Furthermore, Sachin adds, “Google Cloud is a very big brand, so we were easily able to secure the trust from our executive and business teams to run an important system such as SAP S/4HANA on the platform.”

“With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day. With such a scalable and dynamic platform, we are very happy with the performance.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited

Successful transition with Infrabeat

G R Infraprojects Limited completed the project with assistance from partner InfraBeat over three months and SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud went live mid-2019. “Our dedicated SAP team worked closely with Infrabeat to deliver the project successfully,” says Sachin. “We needed an experienced partner to assist with the implementation process and Infrabeat performed that role admirably. Both teams supported each other and worked to plan to deliver a great result.”

SAP S/4HANA runs on an infrastructure comprising virtual machine instances delivered through Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and Cloud NAT to enable the secure transmission and receipt of packets to and from the internet.

G R Infraprojects Limited estimates the cost of running SAP S/4 HANA in Google Cloud is significantly lower than on alternative infrastructure options—freeing up budget for other business priorities.

In addition, moving SAP S/4 HANA to infrastructure as a service through Google Cloud has eliminated the need to assign internal team members to infrastructure management, allowing them instead to focus on higher-value activities.

Google Cloud also incorporates the security needed to protect the data and processes of SAP S/4 HANA from intrusion or disruption and ensure the uptime and continuity required of a business-critical system.

Optimized speed and availability

G R Infraprojects Limited’s decision to run SAP S/4 HANA on Google Cloud is delivering benefits on a daily basis. “With Google Cloud, our speed and availability are controlled and optimized day by day,” says Sachin. “We are very happy with the performance.”

Success with SAP S/4HANA has helped the business decide to move its remaining apps and data to the cloud when its on-premises servers and other equipment reach end of life. G R Infraprojects Limited is already running Active Directory in Google Cloud and Sachin says the cloud platform’s “fast and excellent services” made the decision easy.

“There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”—Sachin Kumar Agarwal, Head, Transformation, G R Infraprojects Limited

Adding value

As G R Infraprojects Limited grows, Sachin adds, the business expects Google Cloud to continue to add value. “There are definitely instances of various upgrades of our systems and within the organization, and as we talk about our application and mobility requirements, we see Google Cloud playing a crucial role.”

At Google Cloud, we believe that the protection of our customers’ sensitive data is paramount, and encryption is a powerful mechanism to help achieve this goal. For years, we have supported encryption in transit when our customers ingest their data to bring it to the cloud. We’ve also long supported encryption at rest, for all customer content stored in Google Cloud.

To complete the full data protection lifecycle, we can protect customer data when it’s processed through our Confidential Computing portfolio. Confidential Computing products from Google Cloud protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware isolated environment that is encrypted with keys managed by the processor and unavailable to the operator. These isolated environments help prevent unauthorized access or modification of applications and data while in use, thereby increasing the security assurances for organizations that manage sensitive and regulated data in public cloud infrastructure.

Secure isolation has always been a critical component of our cloud infrastructure; with Confidential Computing, this isolation is cryptographically reinforced. Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing products leverage security components in AMD EPYC™ processors including AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology.

Building trust in Confidential Computing through industry collaboration

Part of our mission to bring Confidential Computing technology to more cloud workloads and services is to make sure that the hardware and software used to build these technologies is continuously reviewed and tested. We evaluate different attack vectors to help ensure Google Cloud Confidential Computing environments are protected against a broad range of attacks. As part of this evaluation, we recognize that the secure use of our services and the Internet ecosystem as a whole depends on interactions with applications, hardware, software, and services that Google doesn’t own or operate.

The Google Cloud Security team, Google Project Zero, and the AMD firmware and product security teams collaborated for several months to conduct a detailed review of the technology and firmware that powers AMD Confidential Computing technology. This review covered both Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) capable CPUs, and the next generation of Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) capable CPUs which protect confidential VMs against the hypervisor itself. The goal of this review was to work together and analyze the firmware and technologies AMD uses to help build Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing services to further build trust in these technologies.

This in-depth review focused on the implementation of the AMD secure processor in the third generation AMD EPYC processor family delivering SEV-SNP. SNP further improves the posture of confidential computing using technology that removes the hypervisor from the trust boundary of the guest, allowing customers to treat the Cloud Service Provider as another untrusted party. The review covered several AMD secure processor components and evaluated multiple different attack vectors. The collective group reviewed the design and source code implementation of SEV, wrote custom test code, and ran hardware security tests, attempting to identify any potential vulnerabilities that could affect this environment.

Working on this review, the security teams identified and confirmed potential issues of varying severity. AMD was diligent in fixing all applicable issues and now offers updated firmware through its OEM channels. Google Cloud’s AMD-based Confidential Computing solutions now include all the mitigations implemented during the security review.

“At Google, we believe that investing in security research outside of our own platforms is a critical step in keeping organizations across the broader ecosystem safe,” said Royal Hansen, vice president of Security Engineering at Google. “At the end of the day, we all benefit from a secure ecosystem that organizations rely on for their technology needs and that is why we’re incredibly appreciative of our strong collaboration with AMD on these efforts.”

“Together, AMD and Google Cloud are continuing to advance Confidential Computing, helping enterprises to move sensitive workloads to the cloud with high levels of privacy and security, without compromising performance,” said Mark Papermaster, AMD’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. ”Continuously investing in the security of these technologies through collaboration with the industry is critical to providing customer transformation through Confidential Computing. We’re thankful to have partnered with Google Cloud and the Google Security teams to advance our security technology and help shape future Confidential Computing innovations to come.”

Reviewing trusted execution environments for security is difficult given the closed-source firmware and proprietary hardware components. This is why research and collaborations such as this are critical to improve the security of foundational components that support the broader Internet ecosystem. AMD and Google believe that transparency helps provide further assurance to customers adopting Confidential Computing, and to that end AMD is working toward a model of open source security firmware.

With the analysis now complete and the vulnerabilities addressed, the AMD and Google security teams agree that the AMD firmware which enables Confidential Computing solutions meets an elevated security bar for customers, as the firmware design updates mitigate several bug classes and offer a way to recover from vulnerabilities. More importantly, the review also found that Confidential VMs are protected against a broad range of attacks described in the review.

Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio

The Google Cloud Confidential VMs, Dataproc Confidential Compute, and Confidential GKE Nodes have enabled high levels of security and privacy to address our customers’ data protection needs without compromising usability, performance, and scale. Our mission is to make this technology ubiquitous across the cloud. Confidential VMs run on hosts with AMD EPYC processors which feature AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). Incorporating SEV into Confidential VMs provide benefits and features including:

Isolation: Memory encryption keys are generated by the AMD Secure Processor during VM creation and reside solely within the AMD Secure Processor. Other VM encryption keys such as for disk encryption can be generated and managed by an external key manager or in Google Cloud HSM. Both sets of these keys are not accessible by Google Cloud, offering strong isolation.

Attestation: Confidential VMs use Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) attestation. Every time a Confidential VM boots, a launch attestation report event is generated and posted to customer cloud logging, which gives administrators the opportunity to act as necessary.

Performance: Confidential Computing offers high performance for demanding computational tasks. Enabling Confidential VM has little or no impact on most workloads.

The future of Confidential Computing and secure platforms

While there are no absolutes in computer security, collaborative research efforts help uncover security vulnerabilities that can emerge in complex environments and help to prevent Confidential Computing solutions from threats today and into the future. Ultimately, this helps us increase levels of trust for customers.

We believe Confidential Computing is an industry-wide effort that is critical for securing sensitive workloads in the cloud and are grateful to AMD for their continued collaboration on this journey.

To read the full security review, visit this page.

Acknowledgments 

We thank the many Google security team members who contributed to this ongoing security collaboration and review, including James Forshaw, Jann Horn and Mark Brand.

We are grateful for the open collaboration with AMD engineers, and wish to thank David Kaplan, Richard Relph and Nathan Nadarajah for their commitment to product security. We would also like to thank AMD leadership: Ab Nacef, Prabhu Jayanna, Hugo Romero, Andrej Zdravkovic and Mark Papermaster for their support of this joint effort.

Engineers that build last-mile delivery services belong to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. Delivery customers are incredibly demanding when it comes to speed and convenience, and the services they use must take variables like increased traffic, road conditions, human error, and even driver availability into account every day.

Nuro is a company with a new approach to delivery services. Nuro has a fleet of autonomous vehicles designed to address many of the problems related to last-mile delivery. And every day, these vehicles — and their sensors — generate a lot of data before parking for the night. For Nuro engineers, that data can help them understand the impact of new on-road features, make improvements to their vehicles’ software, and ensure even better deliveries for their customers.

For Nuro, the key challenge is how to move petabytes of data as quickly, securely, and easily as possible from their edge environments, like vehicle depots, to Google’s Cloud Storage. For this delivery effort, Nuro selected Google’s Transfer Appliance with its new online transfer capability, now generally available.

Helping Nuro to speed up data delivery from the edge to the cloud

Like many Google Cloud customers, Nuro collects data from remote environments, like vehicle depots, that have different networking and storage capabilities when compared to a traditional data center. For a transfer solution to be effective moving unstructured data from these environments to the cloud, the solution needs to be easy to deploy and automate, while still providing similar performance as a more complicated alternative.

The Transfer Appliance was built for this use case. It arrives to customers as a physical appliance with a preconfigured version of Google’s Storage Transfer Service software already installed. Customers can move files to the appliance by using SFTP or SCP, or, alternately, can mount the appliance as an NFS share and copy target. Data can be stored locally on the appliance or transferred over the network, and secure encryption — at-rest and in-flight — is enabled by default.

With these new appliances, Nuro will be able to automate much of their storage transfer needs. When their autonomous vehicles return to the depot, they can move data like software logs, LIDAR data, and sensor data — all ideal fits for Google’s Cloud Storage — from parked vehicles to the Transfer Appliance. Online transfers can then be performed throughout the day, ensuring a steady stream of valuable data in the cloud for developers to analyze and use in their nightly builds. All of this will help Nuro’s engineering leaders like Jie Pan to run more productive development teams with less operational overhead.

“Our autonomous vehicles generate a tremendous amount of useful data, and our goal is to get that data to our engineers as soon as possible,” said Jie Pan, Engineering Manager at Nuro. “When vehicles return to the depot, we can move data hourly into Cloud Storage over the network. We also have the flexibility to return the Transfer Appliance back to Google Cloud. Most importantly, this rapid transfer architecture gives a meaningful boost to engineering productivity and development velocity.”

Going the extra mile

Engineering and infrastructure leaders understand the value of delivering the right data to the right teams, as fast as possible. By adding preconfigured, over-the-network transfer into a turnkey Transfer Appliance, Google Cloud customers can more easily automate these data deliveries by scheduling regular migrations of on-premises files, objects, and other unstructured data to our Cloud Storage.

As Nuro continues to grow their manufacturing and testing footprint, they plan to use Transfer Appliances to further scale and simplify their data migration from on-premises to Google Cloud. Cutting the time to migrate their data by more than half will make for happier, more productive developers, and that will help Nuro bring us all the future of delivery a little faster.

If you’d like to learn more about Transfer Appliance and its new online transfer capability, click here or reach out to your Google Cloud account team.

In June, we shared our vision for navigating the future of hybrid work with a single connected experience in Google Workspace. Now, as many of our customers begin to embark on their own hybrid journeys, I wanted to share how we’re helping them bridge the gaps in this new way of working.

A dedicated place for team collaboration: Spaces are now live

Spaces are the central place for team collaboration in Workspace and starting today, Spaces are live for all users. Spaces are unique in that they are tightly integrated with Google Workspace tools like Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Tasks, providing a better way for people to engage in topic-based discussions, share knowledge and ideas, move projects forward and build communities and team culture.

We hear from our customers that they’re continuing to work across a broad range of locations and working hours, and that Spaces can be a central hub for collaboration, both in real time and asynchronously. Instead of starting an email chain or scheduling a video meeting, teams can come together directly in a Space to move projects and topics along, whether it’s a team of 10 for “2022 Roadmap Planning” or a team of 1,000 for the “Company-wide All-Hands.”

With Spaces, teams can share ideas, collaborate on documents, and manage tasks from a single place. Because all their work is preserved for future reference, team members can easily jump in and contribute at a time that works best for them, seeing a full history of the conversations, context, and content along the way. Using Spaces has already helped my own team, which is spread across time zones and varied in its working styles. It’s been helpful to rely on Spaces to retain and structure foundational knowledge, whether it’s for onboarding a new teammate or preserving context when someone moves to a new role.

We’re just getting started with Spaces and I’m excited to share a little more about where we’ll take it next. 

In the coming months, our users will see: 

• Streamlined navigation: A flexible user interface helps users easily access their inbox, chats, Spaces and meetings—all from a single location—so they can stay on top of everything that’s important.
• Discoverable Spaces: Spaces and their content can be made discoverable to all members of an organization, so other people can find and join the conversation. Administrators can also set discoverability as the default for their organization.
• Enhanced search: Allows users to easily find content from within and across Spaces, or even discover new Spaces to join. “Search everything” in Spaces opens up powerful new collaboration possibilities and makes it easier to access the team’s collective knowledge base.
• In-line topic threading: The ability to reply to any message within a Space fuels deeper discussions and collaboration across teams and organizations.
• Robust security & admin features: Tools for content moderation, managing Spaces, and establishing the right rules for healthy communication across domains and companies.

Making meetings more hybrid friendly

Spaces will play an important role in laying the groundwork for meetings and, in some cases, reduce the number of meetings a team needs to gain alignment. Having a dedicated space for asynchronous collaboration, with access to all the right content and context, will help teams be more deliberate about scheduling meetings. This is top of mind for us and many of our customers given the rise in meeting fatigue over the last 18 months. But when having a meeting genuinely feels worthwhile, the experience of transitioning into (and out of) it from different collaboration touchpoints should be seamless. 

Over the past few months, in collaboration with many customers and across teams within Google, we developed a handbook for navigating hybrid work that includes best-practice blueprints for the five most common hybrid meeting types. Because meetings are a foundational piece of hybrid work, our goal is to make them as productive, immersive and inclusive as possible. 

Scheduling meetings that work across the entire team

With hybrid work, many teams—my own included—have locations and working hours that can change daily. When many of us were together in the office, we might have tended to schedule meetings at a time that favored the “in-office majority,” but now it’s especially important to schedule meetings that scale across the entire distributed team. 

Now, beyond indicating their virtual or physical presence when accepting meeting invites, team members can set their location for each work day in Calendar. When combined, these capabilities allow meeting organizers and on-site support teams to plan for the right mix of in-person and virtual attendance. They can also provide greater visibility and help set expectations across hybrid teams.

Making meetings more spontaneous

Remember when you’d casually bump into a colleague in the office hallway or a break room and start a conversation that sparked new ideas? That’s perhaps the thing I’m looking forward to most as more of my team plan their part-time return to the office. These casual encounters were always a great way to build relationships and learn about topics that might not come up in structured meetings. To help enable these spontaneous connections when teammates aren’t in the office together, we’re bringing Google Meet calling to Workspace.

Google Meet calling is a seamless experience of initiating a video or audio call between one or more participants, complementing more structured, scheduled video meetings. Our intention is to bring Meet calling to all the natural endpoints in Workspace where you’d initiate an ad-hoc call including chats, people cards, and Spaces, but this will come first to one-to-one chats within the Gmail mobile app. Soon I’ll be able to call members of my team directly from a one-to-one chat. This will ring their device running the Gmail mobile app and send a call chip to our chat on their laptop, so they can easily answer from any device. It’s not quite the same as a spontaneous hallway conversation, but it might be the next best thing in a hybrid setting.

Ensuring collaboration equity in hybrid meetings

How do we ensure that hybrid meetings aren’t two meetings in one, divided between those in-person and those who are remote? Effective hybrid meetings need a unified experience so that the people sitting together in the same room can interact with their remote colleagues seamlessly, without it ever feeling like there are two parallel conversations.

We designed Companion mode in Google Meet to specifically meet this challenge and we’ll start rolling it out to customers in November. With Companion mode I can host or join a meeting from within a conference room using my laptop while leveraging the in-room audio and video—and it all happens without any awkward audio feedback. This functionality lets me share content or see presentations up close on my own device, access the meeting chat and whiteboard, initiate and vote on polls, or post a question in Q&A, just as I would from home. And to ensure that users have greater choice over how they participate in meetings, live-translated captions will be available in Meet and through Companion mode by the end of the year. We’re currently working on translating meetings in English to French, German, Spanish and Portuguese, with many more languages coming in the future.

Expanding choice and flexibility for meeting hardware

While Companion mode keeps people in the room seamlessly connected to their remote colleagues, meeting hardware plays a crucial role in making hybrid meetings feel more immersive and human, with the ability for everyone to be clearly seen and heard. To provide more flexibility and choice on this foundation of how we come together in a hybrid work world, we’re announcing an expanded Google Meet hardware portfolio and interoperability with other conference room solutions.

First, we’re announcing two new all-in-one video conferencing devices to complement our Series One Room Kits. The Series One Desk 27 is an all-in-one 27” device that’s perfect for small shared spaces or your desktop, either in the office or at home. Series One Board 65 is an all-in-one 65” 4K device that can be paired with an optional stand for ultimate configuration flexibility—turning any room or space into a video collaboration hub in minutes. 

Both devices feature collaboration capabilities with the Jamboard app built right in, and each can be used as an external display. While optimized for Google Meet, USB-C connection from your laptop gives you the flexibility to use the meeting app of your choice while leveraging the high-fidelity audio and high-definition video on Series One Desk 27 and Board 65. You can learn more about these devices developed in partnership with Avocor through our on-demand webinar starting at 9 AM PT today.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/BR81EAce5BQ?enablejsapi=1&

We’re also proud to announce new third-party devices coming to the Google Meet hardware ecosystem. Google has certified the Logitech Rally Bar Mini and Rally Bar for Google Meet, which provide complete room solutions for small and mid-sized rooms. You can learn more about these Google Meet-certified products in Logitech’s September 21 webinar. Additionally, the Rayz Rally Pro is a new mobile device speaker dock by Appcessori that will automatically launch Google Meet for video meetings and provide an improved audio experience from your mobile device.

Certified Google Meet hardware ensures high-quality video and audio in meetings and is easy to deploy and manage. You can view our full Google Meet device portfolio and purchase directly from approved resellers by visiting the Google Meet Hardware website. 

While Google Meet customers enjoy a full-featured experience on Meet hardware, we realize they sometimes need to connect with people outside of their video calling network. To enable this, organizations can use Pexip for Google Meet to seamlessly join Meet meetings from the widest range of third-party video conferencing solutions. Today, we’re also announcing support for bidirectional interoperability with devices from Webex by Cisco and Google Meet hardware. Soon you’ll be able to launch a Google Meet meeting on Webex hardware and a Webex meeting on Google Meet hardware. Calling interoperability between Meet and Webex is supported on Series One Board 65, Series One Desk 27, and the rest of the Google Meet hardware portfolio, as well as Webex Room Series, Room Kit Series, Desk Series and Board Series. We expect general availability later this year. You can find more details here. We plan to give Meet users even broader calling interoperability with support for other conferencing services in the near future. 

Navigating hybrid work is a journey

We’re thrilled to bring these new Google Workspace experiences and devices to our customers, but we also realize that navigating hybrid work will be a journey of learning and adaptation for every organization. Two resources we recently developed can help along the way:

• Navigating hybrid work: A Google Workspace handbook
• The newly launched Future of Work site from Google Workspace, where you can keep up with all the ways work is changing.

Bridging the gaps in the emerging hybrid work world will necessarily be a combination of technology, workplace culture, and reimagining the use of physical spaces. But developing a “hybrid-first” mindset starts with the tools people use every day to connect, create, and collaborate, and Google Workspace will continue to play a crucial role in that evolution.