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

Gaining the cloud advantage

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

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

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

Easy lift and shift with Google Cloud VMware Engine

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

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

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

Cloud infrastructure for new retail realities

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

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

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

Quanta Services is the leading specialty contractor with the largest and highly-skilled trained workforce in North America. It provides fully-integrated solutions for the electric power

pipeline industrial and telecommunications industries the company’s geographic footprint which includes North America Latin America and Australia.

It’s network of companies ensures world-class execution with local delivery and has over 40,000 employees.

“The exciting thing about Backstory is it allows us to land massive amounts of data from all of our different security tools and then Chronicle worries about how to correlate and aggregate this information for us. We can then focus on the highest priority threats.”

Richard Breaux, Manager Security Operations Quanta Services

Because Quanta Services’ customers provide energy and telecommunications to their customers, they have world-class cybersecurity requirements.

“We must ensure that Quanta leads the industry given the fact that our business is building the core infrastructure that powers people’s lives. It’s crucial that we meet their cybersecurity requirements,” says James Stinson, VP-IT, Quanta Services.

To support this goal Quanta implemented a number of security tools that generate terabytes of security telemetry. Over time, however, these systems generated an information overload for the company’s limited pool of qualified security resources.

“Our logging tools also couldn’t keep up with the rapidly growing information. With limited resources we need to focus our security analysts time on high quality work instead of digging through mountains of data,” says Stinson.

They achieve this by implementing Backstory and Chronicle, which is on Google Cloud.

“The exciting thing about Backstory is it allows us to land massive amounts of data from all of our different security tools and then Chronicle worries about how to correlate and aggregate this information for us. We can then focus on the highest priority threats,” says Richard Breaux, Manager Security Operations Quanta Services.

As a result, the company’s security  team spends less time getting to the core information they need to address these incidents.

“What used to take us 15 minutes or more, we can now accomplish in seconds,” says Breaux.

In order to be successful, research needs to be replicable, so scientists can build on past work and insights. However, an article in Nature warned that as much as 50% of published drug development research could not be reproduced in subsequent trials. As a result, promising drug candidates sometimes led to disappointment, as well as wasted time and money, when key findings could not be replicated. 

The shift to cloud computing helps solve this problem because it allows researchers to use open-source tools that work across platforms. As demand for cloud computing rises, our customers have asked us for more ready-made solutions to assure reproducibility of results by their collaborators, regardless of the platform they are using. They asked for secure and effective collaboration tools as well as faster time-to-insight from any type of data.

We listened. Google’s new research and data insights solution includes three sets of functionalities to address these key challenges. Each can be activated on demand and may be eligible for subscription pricing. “HPC in a box” offers abstract complexity to run high performance computing (HPC) workloads by automatically managing your cluster in the most effective manner. It integrates seamlessly with some of the industry’s most-used schedulers like Slurm and PBS. It makes it easier than ever to answer bigger questions faster by accessing Google’s fast, powerful hardware like TPUs and GPUs, all for one predictable flat fee for eligible workloads. Healthcare Innovation Hub provides healthcare-specific functionality to help ingest, aggregate, and de-identify any type of healthcare data in its original format. It unlocks cross-modality analysis and collaboration and empowers researchers with harmonization tools to overcome healthcare interoperability issues. Google Cloud Real-World Insights (formerly FDA MyStudies) accelerates and streamlines drug development and clinical trials to address urgent medical challenges with reproducible results.

The solution enables researchers to ask new questions, get answers more quickly, and work more collaboratively–with no wait times or down times. Institutions can scale to more ambitious projects and generate actionable, real-time insights from any data source–all while staying within budget.

Many top research centers have already found it faster and more cost effective to shift from downloading and storing data on their own servers to storing and analyzing data on Google Cloud. Here are some of the real-world projects already yielding breakthroughs:

• Clemson analyzed 8,500 hours of traffic camera feeds with 2.1M vCPUs in three hours to improve evacuation routes for disaster planning.
• The Colorado Center for Personalized Medicine saved $2.9M by building their Compass data warehouse on Google Cloud rather than on on-prem.
• The Broad Institute slashed costs of genomic sequencing by 90% with Google Cloud.

Our partners, such as Atos, Burwood, Omnibond, Mavenwave, Quantiphi, and Deloitte, can help you first design and develop, then install and implement your own solution, including training. To assess your institution’s needs and develop a customized plan for your next-generation research solution with research and insights, contact our sales team.

Casper Labs announced a collaboration with Google Cloud that will allow developers to launch public and/or private Casper nodes directly from Google Cloud. This enables a much more seamless and highly secure process for the millions of developers who want to build in blockchain environments without having to learn new, highly specialized programming languages. Additionally, Google Cloud will provide its scalable and reliable infrastructure to developers building on the Casper Protocol. 

Blockchain technology is maturing 

As blockchain technology matures, a growing number of businesses are embracing it as a key way to drive new efficiencies and realize cost savings. 

According to a recent Casper Labs study, 87% of executives polled in the United States, United Kingdom and China reported plans to invest in a blockchain solution in 2023. This is due in no small part due to recent innovations that help organizations overcome the so-called Blockchain Adoption Trilemma, which previously held that it was impossible for any blockchain to be simultaneously a) decentralized, b) scalable, and c) secure.

Thanks to the rise of proof-of-stake blockchains like Casper, new models have emerged that enable a more scalable and secure architecture that no longer forces a compromise on decentralization. 

Another trend facilitating these growing adoption rates is the rise of WebAssembly (WASM) as a baseline technology for newer blockchains, including Casper. WASM (created by W3C) makes application development in blockchain environments far more accessible and interoperable to the millions of developers worldwide who specialize in languages like Java, Javascript, C++ and Rust. Previously, any blockchain-based build required a high degree of specialized developer knowledge, which made it a much more challenging option for most organizations. 

Meet Casper

Casper is a permissionless, decentralized public blockchain based on WASM that was built explicitly to foster enterprise adoption of blockchain technology. Beyond its more accessible model, Casper is the first and only blockchain to offer native upgradable smart contracts. This means that organizations can have the option to securely and consistently update software code even after it is running on Casper. This gives organizations the control and flexibility to use industry best practices, such as continuous deployment and continuous integration, which are already in use in their IT departments. Casper is also highly configurable and allows organizations to support public, private, and/or hybrid deployments. 

Casper is also noteworthy for the presence of Casper Labs, a software development and professional services firm that supports organizations building on the Casper network. Unlike most blockchains that follow a more traditional open-source project, Casper Labs provides around-the-clock support and bespoke software development for enterprise organizations. Recently, Casper Labs helped patent management company IPwe execute the largest-ever blockchain deployment, featuring more than 25 million patents being added as custom NFTs to the Casper Blockchain. 

How to get started with Casper on Google Cloud

Developers who want to start building on Casper can find a comprehensive series of tutorials here.

The Casper Association also recently announced a $25 million grant program to support projects and developers building on Casper. Interested participants can apply here.