With the novel coronavirus COVID-19 sweeping across continents and fatalities climbing every day, it was only a matter of time before countries closed their borders to contain its spread.

In the wake of this decision, travel and tourism, the linchpins of many economies, were among the worst affected.

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 22 percent fall in international tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2020, and could see an annual decline of between 60 percent and 80 percent when compared with 2019.

The impact on the economy and to livelihoods that are dependent on tourism and hospitality has been significant. Prior to the pandemic, the outlook was quite different. Research by UNWTO in 2018 estimated that India would have 50 million outbound tourists by 2020.

Technology was also set to play a huge part in that growth. A Google Travel study showed that 74 percent of travellers were planning their trips on the Internet, and technologies like AI, IoT and VR were all set to be key trends this year.

Now, as borders slowly reopen and travel restrictions are gradually lifted, technology could once again be the game-changer. Manoj Sharma CTO, Cleartrip.com spoke to YourStory about the industry’s road to recovery and how technology will aid that journey.

Read the Full Story on YourStory

Editor’s Note: In a previous blog, we discussed how home improvement retailer Lowe’s was able to increase the number of releases it supports by adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework on Google Cloud. Lowe’s went from one release every two weeks to 20+ releases daily, helping meet its customer needs faster and more effectively. Today, the Lowe’s SRE team shares how they used SRE principles to decrease their mean-time-to-recovery (MTTR) by over 80 percent.

The stakes of managing Lowes.com have never been higher, and that means spotting, troubleshooting and recovering from incidents as quickly as possible, so that customers can continue to do business on our site. 

To do that, it’s crucial to have solid incident engineering practices in place. Resolving an incident means mitigating the impact and/or restoring the service to its previous condition. The average time it takes to do this is called mean time to recovery (MTTR). Tracking this metric helps us stay on top of the overall reliability of our systems at Lowe’s, while simultaneously improving the speed with which we recover. Our goal is to keep the MTTR metric as low as possible, so that failures don’t negatively impact our business. Here are the four areas we addressed to drive holistic improvement in our MTTR.

Lowe’s incident reporting process

To reduce MTTR, we created a seamless incident reporting process following SRE principles. Our incident reporting process is a workflow that starts at the time an incident occurs, and ends with an SRE captain who closes the action items after a postmortem report. With this approach, we are able to limit the number of critical incidents. The reporting process involves three core components: monitoring, alerting, and blameless postmortems.

Monitoring and alerting

Having proper monitoring and alerting in place is crucial when it comes to incident management. Monitoring and alerting tools let you detect issues as soon as they occur, and notify the right person in the shortest possible time to take action. From a measurement standpoint, we track this as our mean time to acknowledge (MTTA). This is the average time it takes from when an alert is triggered, to when work on the issue begins.

At the time of an incident, our monitoring and alerting tools notify the on-call SRE first responder via PagerDuty in the form of a phone call, text message and email. Our SRE software engineering team has done a lot of automation to enable various Service Level Indicator (SLI) alerts and Service Level Agreement (SLA) notifications. The on-call SRE then initiates a triage call with our service/domain stakeholders to resolve the incident. As a result, we reduced our MTTA from 30 minutes in 2019, to one minute – a 97 percent decrease. 

Blameless postmortems: learning from incidents

A postmortem is a written record of an incident, its impact, the actions taken to resolve it, the root cause and the follow-up actions to prevent the incident from recurring (see example here). A blameless postmortem builds on that and is a core part of an SRE culture, and our culture at Lowe’s. We ensure that individuals are not singled out, and the outcome for all postmortems are directed toward learnings and process improvement.

For us, the postmortem process is the biggest part of our incident workflow. When an SRE creates a new postmortem report, the first step is to conduct a postmortem session with domain stakeholders to review the report. The postmortem then goes into the review stage and gets reviewed by more stakeholders in our weekly postmortem meeting. In the final stage of this process, the SRE captain will close the report once everyone in the weekly meeting agrees that the report is complete.

To conduct a successful postmortem, it is critical to keep the focus on identifying gaps and issues with the system and operations processes, rather than an individual, and generate concrete actions to address the problems we’ve identified. To ensure this, we follow a couple of best practices:

1. We start by gathering the facts from the person who identified the problem, and each SLI owner has to identify a gap or the next SLI upstream owner who created the impact for them.
2. Every SLI owner is provided full opportunity to present their case, and identifying the issue is done as a community exercise. 
3. Once action items and process changes are identified, an owner is nominated to complete the actions, or they will volunteer. 
4. For easy reference, we publish and store postmortems in our incident knowledge base. This process helps SREs continuously improve as future incidents arise. 

Continuous Improvement 

Encouraging a culture of honest, transparent and direct feedback that you need for blameless postmortems is often an iterative process that needs sponsorship from executives, empowering incident captains to lead the entirety of the discussion and outcomes. Running successful postmortems, and completing action items from them, needs to be recognized and accounted for in SRE performance objective assessment. As shared in Google’s SRE book, the best practice is to ensure that writing effective postmortems is a rewarded and celebrated practice, with leadership’s acknowledgement and participation. This is possibly the hardest part to accomplish in an effective postmortem during a cultural transformation unless you have full buy-in from leadership.

However, it’s all well worth it. This process is a key part of how we were able to improve our MTTR over time—from two hours in 2019 to just 17 minutes! 

Our SRE incident reporting process has also transformed how our company solves issues. By streamlining this workflow from alerting, to solving an issue, to blameless postmortems, we have reduced our MTTR by 82 percent and our MTTA by 97 percent. Most importantly, our team is learning from every incident and becoming better engineers as a result. Visit the SRE Google Cloud website to learn more about implementing SRE best practices in the cloud.

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Rahul Mohan Kola Kandy, Vivek Balivada, and the Digital SRE team at Lowe’s for contributing to this blog post.

When I reflect back on the past year and the pandemic, I’m struck by how the reliance on remote work and operations has changed the fundamentals of business forever. For the financial services industry, this rings particularly true. Many conversations I’m having right now with organizations revolve around embracing a transformation cloud, and thinking of cloud computing not just as an infrastructure decision, but also as the locus for transformation throughout the company. 

Today, as we welcome the industry to our Financial Services Summit, we’ll demonstrate just how Google Cloud accelerates a financial organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. We hope you’ll join us.

How we’re helping financial services firms build their transformation clouds

At Google Cloud, we continue to focus on areas where we can bring the best of our capabilities to banking, capital markets, insurance, and payments customers around the world. Our work with financial services industry customers has given us a deep understanding of the real-world, specific use cases that matter most to them. This groundwork led us to engineer products and solutions that are open and flexible, not ones that force them to rip out existing investments in ERP or other early IaaS cloud implementations. 

It’s why we’ve engineered solutions such as Lending DocAI, Open Banking with Apigee, and Datashare for financial services to help transform the industry. These solutions were created with our customers’ security and compliance top-of-mind and are built at the intersection of user-optimized experience, technology, and sovereignty.

At their core, financial institutions want to drive growth, reduce costs, mitigate risk, stay compliant, and increase efficiency. As a result, when we partner with them on their transformation journeys, we consider three essential focus areas: 

• Enabling the human experience and connected interactions
• Building an open and intelligent data foundation for better insights
• Providing the most trusted and secure cloud in the industry

Enabling humans and connected interactions

A company’s transformation is about more than technology; people and culture ultimately drive change. HSBC, for example, recognized its business users would benefit from guided answers to common questions around risk policy compliance, and turned to Google Cloud to leverage AI and machine learning bots to assist employees, ease the burden on policy experts, and improve the user experience. Using Dialogflow, a core component of Contact Center AI, HSBC was able to build a conversational platform that quickly and accurately addresses user needs at scale. 

Another example is Equifax, which used Google Workspace to support collaboration not only internally between employees, but also externally with customers. Customers can use Google Cloud solutions for financial services to build these sorts of technology-enabled human interactions quickly and easily—supporting organizational change at scale.

Building an open and intelligent data foundation for smarter, faster insights

The real impact of Google Cloud solutions for financial services comes when the whole company has access to the right information at the right time, and can act more intelligently on that data. Our solutions help businesses safely leverage their data and get a complete 360-degree view of their customers’ information, which can often be scattered across multiple systems (CRM, lending, credit, etc.). This helps financial institutions improve the overall customer experience—and sometimes even develop new products quickly. 

Indeed, all financial institutions are looking for ways to grow revenue and reduce expenses, and data can be a critical ingredient to doing both effectively. As daily transactions rise, so does the volume and complexity of data. But to implement new customer experience innovations (and new revenue streams), financial institutions must first capture data effectively. This is why AXA Switzerland, for example, uses real-time analytics on Google Cloud to gain cross-industry insights about future trends and customer preferences.

Financial services organizations also need the confidence of building on a platform that provides choice, flexibility, and agility to move fast. It’s why we have an open cloud approach that allows Google Cloud services to run in different physical locations such as on-premises, other public clouds, and the edge. Customers can also harness the power of data and AI through our open APIs, machine-learning services, and analytics engines on any major cloud platform. This is why companies like Macquarie Bank are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to modernize and empower its developers.

Compliant and secure to address risk and regulatory needs

As a highly regulated industry, financial services is focused on security and compliance, risk and regulations, and fraud detection and prevention. Google Cloud offers unique capabilities to earn customers’ trust as part of our continuing work to be the most trusted cloud in the industry. Google Cloud provides a secure foundation that you can verify and independently control. Our cloud technology reduces risk and data loss, because it is built on comprehensive zero-trust architecture. Finally, we offer a shared-fate model built on best practices in risk management via automation, guidance, and insurance. This is why customers like BBVA have confidence anywhere their systems may operate. 

On the regulatory front, global legislators and regulators continue to focus on the stability of the industry that only a decade ago went through one of the biggest liquidity crises in history. With this oversight comes strong expectations of risk mitigation. Google Cloud offers a single, global set of controls, reviewed by financial institutions and regulators around the world, and verified in collaborative audits—making compliance simpler and less costly for our customers.

Finally, Google Cloud allows financial services firms to operate confidently with advanced security tools that help protect data, applications, and infrastructure, as well as their customers from fraudulent activity, spam, and abuse. We help protect your data against threats, using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, ensuring you never have to trade-off between ease of use and security. Google Cloud encrypts data at-rest and in-transit. And we now also offer the ability to encrypt data-in use, while it’s being processed for customer VM and container workloads.

Let us help you with your transformation cloud journey

We’ve seen leading financial services companies embrace Google Cloud to help them move beyond infrastructure toward the next phase of their cloud evolution. This is an era where no company is better positioned to lead than Google Cloud, and we’re excited to help you with your journey.

Learn more about Google Cloud for financial services.