Retail will forever be an industry that must constantly reinvent itself in response to, and anticipation of, ever-changing consumer demands.

Digital transformation is fueling these changes and we’ve previously spoken about how businesses including Ulta Beauty and Kohl’s are taking advantage of Google Cloud to put data at the center of what they do and deliver the best possible shopping experience and product offerings for their customers.

Leveraging Google Cloud machine learning platform, Sainsbury is able to develop predictive analytics models to spot trends and adjust inventory, providing shoppers with a better experience. 

Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s best-known supermarkets, is another great example of a business transforming the way it engages with its customers with the cloud.

With over 150 years of service, Sainsbury’s vision is to be the most trusted retailer, where people love to work and shop. It makes customers’ lives easier, by offering great quality and service at fair prices. 

The food industry and the way that customers shop is rapidly changing. From foodie hashtags on Instagram, to the latest cooking fads, customers want to stay connected to the latest trends and Sainsbury’s is empowering them do that.

To help Sainsbury’s achieve this goal, its Commercial and Technology teams, in partnership with Accenture, are building cutting-edge machine learning solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to provide new insights on what customers want and the trends driving their eating habits.

With the help of Google Cloud Platform, we are generating new insights into how the world eats and lives, to help us stay ahead of market trends and provide an even better shopping experience for our customers.
–Phil Jordan, Group CIO, Sainsbury’s 

Sainsbury’s solution relies on data from multiple structured and unstructured sources. Using Google Cloud’s powerful cloud-based analytics tools to ingest, clean and classify that data, and a custom-built front-end interface for internal users to seamlessly navigate through a variety of filters and categories, Sainsbury’s is able to gain advanced insights in real time.

As a result, Sainsbury’s has been able to develop predictive analytics models to spot trends and adjust inventory, providing shoppers with a better experience. 

Phil Jordan, Group CIO of Sainsbury’s believes this project will have a big impact.

“The grocery market continues to change rapidly. We know our customers want high quality at great value and that finding innovative and distinctive products is increasingly important to them. With the help of Google Cloud Platform, we are generating new insights into how the world eats and lives, to help us stay ahead of market trends and provide an even better shopping experience for our customers.” 

This project is also a great example of the successes Google Cloud customers have when they work with the company’s partners.

“We’re delighted to partner with Google Cloud to help the Sainsbury’s Commercial team apply predictive analytics to the identification of new and emerging trends in grocery,” says Adrian Bertschinger, Managing Director for Retail, Accenture.

“The food sector is experiencing significant, rapid disruption, and this new, cloud-based insights platform will help Sainsbury’s identify trends much earlier and adapt their product assortment in a faster, more informed way—all for the benefit of customers.” 

Whatever the next food or shopping trend may be, Sainsbury’s is looking to the cloud to help them stay a step ahead. 

A “one size fits all” approach to education no longer works in today’s classrooms. Using cloud-based technologies, schools and educators can take a more personalized approach to education–one that suits each student’s unique learning style, abilities, and needs. 

Taking the lead toward more equitable educational opportunities worldwide, education technology pioneer, LearningMate, is partnering with Google Cloud to offer intelligent, personalized learning via Google Cloud’s Student Success Services.

In a student survey by EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education through the use of information technology, nearly all respondents asked for more digital learning and study options. Given a list of educational material types, such as study guides and recorded lessons, 93 percent said they would like to have online access to at least two options and more than half (56 percent) chose seven or more. 

The trend towards student choice challenges educators to reconsider how they teach and support learners. Students expect the same qualities in their lessons as they encounter in their other, non-school related digital experiences: personalization; user-friendliness; and engagement. Educators who are used to a more top-down education model can struggle to meet these new expectations. 

Google Cloud created Student Success Services to help education institutions meet learners where they are—in the digital age. This suite of tools and services uses Google’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and analytic tools to:

• Engage with students via an AI-powered learning platform and interactive tutor
• Help educators and learners collaborate more effectively
• Provide current, actionable data on student progress 

To bring our Student Success Services to more schools and organizations worldwide, we’re partnering with LearningMate — a global leader in digital learning infrastructure. LearningMate is a key go-to-market partner, helping schools design, launch, and maintain their own learning infrastructure. To start, LearningMate is adding Google’s AI-powered learning platform to its Frost platform, a popular content management for education. 

As the education model continues to change and digital learning becomes the norm, disadvantaged students risk getting left behind. For these learners, the “digital divide” is very real, and stands to hinder them further–not only in school, but in society and the workplace in later life. 

“The gap will only widen between those with digital advantages and those who struggle to gain access to devices and network necessities,” EDUCAUSE states. To meet all these challenges, schools need a diverse mix of tools, methods, and partnerships.

To help close the digital divide among students, digital tools need to be able to scale up or down so institutions and districts of any size and budget can use them. Google Cloud designed Student Success Services with this ability in mind. By offering these services, LearningMate aims to ensure that even schools with smaller teams and fewer resources can offer individualized learning experiences to their students. 

With LearningMate and Google’s nearly 40 years of combined experience in education, this partnership aims to help educators better understand their students’ engagement, performance, and preferences. To learn more about Student Success Services and our collaboration with LearningMate, watch this session from our Government and Education Summit.

Whether they were ready for it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed many retailers into digital businesses. Retailers made huge investments into commerce technologies, customer experience tools, sales and fulfillment technology, and improving digital experiences to continue providing their goods and services to their customers. Now, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, digital retail is the new normal. In fact, many retailers are planning on expanding their digital investments. However, as their digital footprint expands, so do their threats and security concerns. 

As a digital-focused retailer, your website is the most visible part of your attack surface. Your website is where your customers search for goods or services, make payments, or learn more about your brand. However, your website does not operate in isolation. There is an underlying infrastructure as well as the services that run on top of it that need protection from a wide array of attacks that may seek to compromise your data, internal employees, business, and customers. During this week’s Google Cloud Retail Summit, we’ve shared why Google Cloud is built to be the most trusted cloud for retailers. From providing you with control over your data as you move from your own data centers to the public cloud to giving you built-in technology to protect your applications all the way to your end users, Google Cloud helps you safely migrate to and operate in our Trusted Cloud.

Trusted Cloud Gives You Control, Transparency, and Sovereignty

• Access Transparency: We offer the ability to monitor and approve access to your data or configurations by Google Cloud support and engineering based on specific justifications and context, so you have visibility and control over insider access. 
• Certificate Authority Service (CAS): CAS is a highly scalable and available service that simplifies and automates the management and deployment of private CAs while meeting the needs of modern developers and applications. With CAS, you can offload to the cloud time-consuming tasks associated with operating a private CA, like hardware provisioning, infrastructure security, software deployment, high-availability configuration, disaster recovery, backups, and more, allowing you to stand up a private CA in minutes, rather than the months it might normally take to deploy.

• Confidential Computing: We already encrypt data at-rest and in-transit, but customer data needs to be decrypted for processing. Confidential Computing is a breakthrough technology which encrypts data in-use—while it’s being processed. Confidential VMs take this technology to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. With the beta launch of Confidential VMs, we’re the first major cloud provider to offer this level of security and isolation while giving you a simple, easy-to-use option for your newly built and “lift and shift” applications.

• Cloud Key Management: We allow you to configure the locations where your data is stored, where your encryption keys are stored, and where your data can be accessed from. We give you the ability to manage your own encryption keys, even storing them outside Google’s infrastructure. Using our External Key Management service, you have the ability to deny any request by Google to access encryption keys necessary to decrypt customer data at rest for any reason.

Trusted cloud Helps You Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Threats

• BeyondCorp Enterprise is Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering. Google has over a decade of experience managing and securing cloud applications at a global scale, and this offering was developed based on learnings from our experience managing our own enterprise, feedback from customers and partners, as well as informed by leading engineering and security research. We understand that most customers host resources across different cloud providers. With this in mind, BeyondCorp Enterprise was purpose-built as a multicloud solution, enabling customers to securely access resources hosted not only on Google Cloud or on-premises, but also across other clouds such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Cloud Armor: We’re simplifying how you can use Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, you will get access to DDoS and WAF services, curated rule sets, and other services for a predictable monthly price.

• Chronicle: Chronicle is a threat detection solution that identifies threats, including ransomware, at unparalleled speed and scale. Google Cloud Threat Intelligence for Chronicle surfaces highly actionable threats based on Google’s collective insight and research into Internet-based threats. Threat Intel for Chronicle allows you to focus on real threats in the environment and accelerate your response time.
• Google Workspace Security: Used by more than five million organizations worldwide, from large banks and retailers with hundreds of thousands of people to fast-growing startups, Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education include the collaboration and productivity tools found here. Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education are designed to help teams work together securely in new, more efficient ways, no matter where members are located or what device they use. For instance, Gmail scans over 300 billion attachments for malware every week and prevents more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching users. We’re committed to protecting against security 1 threats of all kinds, innovating new security tools for users and admins, and providing our customers with a secure cloud service.
• Identity & Access Management IAM: Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage Google Cloud resources centrally. For enterprises with complex organizational structures, hundreds of workgroups, and many projects, IAM provides a unified view into security policy across your entire organization, with built-in auditing to ease compliance processes.
• reCAPTCHA Enterprise: reCAPTCHA has over a decade of experience defending the internet and data for its network of more than 5 million sites. reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds on this technology with capabilities, such as two-factor authentication and mobile application support, designed specifically for enterprise security concerns. With reCAPTCHA Enterprise, you can defend your website against common web-based attacks like credential stuffing, account takeovers, and scraping and help prevent costly exploits from malicious human and automated actors. And, just like reCAPTCHA v3, reCAPTCHA Enterprise will never interrupt your users with a challenge, so you can run it on all webpages where your customers interact with your services.

• Security Command Center: With Security Command Center (SCC), our native posture management platform, you can prevent and detect abuse of your cloud resources, centralize security findings from Google Cloud services and partner products, and detect common misconfigurations, all in one easy-to-use platform. We have Premium tier for Security Command Center to provide even more tools to protect your cloud resources. It adds new capabilities that let you spot threats using Google intelligence for events in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) logs and containers, surface large sets of misconfigurations, perform automated compliance scanning and reporting. These features help you understand your risks on Google Cloud, verify that you’ve configured your resources properly and safely, and document it for anyone who asks.

• VirusTotal: VirusTotal inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content. Any user can select a file from their computer using their browser and send it to VirusTotal.
• Web Risk API: With Web Risk, you can quickly identify known bad sites, warn users before they click infected links, and prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site. Web Risk includes data on more than a million unsafe URLs and stays up to date by examining billions of URLs each day.

Trusted cloud Plays an Active Role in Our Shared Fate 

Our trusted cloud provides a shared-fate model for risk management. We stand with retailers from day one, helping them implement best practices for safely migrating to and operating in our trusted cloud.

We hope you enjoy the sessions we’ve created for you with Google Cloud Retail Summit and that they help you understand the ways our trusted cloud can help secure retailers all over the world.

There’s a new subsea cable in town: Topaz, the first-ever fiber cable to connect Canada and Asia.

Once complete, Topaz will run from Vancouver to the small town of Port Alberni on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, and across the Pacific Ocean to the prefectures of Mie and Ibaraki in Japan. We expect the cable to be ready for service in 2023, not only delivering low-latency access to Search, Gmail and YouTube, Google Cloud, and other Google services, but also increasing capacity to the region for a variety of network operators in both Japan and Canada.

Google is spearheading construction of the project, joined by a number of local partners in Japan and Canada to deliver the full Topaz subsea cable system. Other networks and internet service providers will be able to benefit from the cable’s additional capacity, whether for their own use or to provide to third parties. And, similar to other cables we’ve built, with Topaz we will exchange fiber pairs with partners who have systems along similar routes. This is a longstanding practice in the industry that strengthens the intercontinental network lattice for network operators, for Google, and for users around the world.

Network infrastructure investments like Topaz bring significant economic activity to the regions where they land. For example, according to a recent Analysys Mason study, Google’s historical and future network infrastructure investments in Japan are forecasted to enable an additional $303 billion (USD) in GDP cumulatively between 2022 and 2026.

The width of a garden hose, the Topaz cable will house 16 fiber pairs, for a total capacity of 240 Terabits per second (not to be confused with TSPs). It includes support for Wavelength Selective Switch (WSS), an efficient and software-defined way to carve up the spectrum on an optical fiber pair for flexibility in routing and advanced resilience. We’re proud to bring WSS to Topaz and to see the technology is being implemented widely across the submarine cable industry.

While Topaz is the first trans-Pacific fiber cable to land on the West Coast of Canada, it’s not the first communication cable to connect to Vancouver Island. In the 1960s, the Commonwealth Pacific Cable System (COMPAC) was a copper undersea cable linking Vancouver with Honolulu (United States), Sydney (Australia), and Auckland (New Zealand), expanding high-quality international phone connectivity. Today, COMPAC is no longer in service but its legacy lives on. The original cable landing station in Vancouver — the facility where COMPAC made landfall on Canadian soil — has been upgraded to fit the needs of modern fiber optics and will house the eastern end of the Topaz cable.

Traditional and treaty rights, and local communities, are deeply important to our infrastructure projects. The Topaz cable is built alongside the traditional territories of the Hupacasath, Maa-nulth, and Tseshaht, and we have consulted with and partnered with these First Nations every step of the way.

“Tseshaht is very proud of this collaboration and our partnership with Google, who has been very respectful and thoughtful in its engagement with our Nation. That’s how we carry ourselves and that’s how we want business to carry themselves in our territory.“ — Tseshaht First Nation – Elected Chief Councillor-Ken Watts

“The five First Nations of the Maa-nulth Treaty Society are pleased that we have concluded an agreement with Google Canada and have consented to the installation of a new, high-speed fiber optic cable through our traditional territories. This agreement, in which both Google Canada and our Nations benefit, is based on respect for our constitutionally protected treaty and aboriginal rights and enhances the process of reconciliation. We would also like to acknowledge the sensitivity that Google Canada expressed during our talks in regard to the pain and trauma experienced by our people as a result of residential school experience. We look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship with Google Canada.” —Chief Charlie Cootes, President of the Maa-nulth Treaty Society

“Google’s respect towards our Nation is appreciated and has good energy behind it.” —Hupacasath First Nation – Elected Chief Councilor – Brandy Lauder

With the addition of Topaz today, we have announced investments in 20 subsea cable projects. This includes Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like Blue, Echo, Havfrue and Raman — all connecting 29 cloud regions, 88 zones, 146 network edge locations across more than 200 countries and territories. Learn about Google Cloud’s network and infrastructure on our website and in the below video.