Most large enterprises started with their own data centers and developed in-house solutions to meet their specific business needs, regulations, and industry specifications. These solutions were based on traditional applications from legacy vendors like Oracle and Microsoft — or even mainframes — and from key technology providers like SAP and VMware. During the last decade, organizations started their digital transformation journey by migrating their IT infrastructure, applications, and data to the cloud to reduce operating costs and gain efficiencies as their needs scaled.

The next step in the journey was to take advantage of cloud-based data analytics, services and scalability to drive business growth and revenue. Rather than offer generic “industry clouds” which require multi-year IT deployments and significant customization, Google Cloud has responded to customer needs by developing production-ready industry solutions that address specific use cases with repeatability across organizations.

These industry solutions are grounded in Google Cloud’s differentiated capabilities, including AI, ML, and data analytics. With these, you can dramatically reduce implementation time and realize value from the cloud more quickly with deep insights into your customers and more efficient interactions with your suppliers and partners.

Here are some highlights from the That Digital Show Podcast where Umesh Vemuri, VP of Global Strategic Customers and Industries at Google Cloud, discusses his industry strategy.

Why Google Cloud solutions?

“We are uniquely positioned to help enterprises with solutions based on our deep understanding of customer needs that are supported by our technologies. There are three examples that come to mind.
The first is our understanding of the consumer from the standpoint of running an ecommerce platform. We have the solutions to run digital platforms at a very large scale, including the engineering practices we bring to support organizations during important high traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The second example deals with media and entertainment as a whole. We operate the world’s largest streaming service and support the largest digital platforms currently out there. That means that whatever problems our media customers are experiencing, there’s a good chance we’ve already seen them and know how to deal with them.

Finally, there is our experience with AI and big data. Our leadership in deploying our AI and big data healthcare technologies has given us the experience to solve complex problems — such as techniques to support evidence-based selection, drug therapy, and molecular profiling.”

B to B to C

“Google is a B to B organization, I always like to add that we are also B to B to C, because the concern the consumer ultimately has is their experiences and the journey that they’re on. Connecting the dots between the business and the consumer experience is really critical and a real big differentiator in how we could better serve our customers.

For example, take Ford Motors. Really think about the challenges they have — traditional problems around manufacturing, core I. T. modernization and information, and how to remove costs. But then when you really think about the core of the business, how do you actually make this incredible experience for drivers of Ford vehicles? What do you want to do from an infotainment perspective? What do you want to do in speech-to-text conversion?

And suddenly your business is really a direct-to-consumer experience. Ultimately, all the infrastructure and technology is designed to provide the consumer — who’s ultimately buying that vehicle — with an amazing experience that will maintain their loyalty.

From this example, we can see this kind of linkage in every industry: from retail and e-commerce, media, and direct streaming to healthcare with direct telehealth.”

Solutions that transform the consumer experience

“The consumer’s expectations are constantly shifting and we have to be able to provide the technologies, the structure, and the solutions to our customers to be able to meet those changing expectations at that consumer level.

So first, we want to be very clear on the industry segments that we’re going to focus on and what we believe our clear differentiation will be. So we’ve focussed on ten industries including: retail, financial services, manufacturing, telecommunications, media and entertainment, healthcare and life sciences, education, government, supply chain and logistics and gaming.

Second, we really have to be very prescriptive about the solution pillars in the areas where our customers tell us we have challenges. We want to build solutions that solve not only today’s issues, but the problems of the future.

And third, in those pillars, we have to be very clear on what are the specific use cases that we think have high value for our customers. Then make these available as a catalog of actual products and production-ready solutions that we and our partners in the ecosystem provide.”

Google Cloud industry solutions focus on our top ten industries where we can provide differentiated value to organizations. Whether it’s discovery in retail, AI-enabled call centers, or automotive tools for connected cars, we are delivering production-ready solutions that are ready to implement with minimum customization.

Cloud transformation and the adoption of modern DevOps technology presents both opportunities and challenges for IT compliance functions. With DevOps style application development, the feedback loop for developers and engineers is much tighter than with traditional application development pipelines, enabling speed and agility of application release cycles. While speedy CI/CD is a critical advantage of DevOps, it also shifts compliance left in the development timeline, and therefore puts pressure on the IT risk & compliance organization to modernize their approach to regulatory compliance as well. With the ongoing shift towards cloud technologies and DevOps, modernization of regulatory compliance is no longer optional for an IT compliance function

Compliance modernization is a broad mandate that spans the way the function is governed; the tools, technology, and analytics it uses; the number and nature of its connections to other parts of the business; verifiability and auditability of the controls’ evidence, the expectations assigned to it; and more.

Public cloud technology is becoming a core part of many industries today, and with this comes some potential risks such as cloud misconfigurations exposing intellectual property, loss of physical control of assets, skillset scarcity around cloud based security and compliance. 

Given the constantly changing risk landscape, it is critical that regulations more closely align to address these risks. As regulations and risks evolve, the aim of a modern compliance function is to help an organization stay compliant as it goes through a digital transformation. As organizations go through digital transformation, IT compliance also needs to transform — via upgrading the technology stack, modifying the business processes and most importantly re-skilling people to become cloud aware.

Today we are releasing the new paper by Google Cloud’s Office of the CISO. In the paper we reveal a new approach for modernizing your compliance approach using modern approaches and Google Cloud toolsets. Your team can leverage the paper to add value to enterprises, both by charting a course to the safe use of cloud technology and by reducing risk through the use of the public cloud.

Read the paper “Assuring Compliance in the Cloud.”

Also, review these related resources:

• “Risk Governance of Digital Transformation in the Cloud“ paper
• “Making Compliance Cloud-native” (episode 14) with Zeal Somani
• Google Cloud Compliance resource center
• Our compliance blueprints: PCI DSS on GKE and GCP FedRAMP Blueprint
• Google Cloud security best practices center

Editor’s note: Today’s post documents the solution to a problem of how to scale website infrastructure as it moves from on-prem to the cloud. It is the result of collaboration between technical teams of Les Echos Le Parisien Annonces (a division of Groupe Les Echos, subsidiary company of LVMH) and Google in the spirit of finding the best tool for the job together.

All technology starts aging from the first day you set it up, and over time becomes in need of some renewal. At Les Echos Le Parisien Annonces (a division of Groupe Les Echos, subsidiary company of LVMH), we complement the main site (“publication annonce légale”) with a number of local market sites for different regions within metropolitan France, as well as French readers in territories across the world. Each local market site offers a variety of services and content, which are served by a set of CMS-driven sites.

Historically these sites were served from dedicated on-prem infrastructure. As the number of sites grew, vertical scaling was used to increase the capacity of the machine. Over time, this approach presented challenges. First, each new site involved modifying multiple shared configurations, and modifying several monolithic parts of the architecture. Because all the sites shared parts of the serving stack, an issue that developed for one site could take down all of the sites. The reliability of the serving path was not able to reach the availability we and our customers expected. Les Echos and Google put their heads together to solve this with a new serverless deployment pattern where each new site can be quickly and independently launched.

Each site, running a conventional PHP CMS solution, is now containerized and deployed as its own Cloud Run service with an independent configuration and database. This means each site scales vertically, including down to zero at times of day when that locale is quiet. Because Cloud Run is available across GCP regions, we can deploy sites closest to the market we want to reach. To further enhance our customer experience, each of these sites is run behind Cloud Global Load Balancing with Cloud Armor and Cloud CDN, providing extra security and performance. The initial pilot of 30 sites has performed well, and the remainder of the 150 current sites are now being migrated. Adding new sites has gone from taking hours to minutes. This allows Les Echos to quickly explore new opportunities in markets that previously would have taken much longer to assess and qualify for investing in a new site.

Adopting this serverless approach has been a successful step in the modernization journey to Google Cloud, allowing us to use containers to take existing software and both re-architect and re-platform to support growth while reducing toil.