We’ve made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine in recent weeks—today’s post provides a recap of our latest milestones. Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade VMware stack running natively in Google Cloud. This cloud service is one of the fastest paths to the cloud for VMware workloads without making changes to existing applications or operating models across a variety of use-cases. These include rapid data center exit, application lift and shift, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, or modernization at your own pace.

In fact, Mitel, a global provider of unified communications-as-a-service to 70 million business users across 100 countries, migrated 1,000 VMware instances to Google Cloud VMware Engine in less than 90 days and improved its monthly operational output four times. 

In our last update, we focused on several innovative capabilities around networking, reach, and scale. Let us take a look at the highlights we released since our last installment.

Fast provisioning of a dedicated, intrinsically secure VMware private cloud

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can spin up a VMware private cloud in about 30 minutes. You can also scale your VMware-based infrastructure on-demand with dedicated hosts located in secure Google data centers. Let us look at what’s new:

Autoscale: The ability to elastically and programmatically manage infrastructure resources to align with business needs or what is called “right-sizing” is a core capability of an IaaS platform. With autoscale, Google Cloud VMware Engine users can leverage policy-driven automation to scale the nodes needed to meet the compute demands of the VMware infrastructure. 

Autoscale:

• Addresses seasonal spikes in demand, gradual increases of utilization, or new projects being onboarded or expanded due to disaster recovery events. 
• Analyzes the CPU, memory, and storage utilization to give you the controls to scale Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes up or down. 
• Ensures that storage consumption does not exceed the recommended limits for maintaining the Google Cloud VMware Engine service-level agreement. 
• Reduces overhead on IT teams by automating capacity monitoring and enabling sufficient availability of resources based on thresholds. Note that safeguards for maintaining minimum capacity and maximum capacity can be configured to ensure there are boundaries to the automation.

Learn how to set up Autoscale.

Mumbai region availability 

Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Mumbai region. This brings the availability of the service to 12 regions globally, enabling our multi-national and regional customers to leverage a VMware-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service platform on Google Cloud. For more details, please read the press release.

Enterprise-grade infrastructure

With 99.99% availability for a cluster in a single zone, fully dedicated 100 Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription, and all nonvolatile memory express storage, Google Cloud VMware Engine provides the highest performance required for the most demanding workloads. Let us look at what’s new:

Preview – Google Cloud KMS integration: You already have the ability to bring your own keys to encrypt your vSAN datastores. With this new capability, organizations that want to eliminate the overhead of managing external key providers can leverage a Google managed key provider, using Cloud KMS. This brings increased flexibility in securing workloads and data by enabling vSAN encryption by default for newly instantiated VMware Private Clouds. This feature is currently in Preview. 

HIPAA compliance: Since April, Google Cloud VMware Engine is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. This opens the service up to healthcare organizations, that can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications. Read more in this blog.

NSX-T support for Active Directory: With NSX-T support for Active Directory, you can now leverage your on-premises Active Directory as one of the lightweight directory access protocol identity sources for user authentication into NSX-T manager. This extends the theme of being able to leverage your on-premises tools with Google Cloud VMware Engine. For more information, read the documentation on how to set up identity sources.

vSAN TRIM/UNMAP support: For space-efficiency, vSAN allows creating thin-provisioned disks that grow gradually as they are filled with data. However, files that are deleted within the guest operating system (OS) do not result in vSAN freeing up space allocated. To increase space efficiency, guest OS file systems have the ability to reclaim capacity that is no longer used, using TRIM/UNMAP commands. vSAN is fully aware of these commands that are sent from the guest OS and enables reclamation of previously allocated storage as free space. We have enabled TRIM/UNMAP for vSan by default in Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Simplicity in experience and operations

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you only need to worry about your workloads—not patching, upgrading, and updating the solution layer, for fewer interoperability issues and infrastructure maintenance. IIn addition, we have pre-built service accounts to enable your third-party VMware-supported tools and solutions to work seamlessly in VMware Engine. Access to Google services privately over local connections is also natively supported, enabling enrichment of existing applications and modernization over time. Finally, this service brings the power of Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) design by natively providing multi-VPC, multi-region networking that’s unique. Let’s look at what’s new:

Dashboards for Day 2 operations: To speed up cloud transformation and enable efficiency, Google Cloud VMware Engine administrators can take advantage of Cloud Operations dashboards for the solution. In addition, administrators can create custom policies through cloud alerting and enable notifications via channels of their choice (SMS, email, Slack, and more). For more details on how to set up cloud monitoring, please refer to Setting up Cloud Monitoring. 

For the latest updates, bookmark Google Cloud VMware Engine release notes.

^{Thanks to Manish Lohani, Product Management, Google Cloud; Nargis Sakhibova, Product Management, Google Cloud; and Wade Holmes, Solutions Management, Google Cloud; for their contributions 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.

Pierogies might just be the ultimate comfort food. But when Mrs. T’s Pierogies — the leading manufacturer of frozen pierogies in the US — learned it needed to transition its existing on-premises SAP ECC to S/4HANA, the company sought a little comfort for itself. 

Founded in 1952, Mrs. T’s Pierogies now produces more than 650 million pierogies a year. Moving that many pierogies requires a powerful ERP system — and an equally powerful IT infrastructure on which to run it. Mrs. T’s realized that the SAP-mandated transition of its ERP solution to SAP S/4HANA was an opportunity to move its SAP systems to Google Cloud and gain real-time analytics capabilities for faster sales forecasting, more effective trade promotions, and more sophisticated planning.

From necessity to opportunity

Mrs. T’s successfully ran its SAP ECC solution on its own on-premises servers for years. But after SAP decided to sunset the product, Mrs. T’s realized that it faced multiple challenges, including: 

• Migrating its SAP ECC 6.0 system from an on-premises leagcy OS to a cloud-based Linux environment
• Moving data from its SAP DB2 database to HANA
• Transitioning from ECC to SAP S/4HANA

That complex transition needed to take place with little or no downtime, since nearly all of the company’s invoices, warehouse movements, and transfer orders used the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) protocol. Missing even a few hours of EDI transactions would put significant revenue at stake. Adding to the challenge: Some Mrs. T’s customers would not accept an invoice past five days, which left little room for error. Mrs. T’s chose Rackspace Technology, a longtime Google Cloud partner, to oversee the move. 

Mrs. T’s could have chosen to run S/4HANA on its legacy hardware but saw migration to Google Cloud as an opportunity to improve key aspects of its business, in particular data analytics. Historically, sales planning and forecasting involved time-consuming manual processes. But the speed, availability, and scalability of Google Cloud meant that Mrs. T’s could take advantage of S/4HANA’s embedded analytics capabilities. Migrating could also open the door to leveraging Google Cloud’s native integration of SAP data to power Google tools such as BigQuery, Google Cloud AI Building Blocks, and more. 

The move to Google Cloud also gave Mrs. T’s an opportunity to update its disaster recovery process. Previously, the company backed up to tape. So, if its SAP systems went down, a member of the IT department would have to drive the most recent tape backups an hour to its cold site, where the disaster recovery partner would load the SAP backup tape, boot the system up, switch network connections to that site, and cross their fingers. Not only would downtime be significant, but restored data would be limited to the periodic tape backup. 

“Everything just worked”

Once Mrs. T’s decided to migrate to Google Cloud, the company worked with Rackspace Technology to implement the system. The first phase focused on moving the SAP production environment from on-premises infrastructure to Google Cloud and updating its database to HANA, which took place over 12 weeks. The switchover occurred over a weekend and was all but invisible to users. “We came in on Monday and everything just worked,” recalls Timothy Coyle, Director of Information Systems & Technology. In a second four-month phase, the company transitioned from ECC to S/4. 

The move to Google Cloud paid dividends immediately. Batch transactions occurred twice as fast and on-screen end-user transactions rendered instantly. The upgrade also gave the finance team access to embedded analytics and monitoring for the first time. With everything now in the cloud, disaster recovery could be dynamic and nearly instantaneous, with a worst-case scenario of just 5 to 10 minutes of downtime. 

“Mrs. T’s needed a skilled and experienced partner that could move its SAP environment to Google Cloud with no negative impacts to its business. We knew this migration was a key initiative in Mrs. T’s digital transformation journey,” says Chuck Britton, Google Partner Development Manager at Rackspace. “We also knew that running SAP on Google Cloud would give the business the fast and flexible analytical capabilities it needed for its SAP data.” 

From ideation to production, Mrs. T’s migrated from its legacy on-premises infrastructure to a modern SAP S/4HANA solution on Google Cloud in only seven months, with minimal downtime and zero disruptions. Now that the migration is complete, Mrs. T’s has a flexible, highly scalable environment to run the SAP applications and data that fuel the business. Says Coyle, “Our strategic intent for IT is to make processes simpler, people more productive, and infrastructure more secure. This project fits right square in the middle of that strategic philosophy.”

Learn more about ways in which Google Cloud can transform your SAP experience and about Rackspace Google Cloud solutions for SAP customers.

Operational resilience continues to be a key focus for financial services firms. Regulators from around the world are refocusing supervisory approaches on operational resilience to support the soundness of financial firms and the stability of the financial ecosystem. Our new white paper discusses the continuing importance of operational resilience to the financial services sector, and the role that a well-executed migration to Google Cloud can play in strengthening it. Here are the key highlights: 

Operational resilience in financial services

Financial services firms and regulators are increasingly focused on operational resilience, reflecting the growing dependency that the financial services industry has on complex systems, automation and technology, and third parties. 

Operational resilience can be defined as the “ability to deliver operations, including critical operations and core business lines, through a disruption from any hazard”¹. Given this definition, operational resilience needs to be thought of as a desired outcome, instead of a singular activity, and as such, the approach to achieving that outcome needs to address a multitude of operational risks including: 

• Cybersecurity: Continuously adjusting key controls, people, processes and technology to prevent, detect and react to external threats and malicious insiders.
• Pandemics: Sustaining business operations in scenarios where people cannot, or will not, work in close proximity to colleagues and customers.
• Environmental and Infrastructure: Designing and locating facilities to mitigate the effects of localised weather and infrastructure events, and to be resilient to physical attacks.
• Geopolitical: Understanding and managing risks associated with geographic and political boundaries between intragroup and third-party dependencies.
• Third-party Risk: Managing supply chain risk, and in particular of critical outsourced functions by addressing vendor lock in, survivability and portability.
• Technology Risk: Designing and operating technology services to provide the required levels of availability, capacity, performance, quality and functionality. 

Operational resilience benefits from migrating to Google Cloud

There is a growing recognition among policymakers and industry leaders that, far from creating unnecessary new risk, a well-executed migration to public cloud technology over the coming years will provide capabilities to financial services firms that will enable them to strengthen operational resilience in ways that are not otherwise achievable.  

Foundationally, Google Cloud’s infrastructure and operating model is of a scale and robustness that can provide financial services customers a way to increase their resilience in a highly commercial way.

Equally important are the Google Cloud products, and our support for hybrid and multi-cloud, that help financial services customers manage various operational risks in a differentiated manner:

• Cybersecurity that is designed in, and from the ground up. From encryption by default, to our Titan security chip, to high-scale DOS defences, to the power of Google Cloud data analytics and Security Command Center our solutions help you secure your environment.
• Solutions that decouple employees and customers from physical offices and premises. This includes zero-trust based remote access that removes the need for complex VPNs, rapidly deployed customer contact center AI virtual agents, and Google Workspace for best-in-class workforce collaboration.
• Globally and regionally resilient infrastructure, data centers and support. We offer a global footprint of 24 regions and 73 zones allowing us to serve customers in over 200 countries, with a globally distributed support function so we can support customers even in adverse circumstances.
• Strategic autonomy through appropriate controls. Our recognition that customers and policymakers, particularly in Europe, strive for even greater security and autonomy is embodied in our work on data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and software sovereignty.
• Portability, substitutability and survivability, using our open cloud. We understand that from a financial services firm’s perspective, achieving operational resilience may include solving for situations where their third parties are unable, for any reason, to provide the services contracted.
• Reducing technical debt, whilst focusing on great financial products and services. We provide a portfolio of solutions so that financial services firms’ technology organisations can focus on delivering high-quality services and experiences to customers, and not on operating foundational technologies such as servers, networks and mainframes.

Introduction

The Google Cloud Professional Services Organization’s (PSO) mission is to help our customers get the most out of Google products. PSO is responsible for customer success by sharing our technical expertise in order to unlock business value from the cloud by providing cloud strategy and best practice advice, implementation guidance, and training using our proven methodology. 

In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on Operational Health Reviews and how PSO engages in a myriad of activities to ensure the overall success and health of a customer engagement while ensuring we are meeting customer expectations and objectives, managing risk, and ultimately delivering value during or after the Google Cloud migration. We will discuss the assets, methodology, and tools that we leverage to ensure this success.

What is an Operational Health Review and what purpose does it serve?

Operational Health Reviews (OHR) are regular reviews to proactively address the below topics: 

• A customer’s support experience
• Analysis of trends in key operational metrics
• Analysis of trends in Google Cloud usage
• Status reports for high-priority cloud projects
• Discussion of upcoming events
• Discussion of potential opportunities for training
• Review of feature requests

The core aim of an OHR is to measure progress and advise customers on the overall health of the account and migration progress while providing recommendations as a team on what adjustments should be considered to ensure continued success. During the OHR, we will address any pain points as well as identify and remediate any negative trends in support interfaces and usage metrics. 

The intention of the activity is to also perform a blameless reflection for continuous improvement. This supports the effort to maintain common ground and obtain mutual optimism for the next phase of the customer’s journey on Google Cloud. 

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the activities that go into an OHR. 

Support experience

One of the Google Cloud’s Support Organization’s goals is to simplify and streamline our customer’s support experience with a scalable and flexible set of offerings built with the customer needs at the center. This includes supporting an ongoing partnership model, with a proactive and collaborative approach. Premium Support is our top-tier support model which is a paid support offering designed for enterprises that run mission critical workloads and require fast response times, platform stability, and increased operational efficiencies. As part of this offering, customers are provided with a Technical Account Manager (TAM) who is in charge of delivering frequent touchpoints, including OHRs. 

During the support experience section of an OHR, some of the following topics may be reviewed:

• Case volume by priority
• Case volume by product
• Cases linked to Google Cloud incidents
• Escalated cases or incidents
• Case initial response time (IRT)
• Case IRT SLO Met Rate
• Case total resolution time (TRT) hours

The purpose of this activity is to better understand the efficiency of both the customer’s and Google’s cloud operations from a support trend perspective. The goal is to celebrate any positive trends, but also to identify potential negative trends and proactively determine a remediation strategy. 

Status reports for high-priority cloud projects

The purpose of this part of the OHR is to ensure the senior management stakeholders have continued visibility into the status of all their high-priority cloud initiatives with an easy-to-read, sometimes color-coded assessment on the status of each project. The assessment [Figure 1] may include, but is not limited to potential identified risks, key next steps, key stakeholders, and a mitigation plan for any high priority issues that may occur during their migration engagement. Additionally, the TAM may also cover any upcoming milestones or events, as well as any potential anticipated future blockers [Figure 2]. 

Review trends in Google Cloud usage

This part of the OHR is meant to provide the customer with a holistic view of their overall Google Cloud usage. The purpose is to provide understanding around what products are being used on Google Cloud and also where cost is generally being allocated for overall cost management and budget tracking purposes. This can help customers with their overall cost optimization efforts. Some of the metrics we may cover in this section are:

• Current Google Cloud usage by service
• Google Cloud growth trends
• Google Cloud growth trends by service
• Google Cloud growth trends by project
• Review of used and available service credits

Feature request review and advocacy

TAMs will work with customers to help identify product needs and advocate for feature requests with Google Product Management and Engineering teams. While feature request advocacy is an ongoing activity, during the OHR, the TAM will review any high priority feature requests that have previously been submitted, providing updates on status including potential release dates. 

When a feature is coming up for the release, the TAM can help the customer prepare for implementation (providing early Preview access, coordinating a meeting with the Product Manager to review the feature, etc.) and then continue to provide support until the feature is successfully implemented in the customer environment. Similarly, if a high priority or technical blocking feature is not yet coming available, the TAM can help offer an alternative solution that can unblock the customer in the short term. 

The OHR is also a great time for the TAM to work with the customer to ensure they have early access to new and exciting features that are in Alpha or Beta, and that would be beneficial to the customer and their environment. 

Training strategy

Training is a primary component to ensuring the overall success in adopting Google Cloud. During the OHR, a review of training metrics will be provided. This may include tracking metrics to determine how the customer is tracking towards an initially agreed upon learning plan or coming up with additional upskilling strategies as necessary. Additionally, throughout an engagement, the customer’s TAM will provide opportunities for both free and paid Google Cloud training. 

Conclusion 

PSO is the voice of customer health, maintaining priority to proactively and strategically guide large enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud, both during and after the migration process. The OHR is an efficient and effective way to maintain alignment, ensure expectations and objectives are being met, manage risk, and overall ensure the success of the customer.

Learn more about our methodology and get started with Google Cloud by completing a free discovery and assessment of your migration. Alternatively, if you’d like to engage directly with our PSO team on your migration, contact us!