The Home Depot (THD) is the world’s largest home-improvement chain, growing to more than 2,200 stores and 700,000 products in four decades. Much of that success was driven through the analysis of data. This included developing sales forecasts, replenishing inventory through the supply chain network, and providing timely performance scorecards.

However, to compete in today’s business world, THD has taken this data-driven approach to an entirely new level of success on Google Cloud, providing capabilities not practical on legacy technologies.

The pressures of contemporary growth that drove much of the work are familiar to many businesses. In addition to everything it was doing, THD needed to better integrate the complexities in its related businesses, like tool rental and home services. It needed to better empower teams, including a fast-growing data analysis staff and store associates with mobile computing devices. It wanted to better use online commerce and artificial intelligence to meet customer needs, while maintaining better security.

Even before addressing these new challenges, THD’s existing on-premises data warehouse was under stress as more data was required for analytics and data analysts were utilizing the data with increasingly complex use cases. This drove rapid growth of the data warehouse, but also created constant challenges for the team in managing priorities, performance, and cost.

In order to add capacity to the environment, it was a major planning, architecture, and testing effort. In one case, adding on-premises capacity took six months of planning and a three-day service outage. Within a year, capacity was again scarce, impacting performance and ability to execute all the reporting and analytics workloads required. The capacity refresh cycles were shrinking, and the expecations for data were growing. There had to be a better way.

Still, THD did not take its move to the cloud lightly. A large-scale enterprise data warehouse migration involves tremendous effort among people, process, and technology. After careful consideration, THD chose Google Cloud’s BigQuery for its cloud enterprise data warehouse.

BigQuery, a scalable serverless data warehouse, was better on cost, infrastructure agility, and analytics capability, driving better insights with improved performance. There are no service interruptions when capacity is added, and that capacity can be added within a week (and soon same day). It doesn’t require complex system administration, and its standard SQL support means people can easily ramp up quickly. Valuable BigQuery products like Identity and Access Management meant THD could create many separate Google Cloud projects, while ensuring that different teams weren’t interfering with each other or accessing protected data.

THD also utilizes BigQuery’s flat-rate monthly pricing model that allows teams to budget their capacity based on need and provides billing predictability. The capacity not being used by a given project is available for enterprise use. This ensures no surprises when the monthly bill arrives and provides all analytical users access to significant computing power.

While THD’s legacy data warehouse contained 450 terabytes of data, the BigQuery enterprise data warehouse has over 15 petabytes. That means better decision-making by utilizing new datasets like website clickstream data and by analyzing additional years of data.

As for performance, look at this chart:

With the cloud EDW migration complete, and the legacy on-premises data warehouse retired, analysts now execute more complex and demanding workloads that they would not have been able to complete before, such as utilizing Datalab for orchestrating analytics through Python Notebooks, utilizing BigQuery ML for machine learning directly against the BigQuery data (no movement of large datasets), and AutoML to help determine the best model for predictions.

Additionally, engineers at THD have adapted BigQuery to monitor, analyze, and act on application performance data across all its stores and warehouses in real time, something that was not practical in the on-premises system.

With over 600 projects that THD now has on Google Cloud, the BigQuery story is just one of the many ways that Google Cloud is working with THD to deliver meaningful business results, every day.

Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile and web apps at global scale.

Cloud Firestore is a fast, fully managed, serverless, cloud-native NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for your mobile, web, and IoT apps at global scale.

Its client libraries provide live synchronization and offline support, while its security features and integrations with Firebase and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accelerate building truly serverless apps.

Here’s other stuff it’s good at:

Sync data across devices, on or offline

With Cloud Firestore, your applications can be updated in near real time when data on the back end changes. This is not only great for building collaborative multi-user mobile applications, but also means you can keep your data in sync with individual users who might want to use your app from multiple devices.

With Firebase Realtime Database, we felt we had built the best force-plate testing software on the market. Thanks to Cloud Firestore, in only two weeks, we built a system that’s significantly better and includes features we never thought possible to ship on Day 1.

Chris Wales, CTO, Hawkin Dynamics

Cloud Firestore has full offline support, so you can access and make changes to your data, and those changes will be synced to the cloud when the client comes back online. Built-in offline support leverages local cache to serve and store data, so your app remains responsive regardless of network latency or internet connectivity.

Simple and effortless

Cloud Firestore’s robust client libraries make it easy for you to update and receive new data while worrying less about establishing network connections or unforeseen race conditions. It can scale effortlessly as your app grows. Cloud Firestore allows you to run sophisticated queries against your data. This gives you more flexibility in the way you structure your data and can often mean that you have to do less filtering on the client, which keeps your network calls and data usage more efficient.

Enterprise-grade, scalable NoSQL

Cloud Firestore is a fast and fully managed NoSQL cloud database. It is built to scale and takes advantage of GCP’s powerful infrastructure, with automatic horizontal scaling in and out, in response to your application’s load. Security access controls for data are built in and enable you to handle data validation via a configuration language.

Operating for 23 years, Rustomjee has carved a niche for itself in the ever-growing real estate sector. Rustomjee’s portfolio includes 14.32 million square feet of completed projects; 12 million square feet of ongoing development; and another 28 million square feet of planned development. These projects span the best locations of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. Rustomjee adds value to the lives of its homeowners through its core business, its corporate social responsibility initiatives, and its philanthropy. The business strives to ensure that every blueprint includes child-friendly spaces for parks, playgrounds, and learning rooms, encouraging families to spend quality time with each other.

In the 17 years Rustomjee’s Corporate Head of Information Systems, V M Samir, has worked with the business, it has grown from 100 employees to more than 800 employees – primarily professionals such as engineers, architects, lawyers, accountants, and regulatory consultants. The remainder work in marketing, sales, administration, security, human resources, and other associated areas.

Historically, Samir says, the real estate industry globally has lagged in embracing new workplace technologies, making building business cases, securing sponsorship, completing implementations, and encouraging adoption a difficult task.

G Suite powers cloud journey

Rustomjee started operations running an on-premises email service. However, the business wanted to upgrade its anti-spam capabilities and, in 2007, turned to G Suite. “There was no practical way I could build an anti-spam engine within that service that could match the power of the G Suite anti-spam engine and the intelligence held within its databases,” says Samir. “Our second key reason for moving was the lower cost of G Suite relative to an on-premises service that required us to spend on compute, backup, storage, and administration resources. Running G Suite would also help ensure users could still access their emails if their machines experienced an outage.”

Finally, G Suite enabled Rustomjee to access and compose emails from any location – a luxury for a real estate organization whose workers often attended construction projects with poor connectivity. “Finally, G Suite was the only service in those days that integrated calendar, meeting, and storage repositories through single sign-on. Google was so far ahead of the curve at that time and we saw the potential of G Suite to transform our communications and ultimately our business.”

“We did not have to shut down the business operations during the migration because Google Cloud Platform complemented every idea we had. And when my business users came to work on the Monday morning [after the final migration], everything was stable and the performance had improved. We told them our infrastructure had changed and they should start thanking Google Cloud!”

—V M Samir, Corporate Head, Information Systems, Rustomjee

The business started its cloud and IT modernization journey by decommissioning its on-premises email servers and using G Suite for Business. It began testing in March 2007 and went live with all production email services for 500 users in June 2008.

The intuitive nature and ease of use of G Suite made the transition seamless. “I did not have to undertake a large-scale change management exercise,” says Samir. “Users bought into the program and acquired the necessary knowledge quickly, meaning our adoption rate was extremely fast.”

With G Suite, email became the new norm to complete a range of tasks at Rustomjee. “We started exchanging CAD drawings, videos, high-resolution images, and other large files with our consultants,” says Samir. “These files had been difficult to store in on-premises environments.”

Rustomjee has improved collaboration and performance with G Suite, primarily due to four services. Gmail enables workers to communicate seamlessly externally and with each other, while Calendar enables them to set up and synchronize meetings. These meetings can be conducted through Hangouts Meet. “If a group of people internally need to discuss a work order or contract, they can coordinate calendars, sit at different locations within our organization, and collaborate using audio and video on a common service,” says Samir. “They can also work from and update a single document in Drive.”

With email and other collaboration applications running smoothly, Rustomjee saw an opportunity to enhance its technology infrastructure. The business had started operations running workplace applications on servers in small air-conditioned rooms. These servers ran databases and applications that sent data across a network to endpoints including desktops and laptops.

Expansion and the changing demands of workplace technology prompted Rustomjee to upgrade its capabilities, and the business commissioned a data center. However, Rustomjee’s continuously fast-growing compute and storage requirements, as well as the need to access new technologies to innovate and compete, quickly strained its technology model. “We required eight weeks each time we needed to add new compute and storage to our environment,” says Samir. “In addition, the heavy investments in our captive data center meant we were unable to easily leverage new technologies and decommission old technologies.”

Public cloud supports growth

Rustomjee reviewed its options and decided public cloud services could best meet its ongoing needs. “The rising cost of maintaining old hardware would force us to refresh data center technologies every five to seven years,” says Samir. “More broadly, a hardware-defined data center could not adapt quickly in the cloud-computing world, making it difficult to align compute with growth.”

The business started by moving its corporate website and microsites to a public cloud service to accommodate increased traffic delivered from a change in business strategy. “We saw an opportunity to shift our marketing and advertising from print advertising to digital platforms,” says Samir. “We wanted to be available to buyers from the point at which they start looking at properties online.”

However, Rustomjee’s digital marketing teams found it difficult to scale instances in line with demand, and work with complex user administration screens and control panels.

“With Google Cloud Platform, we’ve achieved a considerable reduction in timelines and simplified technology management and administration. All of our business users are delighted.”

—V M Samir, Corporate Head, Information Systems, Rustomjee

Google Cloud Platform presented an opportunity for Rustomjee to run its websites and microsites in a reliable, scalable, and responsive infrastructure. “Our evaluation confirmed Google Cloud Platform could support our growing demand for compute and storage,” says Samir. ‘In addition, because we undertake projects that are geographically distributed, networking – not only within the data center, but that could be accessed from any location – was very important. Only Google Cloud Platform had its own networking infrastructure.”

“More broadly, in a cloud environment, we could select any database we needed and start consuming operating systems as a service,” he adds. “In addition, we did not have to invest capital in licenses and hardware and we could always resize network bandwidth. Further, we could take advantage of pay-as-we-use cloud services, and link this to business growth.”

Google Cloud Platform also allowed Rustomjee to reduce the size of the teams needed to manage and operate its infrastructure. “When you have infrastructure running in the data center and in disaster recovery locations, you need to have a large pool of resources working around the clock to ensure constant uptime, sound backup, and good replication measures in place,” says Samir. “With the cloud, everything is simplified and we do not have to consider issues like how many hard drives have failed in on a particular morning.”

The business started testing and created its first virtual machine instance to Google Cloud Platform in April 2017. Because the Mumbai data center was not yet operating Rustomjee initially hosted its instances in the Google Cloud Platform Singapore Region. This initial move enabled the business to reduce the number of required virtual machine instances from six to one. After a year of running the website on Google Cloud Platform, the business found the simplicity of scaling compute resources meant its digital marketing teams were running more campaigns and servicing more leads, while compute spend had fallen by 56 percent. Furthermore, Rustomjee was not experiencing latency that impacted the user experience.

The opening of the Google Cloud Platform Region in Mumbai in late 2017 gave Rustomjee an opportunity to use compute, storage, and networking services located domestically. The business decided to go all-in on Google Cloud Platform and migrated a range of applications to the service.

These included an SAP enterprise resource planning system, running initially on Oracle but moved to the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform, with the assistance of advisory consultants from a leading firm. This system is integral to Rustomjee’s successful operations, meaning it has to be highly available and responsive. “All our financials are captured and stored in this system, as well as projects, materials management, order management, financial systems, and sales ordering systems, both procurement and supply-side,” says Samir. “In short, we cannot live without SAP ERP!”

Rustomjee turned to SAP specialist partner InfraBeat Technologies, a leading network implementation provider, and Google engineers to complete the migration successfully. “We were all in this together and collaborated closely to deliver the project successfully,” says Samir. “We were very impressed by the expertise and skills of everyone involved.”

A nine-day migration

With assistance from Google Cloud and the partners, Rustomjee moved all its SAP workloads, from sandbox to development, development to quality, and quality to production, in just nine calendar days, without impacting the business. “We did not have to shut down the business operations during the migration because Google Cloud Platform complemented every idea we had,” says Samir. “And when my business users came to work on the Monday morning [after the final migration], everything was stable and performance had improved. We told them our infrastructure had changed and they should start thanking Google Cloud!”

Moving to Google Cloud Platform enabled the business to complete certain customer invoicing workloads in just two hours, down from 13 hours previously. Backups of the SAP enterprise resource planning system that had taken up to six hours, were now being completed in six minutes.

“We have now fully embraced a cloud-first approach and have moved 100 percent of our workloads to the cloud. We depend totally on Google Cloud Platform to run our business.”

—V M Samir, Corporate Head, Information Systems, Rustomjee

Eight weeks down to 20 minutes

Rustomjee has also cut the eight-week cycles needed to set up the infrastructure and applications for a new real estate project, and integrate it into the SAP system, to just 20 minutes. “With Google Cloud Platform, we’ve achieved a considerable reduction in timelines and simplified management and administration,” says Samir. “All of our business users are delighted.”

With its website and enterprise resource planning system running successfully on Google Cloud Platform, the business decided to move its virtual application delivery environment into the service. “We decided to move all 800 of our employees into the cloud, so they could access applications through any endpoint, be it a mobile phone, tablet, thin client, desktop, or laptop,” says Samir.

The business decided to replace an existing application virtualization product with public images available on Compute Engine, with testing of Android, iOS and Windows operating systems across a range of devices proving highly successful. “Running the remote desktop service in Compute Engine and using public images enabled us to operate a leaner, simplified desktop as a service environment,” says Samir. “We have been able to deploy business function-specific virtual machine instances on the cloud and compartmentalize data to the business functions that need them. The business completed the move – including 8.1TB of data – in just six weeks. “The only workloads we did not move during that period were intensive workloads for visualization,” says Samir.

However, the four teams that did not use the remote desktop as a service environment – and that created visualization-intensive workloads – were working in traditional ways, compromising productivity and increasing risk. “They used to be given a desk in their respective offices and their workstations loaded with the applications,” says Samir. “There was no way of taking hourly backups of these devices and there was no recovery mechanism for the applications, because they were not in the data center.

“The other challenge was what happens to the data, because we operate out of multiple locations. The users in these four teams always had to come back to pre-assigned desks and continue working from there. This was counterproductive.”

The business subsequently implemented virtual machine instances with GPU access for visualization-intensive workloads. “We started evaluating Nvidia T4 (Tesla) GPUs in the Mumbai Region on 13 February and went live on 11 March in Mumbai,” says Samir. “By moving these 40 team members to Google Cloud Platform, we have enabled them to work with visualization workloads from any location, improving productivity and flexibility.”

Focus on core business

With Google Cloud Platform, Rustomjee can focus on running real estate projects and using technology to enable them. “I don’t have to refresh my technology every five to seven years, and I can leverage new technologies as they come on stream,” says Samir.

Reliable application access

With the flexibility and scalability of Google Cloud Platform, Rustomjee is now well-positioned to support further growth and operate in accordance with the time-limited nature of the real estate industry in India. “If we have promised to hand over the keys to a customer by a certain deadline and we fail to do so, we face a penalty of 10 percent of the cost of the project,” explains Samir. “The Indian Government introduced this regime in 2017 and business and technology have to align with its requirements.

“Google Cloud Platform is the right service to move us forward and enable us to overcome these challenges,” he adds. “We have now fully embraced a cloud-first approach and have moved 100 percent of our workloads to the cloud. We depend totally on Google Cloud Platform to run our business.”

“Any device, anytime, anywhere.” A cohort of CIOs within Airbus believed that the cloud, combined with new ways of working, could provide the foundation for this vision. Google Workspace and Google Cloud have played a pivotal role in helping Airbus realize this new path, transforming security, data management, and collaboration along the way.

Adopting a secure-by-design approach

In adopting Google Workspace and Google Cloud Airbus needed to ensure a robust, zero-trust security model that works across the entire organization, even when employees are working outside the office. Google Workspace provides a single login that enables secure access to data, based on device and user information, as well as contextual inputs that inform the security risk of each login and user action. Airbus admins also use Google Workspace to define trust rules that govern what information and files can be shared within and outside the organization, making it easy for employees to comply with best practices from anywhere.

Encryption also plays a central role in keeping information secure and private. By default, Google Workspace uses the latest cryptographic standards to encrypt all data at rest and in transit. Google Workspace also offers client-side encryption, which Airbus uses for their most sensitive projects, giving them authoritative control over their data as the sole owner of their encryption keys.

And to ensure the organization is protected against hackers, Airbus has implemented sharding as a standard practice, thereby splitting data across multiple servers and data centers. Because the company works with incredibly sensitive information—including government and military information—the ability to locate data all within European data centers continues to be a necessity.

Powerful data management

Managing an enormous volume and variety of data, Airbus needs to ensure complete compliance with internal policies, as well as with external standards, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Given this context, Airbus requires a solution that has strong built-in governance controls. Airbus also leverages the Drive labels feature, along with manual classification, to ensure that every file added to Google Drive is tagged and labeled correctly. In turn, these labels define the loss-prevention policies assigned to each file.

Staying connected during the pandemic

Before the pandemic, nearly every employee spent their workdays at an Airbus facility. When remote work became mandatory, the company made the pivot to Google Chat and Google Meet as an essential part of supporting real-time and asynchronous collaboration. Gmail also played a significant role in secure, anywhere-anytime communication, with its built-in anti-spam and anti-malware protections. Customizable filters let administrators protect against suspicious attachments, untrustworthy links, and countless other forms of malicious content. While Gmail blocks more than 99.9% of spam and phishing messages from ever reaching users’ inboxes, more advanced security measures like sandboxing can be put in place for specific use cases.

Protecting more than just data

Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts are as equally important to Airbus as data security. Google Cloud has been working to keep its climate footprint and those who use its services as low as possible, with all of Google currently carbon neutral and with a goal to run on carbon-free energy 24/7 at all of our data centers by 2030. And with our smarter, more efficient data centers, we’re already on that path with more than six times the computing power for the same amount of electrical power we used 5 years ago.

Building the future of work

By combining Google Workspace with Google Cloud, Airbus has been able to live up to its vision of “any device, anytime, anywhere.” The new model is a core foundation for its evolving future of work. Not only has Airbus adopted a zero-trust model across the organization, it’s also transformed how data is secured, managed, and accessed by employees working across a broad range of locations. The new flexible approach has also led to changes in how collaboration happens. Google is deeply gratified to have supported Airbus as they implement these changes and we continue to be proud that we’re running the cleanest cloud in the industry.

Want to learn more about how Google Workspace helps businesses like yours do more while keeping your data secure? Read this whitepaper to find out about our zero-trust model and other ways we protect organizations.