“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.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month —a time for us to come together to celebrate and remember the important people and history of Asian and Pacific Island heritage. This feature highlights three AAPI founders from the Google For Startups community.

Read on to learn how these three founders built their businesses, leverage Google tech, and suggestion they have for aspiring entrepreneurs.

CultivatePeople 

Founder: Lola Han

Description: CultivatePeople’s compensation software, Kamsa, provides global market pay rate data and helps companies make data-driven salary decisions so they can attract and retain their most valuable asset: employees. 

Why GCP: “CultivatePeople began using GCP when integrating SSO/SAML authentication after  our SaaS product became a high priority. We were able to exceed our clients’ expectations and increase their level of trust in our platform’s capabilities. We’re currently investigating additional machine learning products, such as Cloud AutoML, that will allow us to quickly deliver exciting features.” 

Note from the Founder: “I grew up with immigrant parents who value stability and are risk-averse. My parents discouraged me from starting my own company because they didn’t want to see me struggle financially or see my health suffer (due to stress). I felt strongly about what CultivatePeople could do, so I started the company as a sole founder in 2017 and watched it double in size year over year since. While the ones I love most may not have cheered me on initially, it was important for me to hang on to the encouraging words of former bosses, executives, and founders to keep me focused on my mission. 

My advice for other AAPI founders is to be a “silent assassin” and believe in the mission and values of your organization. Always remember to stop along the way and: 

 1) Enjoy the journey by celebrating wins and giving yourself credit;

2) Follow your intuition—it’s (almost) always right; 

3) Recognize and invest in your people regularly (ie. give increases more than once a year, if warranted);

4) Give regular words of affirmation to employees on even small achievements.”

Swit

Founder: Josh Lee and Max Lim

Description: Swit is a team collaboration platform that seamlessly combines team chat with task management by allowing teams to turn their conversations into trackable tasks and share tasks to chat with simple drag-and-drop functionality, ensuring everyone is on the same page and projects get done faster.

Why GCP: “Swit is a cross-category hybrid work tool for chat and tasks. This functionality requires more complicated and heavier architecture for performance. So, configuring and managing virtual machines was really challenging to scale up our systems, while handling occasional unexpected traffic surges and frequent updates. Eventually we divided our monolithic architecture into 35 microservices when we launched our official product. The migration to GKE took around one month, and it turned out to be well worth the effort—our systems became able to offer high scalability and enough resilience to keep its uptime no matter what happened. Now we’re operating 84 workloads and 252 microservices with high stability with remarkably low downtime – less than 0.00001%/year.”

Note from the Founder: “As an AAPI founder based in Silicon Valley, I feel proud of the work ethics and diligence fellow Korean American entrepreneurs and professionals have long demonstrated here. Especially with K-pop breaking into the mainstream, I feel even more proud of our culture that strives toward an absolute perfection molded through years of training and dedication. The mission-driven culture of Silicon Valley coupled with Google’s edging technology and creativity really helped us build a product that not only encompasses verticals but also transcends cultures. Swit is growing at an unprecedented rate, and we hope  to join the long list of successful AAPI entrepreneurs here. Swit’s close network with the AAPI community wouldn’t have been possible without Google support. We are grateful for this collaborative environment, and we hope to become the next-generation ambassador for collaboration after Google.” 

Check out more from Swit in their founder story.

WISY 

Founder: Min Chen

Description: Wisy develops technology to bring digital efficiency into the physical world, supporting consumer products businesses and making them thrive in the new economy. All of us have a bad experience when we can’t find the product we want to buy. That is a $1.9T problem in the consumer-packaged goods industry that Wisy is solving with AI and analytics to help manufacturers and retailers sell more by reducing out-of-stocks and waste at a global scale.

Why GCP: “GCP has an intuitive, easy to use interface, was lower cost, and offered preemptible instances with flexible compute options. Some of the reasons why Wisy decided to use GCP include instance and payment configurability, privacy and traffic security, cost-efficiency, and Machine Learning.

Wisy has been able to advance quickly with product development, as well as collaborate better and iterate faster in the creation of our AI models, while reducing costs by 40%. At Wisy, we are solving a problem that affects everyone who shops at a store.“

Note from the Founder: “Two years ago, I moved to San Francisco to expand my second startup, Wisy. This is when I learned that my name ‘Min’ stands for ‘minority.’ I was born in China, raised in a Black community in Panama, received scholarships to attend both Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley. I worked for 20 years in several countries, but I have never felt so discriminated against due to my race, ethnicity, gender and age than during my time in Silicon Valley. However, this is also the place I learned that my diverse life experience is my competitive advantage. My background enables me to recruit and relate to people in different countries, create scalable and flexible products for multinational customers, and run global operations efficiently.

My recommendation to AAPI founders is to find strength in their multicultural background. Don’t hide what makes you unique, do not limit yourselves, and do not let others limit you. You will lose your edge when trading authenticity for validation. Be proud and own your story.”

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our Startup Program application page here and sign up for our monthly startup newsletter to get a peek at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.To learn more about how you can help #StopAsianHate during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month and beyond, visit their website here.

Demand for spoken audio content such as podcasts remains robust despite the proliferation of video services and other entertainment options for consumers. Shibin Li, Co-founder of Castbox, credits growth of the global podcast platform to the following: speed and availability, market-leading features, the proliferation of smart devices to deliver audio content, and activities — such as driving and working around the house — that make consuming video difficult.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Beijing, China, Castbox enables users to locate, access, and create spoken audio content. Available on iOS and Android, Castbox supports 50 million podcasts, on-demand radio programs, and audiobooks in 70 languages from 175 countries. The platform hosts about 2 million users per day and is the largest podcast platform on Android.

Castbox includes a range of features that build on its core service to provide a high-quality user experience. These features include curated podcast recommendations and in-audio search.

A combination of services

At its inception, Castbox relied on a combination of a multinational cloud services, as well as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, including the Google BigQuery analytics data warehouse and Cloud APIs to provide programmatic interfaces with Google Cloud services, and a range of services from the Google mobile development platform Firebase.

However, as Castbox matured and its user base expanded, the business increased its reliance on Google Cloud Platform and Firebase.

“We needed to access stable cloud services as we could not tolerate long periods of downtime that would compromise the user experience,” says Li. “Furthermore, we had to support up to 50,000 concurrent connections, and potentially more in future, without disruption.”

“Based on our analysis of the data in Google BigQuery, we can determine what type of content users are listening to, how long they like to listen to it, and when they like to listen to it. This allows us to recommend similar podcasts to each user based on the preferences he or she expressed, encouraging activity on and return visits to our platform.”

—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, Castbox

Competitive differentiation

Castbox also found machine learning-powered Google Cloud Platform APIs could help deliver features, such as in-audio search, that differentiate the podcast platform from its competitors. In addition, Firebase SDKs and Firebase A/B Testing would enable Castbox to create and analyze new applications, as well as make adjustments based on user feedback. Firebase Realtime Database would allow the business to support tens of thousands of concurrent user connections.

The diligence of the Google Cloud team in advising Li and her team about forthcoming products and services also swayed Castbox towards Google technologies. The business gained the opportunity with Google to join several programs that offered early access to Google innovations.

Signature in-audio search service

Castbox now uses Google Cloud Platform services in the Tokyo, Japan, and U.S. East regions. Cloud Speech-to-Text API plays a key role in delivering Castbox’s signature in-audio search service. This service enables users to search transcriptions of audio content on the platform for words or phrases. The search results incorporate the title of the podcast and the search term in context (for example, within the sentence or sentence excerpt in which it appears). Each use of the word or phrase is time-stamped so it can easily be found. The API enables Castbox developers to apply neural network algorithms to achieve audio-to-text conversion accuracy rates of greater than 96%, while search queries typically experience latency of just 50 milliseconds.

In addition, the latency of comparison data, converting audio to text, is only about 250 milliseconds, contributing to the processing of about 12 minutes worth of audio to text in just 10 minutes. “We can process about 20 hours of audio files in one day,” Li says. “This enables us to transcribe and index all the new episodes of a podcast in that period.”

50,000 concurrent connections

With Firebase Realtime Database, Castbox now supports up to 50,000 concurrent connections to its platform with an average latency per connection of just 10 milliseconds. “Firebase Realtime Database also allows us to continue operating in offline mode, which is extremely helpful if we experience any network disruptions,” Li explains. “When we come back online again, any data is simply synchronized with the database.”

Google BigQuery and the analytics capabilities of Firebase SDKs also enable Castbox to monitor and analyze user behaviors. “Based on our analysis of the data in Google BigQuery, we can determine what type of content users are listening to, how long they like to listen to it, and when they like to listen to it,” Li explains. “This allows us to recommend similar podcasts to each user based on the preferences he or she expressed, encouraging activity on and return visits to our platform.”

“Given our queries may span up to 40 days of data, we may be analyzing up to 1,200 GB at one time. We have no problem doing this with Google BigQuery.”

—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, Castbox

Castbox also uses its analyses of Google BigQuery data to amend banners and summaries on its platform to encourage users to listen to additional content. Furthermore, the service is prepared to make surprise recommendations of content to users based on the preferences and reactions of users with similar tastes.

“We analyze a pool of data growing at up to 30 GB per day,” Li explains. “Given our queries may span up to 40 days of data, we may be analyzing up to 1,200 GB at one time. We have no problem doing this with Google BigQuery.” These analyses also support Castbox’s decision to start creating original content, such as finance and economic news, for its platform.

Checking weekly changes

Castbox does not rely only on analyzing user data to deliver a high-quality experience. The business aggregates user feedback from emails and Google Play reviews to make weekly changes to its platform. It then uses Firebase A/B Testing to check whether these changes are met with a positive user response.

“We are extremely pleased with Google Cloud Platform and Firebase. We have been able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and provide an attractive option for users at a time when content and entertainment options are exploding. We have a great opportunity with Google to continue to improve the value of our offering to users and build engagement and loyalty.”

—Shibin Li, Co-Founder, Castbox

Castbox’s positive experiences with Google Cloud Platform are encouraging the business to grow its use of the product. “We are trying to move some more services to Google Cloud Platform because it is very stable and scalable,” Li says. The business is keen to explore the capabilities of Cloud Pub/Sub to provide low latency messaging between applications, Cloud Spanner to deliver a distributed relational database service, and Cloud Dataflow to transform and enrich data in stream and batch modes.

“We are extremely pleased with Google Cloud Platform and Firebase,” Li concludes. “We have been able to differentiate ourselves from our competitors and provide an attractive option for users at a time when content and entertainment options are exploding. We have a great opportunity with Google to continue to improve the value of our offering to users and build engagement and loyalty.”