About DB Corp

DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 62 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.

Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices. However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.

Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues. These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day. DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services. Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.

Expertise in managing large data volumes behind GCP selection

However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery. In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform as a service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp. “We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”

DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services. The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.

The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business. “As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar. “For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.

DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.

Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly. Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.

Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers. Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.

Is Cloud an option for Canadian Healthcare healthcare and medical research organizations?

Yes, Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations are moving to the cloud. The cloud market is expected to grow in Canada significantly through 2027.

There are several reasons why Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations are moving to the cloud. 

• Reduce costs by eliminating the need to invest in and maintain on-premises infrastructure. 
• Enable the healthcare research community to drive their research more expediently to clinical outcomes
• Improve patient satisfaction by making it easier for patients to access their health information and communicate with their providers.
• Improve the quality of care by providing access to patient data and records from anywhere in the country. 

Overall, the transition to the cloud is a positive development for Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations. 

Canadian healthcare providers face many challenges before they can move to the cloud, such as addressing security and privacy concerns, data sovereignty issues, and ensuring interoperability. To help them overcome these challenges, it is important to provide Healthcare Data Custodians, Infrastructure Architects, and Research Leads with clear guidance on how the cloud can align with Canadian Healthcare Regulations. This will allow them to have a practical understanding of what is required to enhance their cloud journey and facilitate a smoother transition to the cloud.

iSecurity and MD+A Health are actively assisting Canadian healthcare and medical research organizations in comprehending the risks and exploring pathways to embrace the cloud. Through extensive research and analysis, iSecurity and MD+A Health have evaluated Google Cloud as a suitable platform for healthcare. Their diligent efforts have resulted in the production of comprehensive documents that detail their findings via a Threat Risk Assessment (TRA) and a Privacy Impact Report (PIA).

Why a Threat Risk Assessment? 

A threat risk assessment is a process of identifying and evaluating threats to an organization and then determining the likelihood and impact of those threats. The goal of a threat risk assessment is to identify the most serious threats and develop mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood and impact of those threats.

A threat risk assessment typically involves the following steps:

1. Identify threats: The first step is to identify all potential threats to the organization. This can be done by brainstorming, interviewing experts, or reviewing historical data.
2. Evaluate threats: Once the threats have been identified, they need to be evaluated in terms of their likelihood and impact. The likelihood of a threat is the probability that it will occur, while the impact of a threat is the severity of the consequences if it does occur.
3. Prioritize threats: The threats need to be prioritized based on their likelihood and impact. The most serious threats should be addressed first.
4. Develop mitigation strategies: Once the threats have been prioritized, mitigation strategies need to be developed to reduce the likelihood and impact of those threats. Mitigation strategies can include things like implementing security controls, training employees, and developing contingency plans.
5. Implement mitigation strategies: The mitigation strategies need to be implemented and tested to ensure that they are effective.
6. Monitor and review: The threat risk assessment should be monitored and reviewed regularly to ensure that it is still effective.

Why a Privacy Impact Assessment?

A Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) is a process that organizations use to identify and assess the privacy risks associated with a new or changed information technology (IT) system or project. The goal of a PIA is to help organizations protect the privacy of individuals whose personal information is collected, used, or disclosed by the IT system or project.

PIAs typically include the following steps:

1. Identifying the purpose of the IT system or project and the types of personal information that will be collected, used, or disclosed.
2. Identifying the privacy risks associated with the IT system or project.
3. Assessing the likelihood and severity of the risks.
4. Developing and implementing controls to mitigate the risks.
5. Monitoring the effectiveness of the controls.

PIAs are an important tool for organizations to help them follow privacy laws and regulations. They can also help organizations build trust with their patients, employees and the research community by demonstrating their commitment to protecting privacy.

The benefits of conducting a PIA:

• Helps organizations identify and assess privacy risks
• Helps organizations develop and implement controls to mitigate privacy risks
• Helps organizations comply with privacy laws and regulations
• Helps organizations build trust with customers and employees

Why Google Cloud?

Google Cloud is committed to providing Canadian healthcare organisations with an environment to expand both their clinical and research environments. Google Cloud has invested significant resources into building out a cloud environment based on best practices coming from Google’s experience running some of the world’s largest platforms.  

Some highlights include:

• Built-in security features that help protect your data and applications from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, or destruction.
• A comprehensive security management platform that helps you assess, prioritize, and address security risks across your organization.
• A team of security experts who can help you design, implement, and manage your security solutions.
• A wide range of security training and resources to help you learn about and stay up-to-date on the latest security threats and best practices.

About Vimeo

Vimeo gives video creators the tools to host, share, and sell videos of the highest quality possible. It reaches viewers in over 150 countries who can watch content anytime, on nearly every Internet-connected device.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: United States

About Fastly

Fastly helps the world’s most popular digital businesses keep pace with their customer expectations by delivering fast, secure, and scalable online experiences. Businesses trust the Fastly edge cloud platform to accelerate the pace of technical innovation, mitigate evolving threats, and scale on demand.

Industries:

Location:

Vimeo is a video-sharing platform that’s home to imaginative video creators and hundreds of millions of viewers. Sixty million people create, host, and sell high-quality videos on Vimeo, including more than 800,000 who subscribe to the service’s premium tools. Over 240 million people in more than 150 countries watch videos monthly.

Vimeo was using its own servers to allow users to upload videos to its service, a cloud storage platform for storing videos, and as an alternative solution for streaming. It was looking for a solution that would do away with its own servers for uploading. Vimeo built a new adaptive video-delivery service on Google Cloud Platform and the Fastly edge cloud that can scale on demand to meet Vimeo’s growing needs for video streaming.

“Our business is dependent on delivering high-quality video; that’s our competitive edge,” says Naren Venkataraman, Senior Director of Engineering at Vimeo. “Thanks to Fastly and Google Cloud Platform, we’re delivering more high-quality videos than ever at less cost, leading to our continuing success and growth.”

Tuning video delivery

Building a great video experience begins with a fast, reliable upload service. Vimeo replaced its servers for accepting video uploads with Google Cloud Storage, fronted by the Fastly edge cloud to help ensure regional routing and low-latency, high-throughput connections for Vimeo’s publishers. Multi-regional Google Cloud Storage offers fast, resumable upload capability that helps make for better user experience.

The video delivery service transcodes videos and streams them to users—videos are customized depending on network traffic and the devices to which the videos are delivered. The goal is to deliver the highest-quality, smooth playback experience across all platforms over varying network conditions and device capabilities.

Google Compute Engine packages the videos, which are stored on Google Cloud Storage. Google Compute Engine can automatically scale to allow Vimeo to deliver videos on the fly, even when demand spikes and many users stream videos simultaneously across a very diverse library. The low latency of Google Cloud Storage helps with fast startup times, while providing scalable storage to host millions of videos from Vimeo’s loyal community of content creators.

“Fastly and Google Cloud Platform enabled us to build a low-latency, highly scalable, on-the-fly adaptive video streaming packager in a short period of time with a small team,” says Naren.

High-quality video means more users

With Fastly and Google Cloud Platform, Vimeo is delivering more and higher-quality videos to its users because of the platform’s low latency, high bandwidth, and ability to scale. Because of the system’s reliability, fewer users stop watching videos because of delays and glitches. Vimeo engineers do not have to spend their time managing infrastructure and now focus on improving the video delivery service, leading to improved customer satisfaction. Costs are reduced because Vimeo does not have to manage the infrastructure in-house.

“We’ve chosen Google for Fastly’s Cloud Accelerator because at Google innovation happens faster, and Google Cloud Platform is driving cloud computing and cloud storage in the right direction,” says Lee Chen, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Fastly.

At 340 square miles, the City of Memphis is among the largest in the United States in terms of land area. Memphis has over 6,800 lane-miles of city streets, enough to drive back and forth to Los Angeles four times. Keeping these streets well maintained and safe for citizens and visitors is a major priority for the city.

Lots of traffic, lots of roads, and a four-season climate prone to wintertime freeze-thaw-refreeze cycles means the opportunity for potholes. Although the city aims to fill potholes within five business days of notification, it can take longer, especially during winter and early spring. Last year, the city’s Public Works crews repaired some 63,000 potholes, only 20% of which were reported by residents. Approximately 32,000-man-hours each year are spent repairing potholes, with seasonal fluctuations requiring ten to twelve Street Maintenance crews working steadily during the winter months. Still, many went unreported, leading the city to flag pothole request resolution under “needs improvement” on its open data portal website.

Like many large cities, Memphis also struggles with vacant and blighted properties. Nearly 15,000 properties in Memphis are likely vacant, and city officials contend that many are owned by out-of-town investors who live elsewhere and do not take necessary restoration or maintenance steps. These properties can decrease the value of surrounding real estate and discourage new businesses and other residents from moving to an area. Citizen frustration and concerns over the number of blighted properties has made blight eradication a major focus of the City of Memphis.

Historically, residents reported potholes and blighted properties by calling 311, or more recently by using the Memphis 311 app. However, these reports only covered about 20 percent of the problems — often the worst cases. And by the time residents took the initiative to submit a 311 report, they usually weren’t feeling good about the situation.

Recognizing that potholes and vacant properties are often the most visible indicators of whether a city government is doing its job efficiently, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland and CIO Mike Rodriguez began looking for ways they could apply technology to fix the problems. Mike approached Google for ideas, and Google recommended conducting a machine learning proof-of-concept (POC) with SpringML, a Google Cloud Partner.

“Memphis is focused on easy living, and we want to do everything we can to keep our citizens happy,” says Mike Rodriguez. “Working with Google and SpringML to reduce potholes and urban blight using machine learning and artificial intelligence was an easy decision.”

Bringing machine learning to city operations and budgets

The city’s goal is to detect potholes and abandoned properties by analyzing video footage of roads and residential properties. It wanted to classify potholes by width and depth, and share the information with workers who can repair them. For abandoned properties, it wanted to enable more strategic deployment of resources for homeowners citywide and take action to hold neglectful property owners accountable.

The POC began by training TensorFlow models for ML object detection using preconfigured AI Platform Deep Learning VM Images on Compute Engine. SpringML helped set up cameras and developed a user interface to collect pothole data and automate the 311 ticketing process.

Together, the teams analyzed 30 days of video from a moving city bus and high-resolution video from 360-degree cameras mounted to a code enforcement vehicle, overlaid with data from 311 reports. As the models were refined, accuracy quickly climbed from 50 percent to over 90 percent as models were taught to differentiate a pothole from a manhole cover or other object.

The city also imported routes, potholes, and paving data along with geolocation data from ArcGIS and Google Maps into BigQuery to better understand street conditions and the proximity of potholes to one another. BigQuery also analyzes city property records, tax records, 311 reports, and third-party survey data on-demand to predict where homes are starting to become run down and where neighborhood decay is most likely to occur. The SpringML team created a pilot analysis to begin vacant property protections and developed a user interface tool to interact with the model’s results.

“Google Cloud Platform made it possible for us to experiment with machine learning and artificial intelligence to help solve our city’s problems while working within the budget constraints of a municipal IT organization,” says Mike. “Google turned a ‘nice to have’ into a ‘let’s do this!'”

Identifying 75 percent more potholes

Memphis expects to substantially reduce the number of potholes on its streets, creating a better driving experience for residents and visitors alike. Because drivers won’t be as likely to swerve to miss a pothole, streets will be safer and friendlier to bicycles and scooters. Fewer potholes will also save the city between $10,000 and $20,000 annually in city claims that it pays out in cases where vehicle damage results from a pothole that was not addressed in a timely manner.

“Historically, Public Works has relied primarily upon Street Maintenance crews to proactively locate and fill potholes. As Memphis has over 6,800 lane-miles of public streets, it is a daunting task to reliably survey the entire system in an efficient and systematic way,” says Robert Knecht, Public Works Director for the City of Memphis. “The outcome of the data collected will be invaluable to Public Works so that it can ensure it is managing the city’s street system in a more proactive manner.”

Memphis will be able to better prioritize road maintenance based on condition and impact, increasing the efficiency of its Public Works road crews. Analyzing video of streets also gave the city visibility into issues it wasn’t previously aware of, such as curbs, gutters, and manhole covers that had been mistakenly paved over and need to be excavated. The ML process is easily transferrable to other concerns as well, helping the city identify illegal signs or spools of cable hanging on light posts that could be potentially unsafe.

Helping communities recover and thrive

Memphis is also having success in analyzing predictive trends to combat high rates of abandoned and blighted properties, surpassing 97.5 percent accuracy. “In the past, Public Works experimented with comprehensive, city-wide blight identification by using approximately 200 volunteers to survey and photograph over 237,000 city parcels. This effort was costly, took a long time to complete, and resulted in inconsistent data collection,” says Robert. “Blighted property conditions can change quickly in a city the size of Memphis. Now, with this new technology, Memphis will be able to make a significant difference in the efforts to proactively and comprehensively identify and manage blighted and substandard properties.”

Code Enforcement with better data-driven detection mechanisms enables the city to also identify cases where homeowners are not physically or financially able to keep up with the challenges of homeownership and make them aware of resources that are available to assist them. Memphis Code Enforcement can do a better job of finding people living in derelict properties that pose hazards to inhabitants’ health and safety, and help them fix those problems or find a new place to live.

“Using SpringML and Google Cloud Platform to detect indicators of vacant or blighted properties will help Memphis create safer neighborhoods that will be more attractive to businesses and home buyers,” says Mike. “Property values and employment will go up, crime will go down, and social services can be more focused and effective.”

Revolutionizing service delivery for citizens

Memphis is proving the viability of a cost-effective, cloud-based machine learning model that other cities can follow. The city is already looking into new applications of AI and ML that will further improve city services and help it build a better future for its 652,000 residents.

As part of his commitment to a transparent government, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland created an open data policy that commits to releasing raw data and sharing it with citizens in a variety of downloadable formats. Going forward, this transparency will help citizens understand how their needs are being served and uncover new, innovative use cases for AI and ML.

“Our goal is to become a smart city, and technologies such as Google Cloud Platform and SpringML put us ahead of the game,” says Mayor Strickland. “Google understands data, and there isn’t a better company to help us analyze our data resources for actionable insights.”