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Meet the people of Google Cloud: Priyanka Vergadia, bringing Google Cloud to life in illustrations

Editor’s note: Cloud computing helps people do all sorts of new things—including, for Priyanka Vergadia, becoming a best-selling author. Her book, “Visualizing Google Cloud: 101 Illustrated References for Cloud Engineers and Architects,” is based on her tremendously popular series of blog posts and videos and sold out its first printing within a month of its March 15 release. Priyanka started drawing as a way to connect to the developer community in a world shut down by COVID, and in it, discovered a new superpower. And, it’s all for a good cause. Priyanka is donating her portion of book proceeds to Akshaya Patra, an organization that provides meals to kids in schools in India.How did you come to Google Cloud?I was born and raised in Indore, between Mumbai and Delhi, and I moved to the U.S. for grad school.I started my career writing code to load test for call center software, then I switched to customer-focused engineering, which opened a world of possibilities, seeing so many exciting and unique technical challenges everyday. Those experiences exposed me to the world of cloud and cloud architectures, which brought me here. I like many styles of learning, solving different problems.What gave you the idea for this book?I work in Developer Relations, and we connected with our community through conferences and events. COVID abruptly ended that. I thought about “advocacy without planes,” and realized there were common questions that could be explained in sketches. I started with Google Compute Engine, the biggest product, and the very frequent question, “Where should I run my stuff?” When we put it on the bog, it got more than 100,000 views!That sounds like a strong signal.I did another on data analytics pipelines, databases, a few other things. All did well, with the idea to see how much we could teach with the fewest words.The book has 101 illustrations on 95 products. Each illustration is reviewed by stakeholders for accuracy, so there are a lot of people involved. I’ve learned an amazing amount putting this together.These illustrations are both fun and practical. Have you always been a visual storyteller or was this a pandemic hobby?Drawing and painting has been my hobby since childhood. I am a visual learner so growing up I always took very pretty handwritten notes with images and text. Since we were not traveling as much during the pandemic, it presented a great opportunity to explore ways to communicate with the tech community from home. I combined my note taking and sketching skills together with the Cloud knowledge and came up with ideas and layout for these sketches. Visual storytelling is definitely one of my favorite ways of communicating because it is the fastest way to learn a concept. Why do you think it resonates with people?A picture is much less daunting than twenty pages of text—I find a lot of people are grateful to have something that lays it all out and isn’t 600 pages of words. It’s nice to give an alternative way to sink into Cloud and bring it to life for different audiences. What’s next for the book?There’s interest to create editions in Spanish, Portuguese and Korean. I’ll take it with me as we start seeing customers, thinking about conferences again. And of course, lots of products are already changing, so I get to learn more for future editions.Read more about the book and how it can help developers here.Related ArticleMeet the people of Google Cloud: Jim Hogan, driving innovation through inclusionJim Hogan shares his experience as an autistic Googler and how inclusion drives innovation.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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A focus on network connectivity use cases in the cloud

Enterprises today have a very broad mix of networks — from SD-WANs, dedicated WANs such as MPLS, cloud interconnects, to VPNs. At the same time, they’re moving those WANs to the cloud to take advantage of faster turn-up, lower cost, and increased feature velocity. As workloads migrate to the cloud and multi-cloud environments, we believe that it’s critical to simplify enterprises’ networking model.Each major cloud provider uses distinct abstraction models to configure networks or connections between your resources. Some use gateways, some use connections or links. Network Connectivity Center, launched last year, provides a simple management solution for your network connection, and is now Generally Available. In this post, we outline the typical connectivity use cases for customers to help you select and set up the best connectivity option for your environment.Understanding cloud network connectivityCloud networking refers to the ability to connect two resources together inside a cloud, across clouds and with on-premises data centers. A cloud provider needs to provide three main types of connectivity:Site-to-cloud – Between on-premises equipment and cloud resourcesSite-to-site – To connect on-premises resources togetherVPC-to-VPC – Connectivity between cloud resourcesLet’s take a look at each one. Site-to-cloud connectivitySite-to-cloud connectivity traditionally is done via a cloud interconnect or a cloud VPN. The automatic exchange of routes between on-premises and multiple VPCs can be done using a transit VPC. A newer approach is to add cloud providers into an SD-WAN mesh using a router virtual appliance in Google Cloud. Network Connectivity Center brings the capacity to synchronize the appliance routes dynamically via BGP to Cloud Router and hence their VPCs. It enables connectivity between on-premises data centers and branch offices and their cloud workloads via SD-WAN-enabled connectivity. This capability is available globally across all 29+ Google Cloud regions. Several of our partners also support this capability in their router appliances.Site-to-site connectivitySite-to-site connectivity enables network connectivity directly between two or more hybrid connection points (VPN, Interconnect or SD-WAN). Network Connectivity Center simplifies this model by automating the routing announcements in this environment, such that all sites connected to a single global Network Connectivity Center hub are able to communicate freely in any-any fashion. You can see an example of this for a specific market vertical use case in a recent blog, Voice trading in the cloud — digital transformation of private wires.VPC-to-VPC connectivity You can create a full or partial mesh of VPC connections using multiple technologies, with VPC peering being the most common. VPC peering provides highly performant, low latency, private connectivity for customer networks connected via hybrid connectivity and Network Connectivity Center to multiple VPCs containing workloads, which can be segmented via granular firewall policies as needed. Alternatively, you can use a transit VPC model to connect multiple VPCs together in a hub and spoke topology.With tight integration with third-party router appliances as mentioned earlier, you can also leverage their third-party supported solutions such as next-generation firewalls to connect your VPCs together to meet specific compliance and segmentation requirements. Network Connectivity Center allows you to synchronize the routing tables of these appliances with your VPC’s routing table, simplifying the process of setting up redundant configurations.What’s next for cloud networking connectivity in Google Cloud? As enterprises continue to migrate different types of workloads to public cloud providers, networking topologies are becoming more complex. In summary, we have solutions for all connectivity needs. We aim to keep our models and solutions understandable and simple. Over time, look for Network Connectivity Center to become Google Cloud’s single point of configuration for all your connectivity needs, with capabilities to handle the most complex network.Related ArticleIntroducing Media CDN—the modern extensible platform for delivering immersive experiencesWe’re excited to announce the general availability of Media CDN — a content and media distribution platform with unparalleled scale.Read Article
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Cloud CISO Perspectives: April 2022

This month marks one year of our Cloud CISO Perspectives Series! Over the past year, we’ve discussed many milestones and challenges across our industry. I’m most proud of the work our collective security teams at Google Cloud are doing everyday to help improve security for our customers and society at large through the cloud. Below, catch up on the latest updates from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team, open source software security progress, and don’t forget to register for our Google Cloud Security Summit… Google Cloud Security Summit On Tuesday, May 17, we will host our second annual Google Cloud Security Summit to introduce the latest advances in our portfolio of security solutions and share our vision for the future of security. Major themes of the sessions include how we are helping customers move to zero trust architectures, new solutions that help strengthen software supply chain security, resiliency frameworks to help defend against ransomware and other emerging threats and new products and capabilities in cloud governance and digital sovereignty. You’ll also hear directly from our Google Cloud customers who are solving some of today’s biggest business challenges with our security solutions and services. Don’t miss these sessions: Opening Keynote: Charting a safer future with Google Cloud Managing the risks of open source dependencies in your software supply chainHow Google is helping customers move to zero trustA holistic defense strategy for modern ransomware attacksA comprehensive strategy for managing sensitive data in the cloudRegister for the event here. Open Source Software SecurityIn February, Google announced support for the OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega Project to help improve improve the security posture of open source software. The announcement came after our participation, alongside many other industry leaders, in the White House Summit on open source software security. Earlier this month, OpenSSF announced that it has selected Node.js as the first open source project to receive support through the Alpha-Omega Project, committing $300,000 throughout 2022 to enhance Node.js security resources and vulnerability maintenance. It’s exciting to see the progress being made since the log4j vulnerabilities to support better open source security standards and practices for all. We still have a lot of work to do in this area, and Google remains committed to advancing the future of open source software security. Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources from our cloud security teams this month: Security Secured data warehouse blueprint: At Google Cloud, we take an active stake to help customers achieve better security through our shared fate vision, which drives us to make it easier to build robust security into their cloud deployments. One way we do help customers is by providing best practices and opinionated guidance in the form of security blueprints. Earlier this month we announced the latest addition to our portfolio of blueprints – the Secured Data Warehouse Blueprint guide and deployable Terraform – to help accelerate our customers’ cloud data warehouse deployments.Automatic DLP for BigQuery: Continuing on our mission to deliver secure products, not just security products, the Google Cloud Security team released Automatic DLP for BigQuery in general availability. This is a fully-managed service that can continuously scan data across an entire cloud organization to provide general awareness of what data exists and specific visibility into where sensitive data is stored and processed, ultimately helping customers prevent unintended exposure. Chronicle MSSP Program: We introduced the new Chronicle MSSP Program, which will offer MSSPs around the world the ability to help provide scalable, differentiated, and effective detection and response capabilities with our cloud-native SIEM product, Chronicle. Chrome Browser Cloud Management for Mobile Devices: As hybrid work becomes the reality for many organizations today, employees more than ever before need easy access to business apps and data – anytime, anywhere, and on their devices. For IT admins, they need to be able to manage their tech stack across various devices and operating systems. In Chrome Browser Cloud Management, IT admins can manage and help secure their organization’s browser from the cloud across Windows, Linux, macOS and now, Android and iOS as well. API Management Security: API connectivity between business applications intra- and inter- enterprise is more prevalent than ever, and we see security as the number one consideration for this connectivity. Apigee outlined other considerations in a recent trends piece. Cloud Network Design: While we focus on workload security, identity, and access controls and application security, it’s important to remember the foundational controls in cloud networking. These controls include the use of shared VPCs to provide for separation of duties between the security and other teams over network policy configuration and the valuable use of VPC Service Controls to establish not just defense in depth from attacks, but also defense in depth from configuration errors. Learn more about our best practices for network design in this blog post. Industry updatesConfidential VMs in healthcare: The Idea Evolver and AstraZeneca teams recently discussed how they are using Google Cloud products and services like Confidential VMs for their Technology-Assisted Cholesterol Trial in Consumers (TACTiC), a Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) application designed to ensure that only the candidates in the trial with an appropriate level of risk are eligible to access the appropriate medicine. ConfidentialVMs allow for encryption of data while in use, helping to protect the confidentiality of personal health data. TIC compliant solutions on Google Cloud: Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) is a federal cybersecurity initiative established in 2007 to enhance network and boundary security across the federal government. The new TIC version 3.0 broadens the concepts of the program to accommodate cloud and mobile applications. As part of our commitment to supporting U.S. Federal Agencies, we shared several resources to help agencies design and deploy TIC 3.0 compliant solutions on Google Cloud. We prepared these artifacts to align with the controls, use cases, and assumptions provided in the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) TIC 3.0 core guidance documents. Compliance & Controls Managing Cloud Encryption Keys: One of Google Cloud’s biggest differentiators is the breadth of customer controls for managing data on Google Cloud. These key controls includes our Cloud External Key Manager (Cloud EKM) solution, which can allow customers to protect their data in Google Cloud with encryption keys that are stored and managed in a third-party key management system outside Google Cloud’s infrastructure. The Cloud EKM team has added several features to Cloud EKM, including: Cloud EKM over VPC: Cloud EKM support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks is now available, allowing Cloud EKM to connect via a secured private network to help provide customers stricter control over network access to their external key manager.Support for asymmetric keys: Cloud EKM now recognizes both RSA and Elliptic Curve asymmetric keys created in a supported external key manager in addition to symmetric encryption keys. Protection level organization policy: A new organization policy available for Cloud KMS that allows for fine-grained control over what types of keys are used. 2021 CCAG customer pooled audit: We work closely with our customers, their regulators, and appointed independent auditors who want to verify the security and privacy of Google Cloud. One example of how the Google Cybersecurity Action Team supports customers’ risk management efforts is our recently completed annual audit with the Collaborative Cloud Audit Group (CCAG). The pooled audit executed by CCAG is an example of customers working together to efficiently deploy their resources and gain detailed information and assurances of Google Cloud’s trust posture. The annual engagement lasts approximately six months and is a comprehensive assessment of the design and the effectiveness of Google Cloud security and privacy controls.Help meet Canadian compliance requirements with Protected B Landing Zone: As part of our commitment to serving the Canadian government with the security capabilities and controls they need, we’ve developed a set of open-source recommendations that map Google Cloud capabilities and security settings to Canadian Protected B regulatory requirements. We’ll be back next month with more important updates on our efforts to secure open source software and to recap highlights from our Cloud Security Summit. We hope to see you there. To have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox, sign up for our newsletter. We’ll be back next month with more security-related updates.Related ArticleCloud CISO Perspectives: March 2022Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares his thoughts on the latest security updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Introducing SWIFT on Google Cloud

It is hard to understand global payments without understanding SWIFT. For over 40 years, SWIFT, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has secured financial messaging for banks, corporates, brokers, and treasuries in over 200 countries. For example, if you have ever requested a funds transfer from your local bank’s branch or website to a friend or relative who has a different bank in another country, chances are those payment messages went through the SWIFT network. Today, I would like to talk about how Google Cloud is collaborating with SWIFT for SWIFT to offer our joint customers the SWIFT Alliance Connect components in the cloud and how Google Cloud products support SWIFT’s security and operational requirements to reliably process core financial messages. SWIFT recently announced the launch of a new solution, Alliance Connect Virtual, which enables their customers to connect to the SWIFT network directly from the public cloud. Alliance Connect Virtual is a new network connectivity solution that enables SWIFT customers to deploy traditional physical hardware based SWIFT VPN connections as virtual appliances in the public cloud. Typically, organizations require either hosting SWIFT infrastructure hardware on-prem or in co-locations or consuming SWIFT services from external third-parties.Launching Alliance Connect Virtual marks a major milestone in supporting our customers’ journey to the cloud,” says Sophie Racquet, Head of Alliance Connect and Digital Connectivity Product Management at SWIFT. “Whether in the cloud or on-premises, our community will be able to experience the same level of security, reliability and availability, and attest their CSP compliance too. We’ve received overwhelming positive feedback from our pilot customers so far and I’m looking forward to our phased launch throughout 2022.For this initiative, Google Cloud is creating a reference implementation of SWIFT components on Google Cloud to help mutual customers satisfy SWIFT security and operational requirements, increase operational efficiency, and accelerate adoption of cloud for their core payment applications. We expect the SWIFT on Google Cloud reference implementations to be generally available (GA) later in 2022 in parallel with SWIFT’s GA launch of the Alliance Connect Virtual products. Some of the many reasons why customers should consider SWIFT on Google Cloud as their preferred solution include:1) Google Cloud’s security principles focus on a secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that assists customers in keeping their organizations secure and compliant. Data is encrypted by default, at rest and in transit, to prevent access by any non-authorized entities.2) Google Cloud currently has29 cloud regions, 88 zones, and 146 network edge locations connected via our private, software-defined, high-performance network across 200+ countries, helping our customers better serve their users around the globe. 3) Google Cloud’s serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multicloud data warehouse,BigQuery, enables customers to dynamically increase data from bytes to petabytes, with zero operational overhead. Customers can quickly gain business and operational insights about financial messages with real-time predictive analytics while relying on robust security, governance, and reliability controls for high-availability. 4) Google Cloud’sAI platform provides customers with one unified experience to create, deploy, and manage models over time, at scale. It is built with groundbreaking ML tools that  enables customers to deploy models faster with MLOps pipeline tooling including configurable management of data and models. 5) Google Cloud is reducing environmental impact with thecleanest cloud in the industry. Google is carbon neutral today and runs smart, efficient data centers that are twice as energy efficient as a typical enterprise data center. Now that you know some of the reasons customers choose Google Cloud, let’s explore some of the customer challenges we aim to solve by moving SWIFT components to the cloud.  Reducing data center operational costs is one of the key business drivers when customers migrate applications to the cloud. Customers want to run their technology on faster, more scalable, and more affordable infrastructure than their on-prem environments. Virtualized SWIFT components like the SWIFT VPN enable customers to run on optimized virtualization platforms and help customers avoid  separate license agreements with hosting providers. These are all part of a customer’s broader cloud modernization and data center migration initiatives.Customers must deploy SWIFT components in secure and reliable infrastructure to process sensitive financial messages. SWIFT has created the Customer Security Controls Framework (CSCF) which consists of mandatory and advisory security controls for SWIFT users to meet those requirements. A few examples would be the principle of least privilege for physical, network, and application permissions to restrict unauthorized access; encrypting credentials and data in flight and at rest; and providing redundancy and fault tolerance for a highly available platform. These controls evolve over time to combat new and evolving threats and to implement new developments in cybersecurity.Once customers are confident they can satisfy SWIFT’s security requirements and virtualize the components in a cloud environment, they can accelerate their adoption of cloud native services for their core platforms. This opens up the opportunity for customers to leverage new big data and machine learning technologies to help gain new insights and further analysis of the messaging data. Let’s see what the SWIFT components look like on Google Cloud.The SWIFT on Google Cloud solution is a packaged, hybrid solution that’s a combination of SWIFT software in Google Cloud and SWIFT hardware components in a colocation facility. The solution can be broken into two logical components: SWIFT VPN or Alliance Connect Virtual and the corresponding SWIFT applications.Alliance Connect Virtual is the secure VPN communication to and from the SWIFT network to the SWIFT Alliance Gateway (SAG) and SWIFT applications. It leverages the SWIFT VPN  virtual appliance on Compute Engine virtual machines with Cloud KMS as the trusted key store to support FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance. Cloud Interconnect provides a high throughput and reliable network to Google colocation and partner peering exchanges. The SWIFT applications include both message processing and business analytics products from SWIFT. Google Cloud provides Bare Metal Solutions (BMS) for hosting the SWIFT Alliance Message Hub (AMH) Oracle database and Hosted Private HSM for the SWIFT HSM requirements. Both services provide low-latency VPC connections for the applications. The entire architecture includes private VPC networks with stateful firewalls for egress/ingress traffic between SWIFT applications, SWIFT VPN, and the SWIFT network. The SWIFT product and package you purchase will determine the final configuration and architecture.Google Cloud continuously invests in secure-by-design infrastructure across the cloud stack to protect our customers. Our use of a private fiber network means that customer data spends less time on the public internet, reducing vulnerability. Customers own their data, and control where it is stored, processed, and transmitted. In addition, Google Cloud addresses the requirements of financial sector laws like FFIEC (US) and EBA (EU) and is audited against international standards like ISO 27017 and ISO 27018.Google Cloud strives to be the best for big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning among cloud providers. Our fully managed, serverless approach addresses performance, scalability, and availability requirements for data platforms and analytics. With no infrastructure to manage, customers can easily leverage products like BigQuery to analyze gigabytes to petabytes of SWIFT message data in minutes, not months. Customers can create risk-based models on the data running high performance computing (HPC) simulations or mitigate the risks of financial crime using fraud prediction and anomaly detection with the Vertex AI platform. In addition, sustainability is becoming increasingly important to more organizations and Google has invested deeply to become thecleanest cloud in the industry. Google has matched 100% of the energy consumed by our global operations with renewable energy since 2017 and maintains a commitment to carbon neutrality. Every workload you run on Google Cloud has zero net carbon emissions.As you can see, Google Cloud’s collaboration with SWIFT enables our customers to deploy SWIFT components on Google Cloud and supports customers’ security goals. Migrating traditional on-prem financial messaging platforms like SWIFT to Google Cloud increases overall operational efficiency and accelerates the adoption of cloud services. If you’re eager to learn more about how Google Cloud is teaming up with SWIFT, please reach out to your Google Cloud sales representative or partner manager. You can also learn about our solutions for financial services customers here.Related ArticleExpanding our infrastructure with cloud regions around the worldA Google Cloud region is coming to Santiago, Chile, and additional regions are coming to Germany, Israel, KSA and the United States.Read Article
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Build your cloud skills with no-cost access to Google Cloud training on Coursera

Attracting talented individuals with cloud skills is critical to success, as organizations continue to adopt and optimize cloud technology. The lack of cloud expertise and experience is a top and growing challenge for businesses as they expand their cloud footprint and search for skilled talent. To help meet this need, we are now offering access to over 500 Google Cloud self-paced labs made available on Coursera. A selected collection of the most popular self-paced labs, known as projects, are available at no cost for one month from April 28 – May 29, 2022. Learners can choose their preferred format to claim one month free access to either a top Google Cloud Project, course, Specialization or Professional Certificate.What is a lab?A lab is a learning experience where you complete a scenario based use case by following a set of instructions in a specified amount of time in an interactive hands-on environment. Labs are completed in the real Google Cloud Console and other Google Cloud products using temporary credentials, as opposed to a simulation or demo environment and take 30 – 90 minutes to complete (depending on difficulty level). Our goal is to enable you to apply your new skills and be effective immediately in real-world cloud technology settings.Many of these labs, known in Coursera as projects, include a variety of tasks and activities for you to choose from to best fit your needs. Combine bite-size individual labs to create a personalized set of learning and upskilling with clear application in a sandbox environment. Labs are available for all skill levels, and cover a wide range of topics:Cloud essentialsCloud engineering and architectureMachine learningData analytics and engineeringDevOpsHere is a roundup of some popular and trending labs right now:Getting Started with Cloud Shell and gcloudKubernetes Engine: Qwik StartIntroduction to SQL for BigQuery and Cloud SQLMigrating a Monolithic Website to Microservices on Google Kubernetes EngineGet a feel for the lab experienceCreating a Virtual Machine is one of our most popular labs, taking place directly in Google Cloud Console. In this beginner level project, you will learn how to create a Google Compute Engine virtual machine and understand zones, regions and machine types. It takes 40 minutes to complete and you’ll earn a shareable certificate.As an example of more advanced content, Predict Baby Weight with TensorFlow on AI Platformrequires experience to train, evaluate and deploy a machine learning model to predict a baby’s weight. The lab activities are completed in a real cloud environment, not in a simulation or demo environment. It takes 90 minutes to complete and you will earn a shareable certificate.Kick off your no-cost learning journey todayFor direct access to self-paced labs, we recommend that you get started by taking a look at Coursera’s Collection Page, where you can browse labs/projects by our most popular topics, or explore the full catalog to find the cloud projects that are right for your career goals by browsing Google Cloud ‘projects’ on Coursera.The month of free Google Cloud learning on Coursera is available from April 28 – May 29, 2022, so join us to evolve your skill set and cloud knowledge.Ready to start your learning Google Cloud at no-cost for 30 days? Sign uphere.Related ArticleTraining more than 40 million new people on Google Cloud skillsTo help more than 40 million people build cloud skills, Google Cloud is offering limited time no-cost access to all training contentRead Article
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SAP BTP on Google Cloud Announces 5 new capabilities

SAP and Google Cloud’s partnership is about expanding what’s possible and enabling innovation. A lot more has become possible for SAP customers since SAP® Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) became available on Google Cloud in 2021. SAP BTP brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration, and extension capabilities on one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications. People can connect applications and combine data in new ways that help them integrate smarter and better collaborate to find answers and solve business problems faster.The following are five use cases from customers who are using SAP BTP on Google Cloud to more successfully manage their businesses.1. Timely insights from combining data from SAP and non-SAP solutions. A North American retailer deployed a joint SAP software and Google Cloud architecture to get better insight into sales teams based on consumer feedback. The company also achieved a closer alignment between supply and demand by positioning product pitches based on availability.A joint architecture like this would include cloud-native solutions such as the SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solutions while leveraging the native AI/ML capabilities and petabyte scale of BigQuery.2. More cost-effective marketing through SAP ERP correlation. Many retail and consumer goods companies are avid users of Google Marketing Platform when it comes to placing and managing ads. Now these customers are using SAP BTP to drive direct correlations between their ERP supply chain and finance data and their marketing investments executed over Google Marketing Platform. This is helping them operate more cost-effectively by providing fast and contextually enriched answers to cost-related questions, such as: Where should I direct my marketing spend? How do I target campaigns based on inventory and margin? How should I focus my supply chain investments based on campaign, location, and demographics data from Google Marketing Platform? 3. Accelerated innovation in core systems with containerized apps. The extensibility and API services of SAP BTP are enabling customers to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to develop and manage custom applications faster and more efficiently. SAP BTP makes direct read/write capabilities in the core of SAP ERP possible, and GKE provides developers with an environment and the tools for using containers instead of traditional environments. The outcome is better capacity utilization, enterprise-grade scalability, faster deployment of new capabilities within core systems, quicker and less disruptive application maintenance, and the ability to “build in” security protections at the start of the app development cycle instead of after.4. Simplified operations with Google Search and SAP Work Zone. With Google Search embedded into the SAP Work Zone enabled by SAP BTP, daily operations are simplified.  SAP Work Zone provides personalized and integrated employee experiences with centralized access to core business systems. Critical business data that’s used every day is within those systems, and making it easier to quickly find exactly what’s needed helps prevent waiting between process steps, the use of inaccurate or incomplete data, and redundant work.5. Extend SAP Process Automation with Google services and APIs. This solution is helping customers adapt, improve, and innovate business processes with minimum assistance from busy IT teams.The SAP Process Automation solution puts capabilities for workflow management, robotic process automation, and AI services into an intuitive no-code interface, allowing anyone to build and share automated workflows across key process owners, and between SAP and non-SAP applications. As part of SAP BTP, SAP Process Automation integrates diverse SAP software systems with Google solutions to simplify business processes. For example, SAP Fiori apps use task automation services from SAP Process Automation to leverage Google Document AI, collect key information from digital documents, and then automatically post the results in SAP. This reduces the manual effort of repetitive tasks and leads to fewer errors and increased data consistency.These are just five of the ways customers of SAP BTP are benefitting from SAP’s partnership with Google Cloud. Learn more about the SAP on Google Cloud partnership. And join us at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Florida.Related ArticleTechEd 2021: What’s new for SAP customers on Google CloudGoogle Cloud announces three new cloud capabilities sure to delight SAP customers at SAP TechEd.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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New research shows consumers more interested in brands’ values than ever

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Consumer Goods Technology MagazineShifting work habits, more online shopping options, rising inflation, and stretched supply chains are just a few factors making it harder to discern what’s top-of-mind for shoppers today.But we’re starting to get a clearer picture of what consumers say they value most right now. New Harris Poll research commissioned by Google Cloud reveals how U.S. shoppers are thinking about consumer goods brands in new ways—from apparel, electronics, and beauty products, to food and beverage. While price unsurprisingly continues to be a major consideration in purchases, the average shopper is increasingly paying close attention to the values of consumer goods brands and how eco-friendly their products and practices are.Shoppers want to buy from brands aligned with their valuesCOVID-19 drove people to reflect on their priorities, elevating concepts like community service, equity, and sustainability. A decade ago, most consumer goods companies would not have made these front-and-center, operational priorities. But today’s consumer not only wants savings and convenience, they also want that good feeling that comes from spending their money with a company that aligns with their values.Our new research reveals that 82% of shoppers prefer a consumer brand’s values to align with their own, and they’ll vote with their wallet if they don’t feel a match. Three-quarters of shoppers reported parting ways with a brand over a conflict in values. Even with their favorite consumer goods products, a majority of shoppers will not compromise on principles. If there’s a value mismatch, 39% of shoppers said they’d permanently boycott their favorite brand, and 24% would break ties at least temporarily. Most won’t be quiet about their concerns either: 28% of consumers that found their values at odds with a brand said they have shared their concerns with friends and family, and another 15% have shared their qualms on social media.Consumer goods companies need to prioritize sustainability A majority of today’s consumers (52%) are especially interested in supporting sustainable brands. They want to know how companies are managing their resources, specifically whether they are sourcing responsibly. These shoppers want to see meaningful, measurable efforts from CPG firms to save energy and reduce waste, like how Nuuly, URBN’s digital rental and resale business, has woven sustainability into its business operations, from its distribution centers to reusable packaging.In fact, 66% of shoppers are now seeking out eco-friendly brands, with 55% saying they would pay more for more sustainable products. But these same shoppers are skeptical too: 72% think that companies and brands overstate their sustainability efforts. And they’re right to question brands’ practical application of their values. According to another Harris Poll survey recently commissioned by Google Cloud, 58% of executives polled across 16 countries admit that their organization has overstated its sustainability efforts.Product availability is table stakesA final point from the research: The global supply chain has stretched past its limits, and 60% of consumers are voicing some level of concern about it. At the end of the day, if a preferred brand isn’t actually on the shelves of a real or digital store, it doesn’t matter what the brand’s values or sustainability efforts are. A staggering 98% said they’d either buy from a different brand or search other stores or websites.What’s a brand to do? After more than 25 years working in the consumer goods industry in roles ranging from marketing and product development to business strategy and technology, at companies like Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Carter’s, and now Google Cloud, I’ve seen successful brands do four things well when it comes to their values:1. Don’t be generic.Your brand’s values need to be authentic, and they need to have teeth. But being too bold could run the risk of alienating some consumer segments. This is where technology can help. Personalizing your messages and outreach to specific shopper profiles is one way to ensure that your core values reach the right customers at the right time.2. Make your values clear and consistent. When focusing on which values to highlight with your consumers and the world, make sure they make sense for your brand and that you’ll stick to them over time. For example, it’s painfully obvious when a brand is being opportunistic and inserting itself into conversations around values like sustainability or social justice, when it doesn’t have a history of voicing those values. The key to clear and consistent messaging of values is balancing authenticity with relatability and the appropriate amount of promotion.3. Develop sustainability practices and communicate their impact to everyday people.How everyday people perceive a consumer goods brand’s sustainability initiatives is different from how an investor or general business audience does. Shoppers don’t read business sustainability plans or impact reports. To increase awareness of your brand’s sustainability efforts, consumers need to identify and interact with your brand and products directly. Some of my favorite examples are how I love that Google Maps gives me the choice of eco-friendly driving directions, and that I know I can buy low-waste, packaging-free cosmetics from a company like Lush.4. Reward customer loyalty.Shoppers have more choices than ever before, and supply chain woes are testing preferences even further. But when someone chooses a specific brand because they feel aligned with their values or like their eco-friendly products, that shopper doesn’t always get recognized or thanked. Implementing a rewards program or following-up with customers after their purchases is one way you can make loyal shoppers feel appreciated while creating a lasting relationship that extends as long as possible.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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A2A puts customers and the planet first by running SAP on Google Cloud

With more than 2.5 million customers, Italian utility company A2A is committed to delivering electricity, gas, clean water, and waste collection every day. More recently, the company made another significant commitment: To incorporate the principles of the “circular economy” into its way of doing business — part of the UN 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable-Development Goals — all while also aiming to double its client base by 2030. Growing rapidly but sustainably requires operating as efficiently as possible at every level of the organization, from operating smart meters to generating accurate demand projections. That’s why A2A chose to deploy its SAP S/4HANA ERP and the SAP BW/4HANA data warehouse on Google Cloud.Roadblocks to innovationInstead of a linear consumption model that starts with raw materials and ends with use and disposal, the circular economy is a continuous cycle that emphasizes repair, recycling, and the creation of materials rather than their disposal. To take an example from A2A’s own success story: The company keeps 99.7 percent of collected waste out of landfills.1 Of the UN’s sustainability goals, A2A is committing to the three most relevant to its industries: Ensuring availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for allEnsuring sustainable consumption and production patternsProtecting, restoring, and promoting sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystemsAchieving A2A’s sustainability and customer-first strategies requires high scalability, rapid data ingestion, and rich, accurate analytics. None of this could be reliably supported with the company’s legacy on-premises SAP and Data Warehouse, especially given A2A’s projected growth and the increasing complexity of the data landscape, including IoT deployments and energy market liberalization. Provisioning data infrastructure was also slow and complex. Simply adding a new metric could require increasing capacity by an order of magnitude. And analytical and transactional data lived in siloes, which created a fragmented and out-of-date view of each customer across sales and customer support teams. A2A’s fragmented data also made it difficult to take proactive action when changing priorities or processes required shifting focus from one data source to another. With a data warehouse that refreshed only once every 24 hours, simple processes such as responding to a customer calling because their power has been cut off due to an unpaid bill became cumbersome. Scalability was also a concern. With the on-premises solution, A2A needed to define the budget for its data warehouse over a two-year timeframe, but the rollout of new electricity meters — each sending data every 10 minutes — across Italy made those data requirements hard to predict. The move to the cloud: From monolith to microservicesThe move has been a giant step forward in A2A’s goal of meeting its data-driven, customer-centric strategy. In deploying its SAP systems to Google Cloud, A2A can take advantage of a highly flexible hybrid environment and powerful data management and analytics. It can replicate data from Salesforce, SAP, and other systems in BigQuery, which operates as a data lake with Google Cloud SQL, connected directly to Google Analytics and Google Ads for data-driven customer service, decision-making, and marketing. “From BigQuery we can feed relevant information directly to the people who need it. Our customer operators work on Salesforce, so we use an OData protocol to embed real-time data in that platform. Elsewhere, we present the information through a dashboard, or with a BI component delivering one-page reports.” —Vito Martino, Head of CRM, Marketing and Sales B2C & B2B, A2ABy running SAP on Google Cloud, A2A can also count on an infrastructure platform that provides:Scalability. The robust data architecture on Google Cloud adapts to shifting and increasing demands without compromising on speed or availability, so A2A doesn’t have to worry about over- or under-provisioning as the rollout of smart meters proceeds.Speed. The new A2A data solution refreshes every five minutes instead of 24 hours, so the company can respond to its customers’ needs without delays. Customer operators working in Salesforce now receive real-time data from Google BigQuery so that, when a customer calls, operators can see accurate information in seconds. They can now offer value-added services and sustainable options tailored to the customer’s needs, from energy consumption to their preferred method of communication.Availability. With microservices orchestrated by Google Kubernetes Engine, the team can update the solution through continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), eliminating the need for downtime when changes are required.Security and control. The A2A IT team uses Google Kubernetes Engine to orchestrate clusters of instances on Google Compute Engine, with Google Cloud Load Balancing and backups on Google Cloud Persistent Disk. Google Cloud Anthos ensures operational consistency across on-premises and cloud platforms.Ready to grow the sustainable wayBy moving to Google Cloud — the industry’s cleanest cloud, with zero net emissions — A2A is ready to grow quickly while locking down the efficiency it will need to meet its ambitious sustainability goals. “To bring sustainable utilities to market, we need to be both responsive to our customers and responsive to the internal needs of A2A,” explains Davide Rizzo, Head of IT Governance and Strategy at A2A. “Understanding what customers need in detail means we can improve their services and reduce their environmental impact at the same time.” Learn moreabout the ways Google Cloud can transform your organization’s SAP solutions with scalability, speed, and advanced analytics capabilities.1.  Circular Economy: one of the four founding pillars of A2A’s 2030 sustainability policy | DrupalRelated Article6 SAP companies driving business results with BigQuerySAP systems generate large amounts of key operational data. Learn how six Google Cloud customers are leveraging BigQuery to drive value f…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Running VMware in the cloud: How Google Cloud VMware Engine stacks up

Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade, cloud-native VMware experience that is built on Google Cloud’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure. By enabling a consistent VMware experience, the service allows customers to adopt Google Cloud rapidly, easily, and with minimal modifications to their vSphere workloads, bringing the best of VMware and Google Cloud together on one platform for 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.  Here are seven ways VMware Engine outshines alternatives for running your VMware workloads in the cloud, simplify your operations, and help you innovate faster:1. Dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking  Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes come with redundant switching and dedicated 100Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription of bandwidth, unlike other options where there is generally oversubscription. This is especially important when it comes to running latency-sensitive workloads. 2. Four 9’s of availability in a single zone The service offers 99.99% uptime SLA for a cluster in a single Zone with five to 16 nodes and FTT=2 or more without the need for stretched clusters, which is higher than the alternatives. Further, dedicated connectivity for core service functions such as vSAN and vMotion enables better solution stability and availability. This enables the service to support the needs of enterprise workloads that require high availability.Note: “Cluster” means a deployment of three or more dedicated bare metal nodes running VMware ESXi and associated networking managed via management interfaces.3. Global networking without complex routingGoogle Cloud VMware Engine networking is built based on Google Cloud’s powerful networking architecture. With simplified regional and global routing modes—which allow a VPC’s subnets to be deployed in any region where our service is available—you can architect global networks without the need or overhead of creating and connecting regional network designs. You get instant, direct Layer 3 access between them. In alternative cloud environments, you may have to configure special networking between regions, often requiring VPN-based tunnels over the WAN to enable global uniform network communication. This adds to the deployment and operational complexity, in addition to cost.4. Integrated multi-VPC networkingUsers often have application deployments in different VPC networks, such as separate dev/test and production environments or multiple administrative domains across business units. The service supports “many-to-many” access from VPC networks to Google Cloud VMware Engine networks with multi-VPC networking, allowing you to retain existing deployed architectures and extend them flexibly to your VMware environments. In addition, by providing multi-VPC networking, you can pool their VMware needs—say for QA and dev—to a smaller set of clusters, effectively reducing their costs.For more information about the end-to-end networking capabilities and services available in Google Cloud VMware Engine, please refer to the Private Cloud Networking for Google Cloud VMware Engine whitepaper. Here, you’ll find details about network flows, configuration options, and the differentiated benefits of running your VMware workloads in Google Cloud.5. Unified, cloud-integrated model Google Cloud VMware Engine is a fully managed Google first-party service, operated and supported by Google and its world-class team. With fully integrated identities, billing, and access control, you have a simpler end-to-end experience that is different from other services. You access Google Cloud VMware Engine service via the Google Cloud console, like any other Google Cloud service. You can also access other native Google Cloud services privately from your VMware private cloud running in Google Cloud VMware Engine over local connections.6. Flexibility in third-party ecosystem compatibility With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can set up existing VMware on-premises third-party tools or products that require additional privileges by using a solution user account. This uniquely enables operational consistency, ensuring that the tools you have invested in and used over the years work on Google Cloud VMware Engine. Furthermore, in key areas such as vSAN data encryption, you have the choice of not only using Google Cloud Key Management Service (KMS)—which is turned on by default on vSAN datastores—but also external KMS providers such as HyTrust, Thales, and Fortanix. 7. Dense nodes with high storage:core and memory:core ratios and fast provisioningGoogle Cloud VMware Engine nodes are dense. Each node is powered by Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors and comes with 36 cores, 72 hyperthreaded cores, 768 GB memory, 19.2 TB NVMe data and 3.2 TB NVMe cache storage. This, along with oversubscription, leads to high consolidation ratios and compelling storage:core per dollar and memory:core per dollar. In addition, you can rapidly spin up these nodes in a VMware private cloud often in under an hour, enabling on-demand, VMware-consistent capacity in Google Cloud for your needs.These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure apart. In addition, migrating to Google cloud can save you up to 38% in TCO.Get started by learning about Google Cloud VMware Engine and your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the customers who have embarked upon this journey.The authors would like to thank the Google Cloud VMware Engine product team for their contributions on this blog.Related ArticleSave big by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs—now GARealize huge savings by suspending temporarily unneeded VMs on Google Compute Engine and resume where you left off at a later time.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Service Catalog: Introducing version selection for Terraform solutions

Enterprise IT admins use Google Cloud Service Catalog Terraform solutions to establish curated catalogs of self-serve Google Cloud infrastructure for their organizations. Now, with support for multiple Terraform versions for Service Catalog solutions, administrators create and validate their deployment configs with a particular version of Terraform. The version selected is used by the Service Catalog to perform the deployment, ensuring end users enjoy a seamless experience when deploying a Service Catalog Terraform solution. This feature also enables both the admins and the platform to take advantage of the most recent capabilities available in Terraform, allowing them to quickly address any compliance concerns that may be present in previous releases.Let’s take a closer look at what is included in this release.Terraform version selectionWith this release, admins can select a specific Terraform version when adding a new Terraform solution to a catalog. The version configuration, once applied, can be viewed on the following pages:Solutions Listings Solution DetailsSolution Deployment HistoryCatalog end users will automatically utilize the version selected by the catalog admin. Different solutions within the same catalog may incorporate different corresponding versions of Terraform, based on an admin’s selection.Version SelectionRelated ArticlePrivate Catalog: Improving Terraform deployment management experiencesWith this release, Private Catalog admins can use Terraform configurations to keep end users informed about updates.Read ArticleGet started with Service CatalogThese new features are available now to all Service Catalog customers. To learn how to use these features, refer to our documentation:Create a Terraform configuration in Service CatalogManage and update your Terraform configurations in Service CatalogRelated ArticleA look at the new Google Cloud Marketplace Private Catalog, now with Terraform supportThe latest version of Private Catalog simplifies management for the products you use from Google Cloud Marketplace.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform