Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene has told an audience in London of her pride at how quickly the company has become a ‘major enterprise player’ – with artificial intelligence (AI) and security the key differentiators to their value proposition.

Speaking at the latest leg of Google Cloud Next’s world tour, Greene explained the increasing importance of AI to the cloud equation – a topic covered in chapter and verse by this publication in recent times.

“Cloud is becoming just a better way to run your IT, and it’s turning out to almost provide a working structure for how you can effect change in your company,” said Greene. “Data tends to be in silos across your data centres or in lots of different databases – then people move to the cloud and you put it all in one data lake, and all of a sudden everybody in the company can easily ask questions, subject to access controls.

“Then once you have that data you can start running analytics, doing AI, getting to know your customers so much better, making predictions about what they want and training on your own data – and everything changes for the better,” added Greene.

Regular readers of this publication will be aware of what Google is doing around pre-packaged AI – in August services were launched around contact centre and talent acquisition. But these industry-focused cloud toolkits don’t stop there. Google is working in the realms of financial services for anti-money laundering and fraud detection, retail for inventory predictions, and healthcare for managing and anonymising records, as well as diagnostics.

This is all AI-flavoured, of course; Greene noted that healthcare was one of the first industries targeted because it is so data-intensive which lent itself so well to building machine learning models. This is interesting when compared with the verdict from analyst firm CCS Insight earlier this month; the company predicted that by 2020 cloud service providers would expand from general purpose AI to business-specific applications. While Google appears to be leading the way in this field right now, expect efforts here to ramp up considerably in the coming 18 months.

Regarding security, Greene put forward a couple of eye-opening statistics. Google filters out 7000 bad URLs per minute, as well as 10 million spam and phishing attacks. Those who read earlier this week around Google+ being shut down after a software breach may raise eyebrows rather than open eyes at the following statement, but Greene emphasised the security side. “Our security is just built into every layer of the system – our assumption is that anything on the network is a risk,” said Greene. “There’s just no more secure setup than taking a Chromebook, adding hardware-based two factor authentication and running it discless with G Suite.”

G Suite – with AI completely infused, as Greene put it – is a key component of the Google Cloud mix. Last year Google revealed that Verizon had rolled out the collaboration tool to more than 150,000 of its employees, while more recently Airbus had gone all-in, with 130,000 employees. Other customers noted here were retailer Carrefour, using both Google Cloud Platform and AI capabilities, long-time partner SAP, and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), who is trusting Google with image APIs for wildlife surveillance.

This comes amidst recent comments from Amir Hermelin, formerly product management lead at Google Cloud, who took to Medium to lament mistakes in taking too long to realise the value of the enterprise market. “Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from ‘large orgs,’” wrote Hermelin. “This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering.”

With this in mind, Greene appears to be doing her best to make up for lost time here.

Picture credit: Google Cloud/Screenshot

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Government and public sector organisations continue to seek ways to improve services and mitigate the risk of migrating mission-critical applications to the cloud. Already, many organisations, focused on improving the citizen experience, have set their sights on the cloud. Flexible, agile and affordable, managed cloud can accelerate the agency mission.  Still, CIOs are cautious about which applications to prioritise and what steps they must take to ensure the reality fulfils the promise.

In the US, since the White House released the Cloud First Policy in 2011, organisations are prioritising the evaluation of cloud computing before making any new investments in IT infrastructure or software. Likewise in the UK, the government set out its plan to adopt a 'Cloud First' policy for public sector IT back in 2013. As a result, worldwide organisations have cautiously deployed sub-sets of applications in the cloud, like email, and an increasing number of organisations have undertaken projects to develop cloud-native applications. Successful deployments and more cloud choices are increasing public sector confidence in cloud.

The benefits of cloud are real

Originating with the government, mission-critical is a term now used by all organisations to describe the crucial dependency of an organisation on an application and its relationship with the business of governing. Delivering mission-critical applications more efficiently saves taxpayers’ money, strengthens security and enables government and public sector organisations to do more with constrained budgets. Migrating legacy workloads and applications to the cloud frees up the budget to tackle transformative new projects and programmes.

The financial incentives for migrating traditional applications to the cloud are real. Analysts estimate that in 2018, 70% of the $95.7 billion U.S. federal IT budget will be spent on operating and maintaining existing IT investments and that percentage figure will be similar here in the UK.

Migration speedbump: Reliance on core enterprise applications

While modern web-scale applications were designed to run in the cloud, most organisations still rely on a broad mix of existing mission-critical applications, many of which were not intended to operate in a cloud computing environment and some that were not designed to scale up or down on demand. Further complicating migration planning, applications may require stringent security or compliance controls to ensure that regulatory guidelines are met.

While organisations are increasingly eager to move to the cloud, many soon realise that it takes considerable time and resources to plan, re-architect and manage the new solution. The majority of today’s mission-critical workloads do not fall into the category that makes it easy for public sector organisations to migrate and gain authority to operate (ATO) quickly and cost-effectively. Most public cloud offerings do not allow these organisations to realise true IT transformation since the self-service nature of public cloud still requires organisations to perform most of the management activities themselves in order to support the workload and the end-user base.

Cloud – the public face of transformation

Public sector organisations need a better path to the cloud with secure and cost-effective managed cloud solutions that allow them to run the complex, mission-critical applications of today. Government and public sector organisations require a cloud that was built to handle mission-critical applications for the most complex, highly secure IT landscapes in the world.

Accelerate time to value

While public sector IT budgets remain stagnant or even decrease, expectations for new technology are continually rising. Public sector and government organisations need to increase the performance and reliability while simultaneously managing and containing costs from their most expensive and time-consuming mission-critical applications. Organisations must be able to step into the cloud today by deploying existing applications with minimal changes and gain ATO sooner, versus taking a giant leap to re-architecting every application from scratch to be cloud-native.

Security and compliance

Different applications have different use case characteristics and they have specific requirements which address these to enable them to migrate their mission-critical applications. This includes understanding stringent security and compliance requirements. They also require an approach to cloud which ensures continuity of operation and shortens time to value without compromising essential aspects like security and compliance.

Manage costs

Organisations need to maximise operational efficiency while increasing cost transparency and gaining the ability to allocate cost to specific programmes, allowing them to achieve improved financial flexibility to choose the right services and resources for the right workload. A true consumption-based pricing model allows government IT departments to only pay for what they use—improving economics beyond basic virtualisation, and freeing up budgetary funding to be allocated to other areas.

Offload management burden

Cloud platform infrastructure is only part of the mission-critical workload story. Organisations can experience true IT transformation through comprehensive IT management solutions that raise the bar on current operations and ensure that the most value and performance is gained from information infrastructures. Industry-leading methods and innovative tools now exist, providing real-time metrics to detect, diagnose, repair, and report on issues in the most complex business IT environments.

Focus on the mission

Government agencies can now effectively navigate the complexities of digital transformation and modernisation. Here at Virtustream our Federal Cloud capabilities allow public sector and government organisations to deliver mission-critical applications more efficiently, strengthen security while simultaneously enabling them to tackle transformative new projects and programmes.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

The rainforest is a wonder of nature that’s fundamental to the preservation of life on the planet, but in the last 40-years, the earth has lost 58% of its wildlife as biodiversity has reduced catastrophically across the world.

Hoping to reduce this horrific trend, the Zoological Society London (ZSL) has been working with Google Cloud, a partnership that has seen the cloud giant provide the hardware and software needed to monitor species around the world.

Speaking at Google Cloud Next, ZSL’s conservation technology lead, Sophie Maxwell shed light on a project known as InstantWild, which the two companies first launched together in 2017.

ZSL’s Sophie Maxwell on stage at Google Next 2018

In the beautiful southern Asian rainforests of Borneo, home to the orangutan, the giant elephant and the clouded leopard, ZSL and Google set up networks of camera traps to collect images of the diverse inhabitants who call it home.

Borneo is one of the oldest rainforests on the planet and these small digital cameras that are deployed in the field have a passive red sensor that detects motion and snaps a picture of wildlife as it walks past. They’re typically deployed in grids of around 30 cameras, to survey wildlife populations in the areas ZSL work.

Male Orangutans photographed by camera traps in Borneo

But technology can fail or be problematic, and in the case of camera traps, they take a large number of empty images and snaps of common species that happen to be walking past. This generates too much data.

«Currently, experts have to label images one by one which can take months,» said Maxwell. «With over 100,000 images coming from each survey and only 5% of them containing the target species, this is really slowing us down.

«And these surveys are happening all over the world. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack and it’s causing a bottleneck. We are wasting our time when we could be out there saving wildlife.»

To tackle this challenge, ZSL used Google Cloud and machine learning to create its own image recognition models to help identify species in camera trap images for greater and faster insights.

«They tell us about the state of nature,» said Maxwell. «Whether the population numbers are going up or whether they are going down, where species are going and what the threats are that they face. We urgently need this information to help us focus and also take conservation action and inform policy change.

«We created our own models without any machine learning expertise, using 35,000 expert labelled images, to create our own advanced model, which we applied to a challenging dataset from Borneo.»

A Sun Bear photographed by a camera trap in Borneo

The models produced surprising results, with 91% classification accuracy for 34 species and according to Maxwell, auto machine learning sped up ZSL’s conservation work from months to just days.

From this promising start, the wildlife conservation charity is hoping to further its work with Google Cloud and create a new platform powered by machine learning that will help conservationists create their own models for niche species and habitats.

This, Maxwell said, will be free and open source so that researchers around the world can share their models and refine them collectively as a community to process their camera track data to reveal new insights.

«Longer-term, we see machine learning playing a key role in giving real-time time view of the pulse of wildlife across the planet to speed up our conservation efforts, because time is running out,» added Maxwell.

Images courtesy of ZSL

Bobby Hellard

Rene Millman

Former Google Cloud product management lead Amir Hermelin has said the company’s two biggest mistakes were spending too much time chasing Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure – and taking too long to realise the value of the enterprise market.

Hermelin, who had been on Google’s cloud team since mid-2012 – in other words, 18 months before Google Compute Engine became generally available – took to Medium to deliver a valedictory post explaining the trends he had seen and what he thought the future would hold.

By all accounts Google today occupies the bronze medal position in the cloud behemoth market, naturally behind AWS and Azure. According to the most recent figures from Synergy Research, Google is positioned at #3 overall and in every geography bar Asia Pacific, where it ranks #4 with Alibaba taking second place.

The past year and a half has seen significant efforts from Google in the cloud arena. As this publication noted in March 2017 reporting on Diane Greene’s Next keynote, the new customers announced seemed to represent a step up from what had gone previously. Colgate-Palmolive, eBay and Verizon were all members of the Fortune 500. Previously, Google’s ‘poster child’ for its cloud suites was Snapchat – an interesting company to tell for sure, but without the oomph of the former three.

Hermelin noted both points as key to Google’s first ‘meaningful’ mistake. “We were led by very smart engineering managers that held tenures of 10+ years at Google, so that’s what grew their careers and that’s what they were familiar with,” he wrote. “Seeing success with Snapchat and the likes, and lacking enough familiarity with the enterprise space, it was easy to focus away from ‘large orgs.’

“This included insufficient investments in marketing, sales, support, and solutions engineering, resulting in the aforementioned being inferior compared to the competitors.”

When it came to those competitors, Hermelin argued it clouded the company’s judgement. Google was particularly ahead of the curve when it came to containers and serverless, and wasted valuable time building features to ape AWS – albeit features their customers had requested.

“Our native internal way of running things – containers – was to take a backseat for a few years, until a small startup by the name of Docker managed to hype up containers enough to make them relevant,” Hermelin wrote. “Google took notice, and the rest is history.

“Another example is App Engine – predating today’s ‘serverless’ hotness by a few years, and arguably a successful business even back then. Neither AWS or Azure had anything like it, but we had to divert too many resources to satisfy customers that were asking for features similar to what our competitors offered at the time,” he added.

In some areas, this may still be the case. Take the launch back in August of Cloud HSM, a managed cloud-hosted hardware security module service which enabled customers to host encryption keys and perform cryptographic operations at level 3 or the FIPS 140-2 standard. This appeared to be a missing feature in Google’s arsenal compared with AWS and Azure. Yet in some areas, such as machine learning, Google aims to forge ahead, launching pre-packaged AI services around contact centre and talent acquisition in the same month.

Hermelin admitted he would ‘crack up’ at thoughts Google was no longer innovative. “The most important field in tech today – machine learning – is led by Google, which is several years ahead of its nearest competition,” he wrote. “In the field of AI/ML, nobody comes close… not in technology and not in the raw numbers of quality engineering talent.”

Regardless, there has been a significant climb from Google Cloud in recent months and years. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said earlier this year the company’s cloud arm was securing ‘larger and more strategic’ deals, defined at $500,000 or more. Among the blue chip customers secured this year were PwC, Spotify, and Apple.

Hermelin did not specify his new destination, aside from calling it a ‘high-risk high-reward opportunity with a company that’s disrupting personal finance.’ You can read his full Medium post here.

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo World Series with upcoming events in Silicon Valley, London and Amsterdam to learn more.

Bobby Hellard

Rene Millman

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