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How can businesses future-proof to unlock the true power of data? The answer lies in leveraging the cloud. A study by IBM investigated how enterprises that have deployed the cloud to boost business performance are gaining a competitive edge in the market. Google Cloud launched its new cloud region in Delhi-NCR in July 2021 to serve its customers in India and Asia Pacific. This new Google Cloud region is the second such in India after Mumbai and the 10th in Asia Pacific.

“Google Cloud has a commitment towards open source, multi and hybrid cloud strategies. This enables us to use data, run your apps on a cloud vendor or environment of your choice. This also gives you a lot of flexibility and freedom,” shared Rajat Pandit, Head of (South India) Customer Engineering, Google Cloud.

The new region will benefit customers operating in India by providing low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data.

Expanding their cloud region presence at a rapid pace, Rajat added that Google set up 16 regions in the last three years along with seven more in the offing.

Decoding the value of software

Led by Craig Dickson, Software Delivery and Operations Lead – APAC, Google Cloud, the next session stressed the importance of software and the need to not only measure but also improve the way software products and services are built.

“So, if you go to a Google search engine today, you will find that there’s a trend across all industries. Software is becoming a critical part of the value chain. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an airline or a candy company. Software is now how value is measured in a lot of companies,” said Craig.

In a digital world where customers are expecting faster value delivery from different high quality service providers, driving efficiencies will help stay competitive.

Craig further highlighted the four key DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics – delivery lead time, deployment frequency, mean time to restore service, and change fail rate – as measures of how well teams deliver value to customers. Successful measures of software delivery performance should focus on a global outcome and not output. “It’s a cultural shift that DORA encourages with those small incremental changes. Using practices like site reliability engineering (SRE) enable communication across product development and operations teams,” he added.

Andrew Haschka APAC Technology Practice Lead, Application Modernization, Google Cloud, discussed building innovative applications with Ashish Sahni, CTO, IDfy, a company that builds technology products and solutions that accurately authenticate entities to help businesses prevent fraud.

Aashish also said that “New regulations come back and this has happened in India and in other countries. And Google has actually partnered with us to build a platform and offer these kinds of services to this industry spectrum. We are able to go hand-in-hand and ensure that you are going to get the services, and you do not need to worry about security compliance. It does meet those needs. This is very important when it comes for the industry to adopt cloud computing and get the maximum benefit.”

The ability to adapt to change is paramount in this digital, disruptive era. Subhash Guddad, Director, Technology Practice Lead (Data Management), APAC, Google Cloud spoke about the importance of databases in the infrastructure while building applications.

Google Cloud offers a multitude of database services for any kind of use case and application. The agility to transform and deliver great customer experiences while ensuring that freedom to work is not affected. Google Cloud offers integrated services that offer a faster way to build new features and unify the entire data life cycle.

A distributed relational database service that runs on Google Cloud, Google Cloud Spanner has been designed to support global online transaction processing deployments, SQL semantics, highly available horizontal scaling and transactional consistency. Google Cloud Spanner also helps by reducing costs, management overhead, and complexity.

“When we were looking to build a platform which is highly available and highly secure, we’re looking at a tech partner who is not just sending us a kitchen sink of services, but essentially being a valued partner with us, understanding our needs, what it takes to build such a platform,” said Ashish.

Rapid AI development with Google Cloud

Vertex AI is a new unified managed machine learning platform that makes it easier for developers to build, deploy, maintain, and scale their AI models. Research reports and analysts have found out that a vast majority of companies have either invested or are looking at investing in machine learning but are unable to derive value from it.

“Depending on the use case and your end-to-end machine learning workflow, you can choose the capabilities that you think are best to solve that use case. A tech service we’ve recently announced is our Vertex AI Workbench. Vertex AI Workbench is our managed environment for orchestrating the work flows,” shared Erwin Huizenga, Solution Lead, Machine Learning, APAC, Google Cloud.

Vertex AI is useful in accelerating data preparation, scaling data training and experimentation, and model deployment.

What’s new in data and analytics?

Efficient growth requires companies to embrace and utilise modern technology. And the right tools can help fulfil changing business needs, provide a great customer service, minimise operational costs, and maximise revenues.

Russell Nash, Solution Lead – Data Analytics, APAC, Google Cloud discussed the reasons behind building Big Query, a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi-cloud data warehouse designed for business agility. “We built Big Query from scratch to really take advantage of the separation of compute and storage. The storage on the left and the computer on the right gives you the flexibility to then scale each of these completely independently. So you can put as much data as you like into Big Query and just scale the compute layer depending on the workloads that you have,” he said.

Organisations need to focus on agility and equip themselves to respond rapidly to emerging trends and changing market scenarios. Outperforming the competition lies solely in the ability to do this on a daily basis.