How Will Cloud Services Propel Your Business?

More and more businesses today are switching to cloud services. It's the right step forward for those who understand its value for their long-term survival, especially in helping businesses adapt to the modern market and stay ahead of their rapidly evolving industries. However, some businesses remain hesitant about making a move due to concerns over the security of their data and loss of control and management. This article will discuss how your company will benefit from switching to Google Cloud services.

The cloud transformation era is an industry trend that succeeds the VM cloud era and the infrastructure cloud era, which focused on moving hardware and applications to the cloud.

A transformation cloud is the best way to deliver transformative capabilities across the organization, inspiring true innovation.

With a transformation cloud, organizations have:

 ○ the freedom to host their apps and data where it makes the most sense without having to worry about lock-in.

  ○ the capabilities to put real-time data and insights directly into their workers’ hands to enable better decision-making.

   ○ the services to connect people and improve productivity to enable innovation anywhere.

   ○ the protections that secure each transaction no matter where they occur.

Recently, we saw the incredible changes that were happening with COVID, especially for how people worked in offices, but also how software developers and IT practitioners innovated.

These changes acknowledged that our economic recovery will look different than how it used to in the past. And through these changes, boards and executives recognized that recovery, as it has been throughout history, will be a catalyst for fast forward transformation in.

There have been different stages to the cloud that have mostly played out: 

The Cloud Virtual Machine, the VM cloud era. New companies, mostly startups, realized that they could forgo ever buying or operating hardware and start in the cloud. This was a key catalyst for many of the great native cloud companies we all rely on today. By the end of this first VM cloud era, it became very rare for startups to operate their own data centers.

And what’s really been building for the last decade, was the infrastructure cloud era. It’s been defined by organizations migrating their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Take your servers, and move them to the cloud. Shift your existing data storage and data estate to the cloud, but it’s still pretty much the same thing. Take your old-school email, calendar, and file sharing, and have it run in the cloud. This has been REALLY important, as it has enabled cost savings as things can scale up and down, faster development without having to do long-term infrastructure planning, improved security, and the ability to redirect more people and other resources to building new capabilities versus simply managing infrastructure. And we saw how, in this last decade of the infrastructure cloud, companies splintered into two groups: those that migrated much of their infrastructure to the cloud and continued to exist, while companies that ignored this migration were generally left behind.

We're talking about digital transformation acceleration, and how the infrastructure cloud and virtualized infrastructure is now a given, but what is next?

The really interesting conversations are how we can get to a third phase, the transformation cloud, where we’re not just making an infrastructure decision, but truly embedding the need and capability to transform throughout the company. Digitization is now fundamental and this phase moves from what might have been a top-down corporate strategy and an initiative for infrastructure, to fully infusing transformation, letting every person and team in your organization transform.

Let’s take a deeper look at what the transformation cloud entails:

 The Power of Data

Data is the essential ingredient for all global businesses and is the rocket fuel for business transformation across analytical and transactional applications. Once generated, it powers deeper AI-driven business insights, helps companies make better real-time decisions, and is also the basis for how companies build and run their data-driven applications. This is the heart of the Data Cloud that is emerging, to unify data across the organization. 

This is why there is so much excitement in the cloud market for the data cloud. We’ve seen it with the growth and excitement with Snowflake, how data lakes are becoming more common and an organizational imperative, and why business intelligence is the outcome every company is optimizing for. 

With the leading AI solutions portfolio, Google helps businesses commit to business outcomes: saving calls, improving customer experiences, preventing fraud, and increasing manufacturing efficiency - all in ways that make us a strategic partner on innovation, not a technology vendor.

The Open Cloud

The discussion has evolved from “why cloud” to “which cloud architecture”. The vast majority of organizations will use a combination of clouds and open source software, rather than relying on a single service provider or closed technology stack for their needs. An open architecture allows organizations to maximize their customer experiences by hedging against inevitable cloud outages and taking advantage of the strengths of technologies wherever they are running. The cloud gives companies a faster way to technically meet their customer needs. An open cloud transforms the way they operate their business, instilling freedom in how they innovate and drive differentiated customer experiences.

It is all about harnessing the flexibility of open source innovation throughout the industry while enjoying the freedom of a multicloud environment to build and run apps anywhere and leveraging solutions from our partner ecosystem to expand the customers' technology choices. 

The People Cloud

A transformation cloud isn’t just about technology; people and culture are equally important. Customers understand that a successful transition into this new era of work hinges on how they keep their people engaged, productive, connected, and create new ways to serve their own customers’ needs.

We’re already partnering with customers to bring the people's cloud vision to life with Google Workspace.

Over seven million customers are realizing tangible value by working with Google Workspace over the alternative. People using Google Workspace are more satisfied with their jobs, and their teams are more innovative, productive, and able to make faster decisions. Leaders also recognize that Google Workspace is a bet on their future workforce - with over 140M students and teachers using Google Workspace to learn and grow every day.

The Trusted Cloud

At Google Cloud, we defend your data against threats and fraudulent activity using the same infrastructure and security services we use for our own operations, empowering you with advanced capabilities that would be unavailable to all but the most-well resourced organizations. As enterprises move into the cloud, they seek to take advantage of what Google has learned and apply it to their core security concerns:

●  Ensure safe access: Simplify secured access to services for employees, contractors, and customers.

●  Protect against threats: Create the visibility needed to find, analyze and resist threats at the scale of your business.

● Own the strategy: Take advantage of cloud innovations, while meeting sovereignty and governance requirements and maintain control of their digital assets.

Benefits of Switching to the Cloud:

Cost Efficiency

You save a great deal on space, installation costs, and manpower requirements by steering away from on-premise computing. Furthermore, the Cloud saves you from requiring an on-premise system that needs regular repairs and maintenance. With cloud platforms, the cloud provider must regulate the maintenance, so this is no longer a worry for you. Moreover, since the space you're using is online, scalability becomes much easier for your business. For example, you won't have to stress about the cost and resources needed to scale your database because Google Cloud's team handles this for you. In addition, you save on software licensing requirements that can potentially cost your business a great deal of money, considering that you'll need to purchase new licenses and updates, along with the cost of supporting and maintaining the in-house system.

Meeting Demand

Google Cloud's scaling flexibility allows your business to meet changing market demands with just a few clicks. With pay-as-you-go features, you can adjust your service package according to your changing business requirements and changing business demands like peak and low seasons. As a result, your company will deliver more results faster than before, without the need for additional staffing, providing your business with cost-effective solutions.

Reliability

Cloud services offer greater reliability and convenience, allowing your team to run applications from any place, through any device, at any time with no interruptions and no downtime. Google is the leader in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), providing you with SRE support round the clock with many layers of protection, ensuring you're getting the most reliable and secure service.

 Security

Some skeptics worry that relying on cloud services could lead to data security issues and prefer to keep their data centers on-premise. Physical proximity can give the feeling of security, right? Well, it shouldn't; the physical location has nothing to do with data security. On the contrary, cloud services offer better security, because it's centralized and offers higher layers of protection and defense. Other than the heavy physical protection at Google Cloud’s data centers, you have data security through anonymity, layers of encryption, and replication. Google also distributes customers' data over several systems in different locations rather than on a single computer while encrypting and naming them randomly to add even more layers of protection. Most companies do not have the resources to ensure this level of security, making Google Cloud an ideal solution for businesses seeking high levels of data security.

Timesaving

Through automated services, cloud services ensure that systems are running efficiently at all times, taking care of security patching, upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery capabilities, your company saves time and resources and allows your team to work on their project and develop your business.

Improving Collaboration & Innovation

With timesaving and the ability to access your system from any place, your team will have more time and access to work on their projects and develop innovative ideas. You will also have access to a great pool of talent without the limitation of fixed location. Google Cloud enables optimization and innovation through Cloud SQL organization policies that provide centralized resource control.

Finally, We have reached the point where cloud is now driving transformation more than efficiency, and Google Cloud is the provider best positioned to help businesses realize what is possible. 

-   Openness and flexibility through OSS, multi and hybrid cloud

-   Intelligence with best-in-class data analytics and AI/ML

-   A commitment to sustainability

-   Best-in-class security to protect systems, data, users

-   Collaboration and productivity solutions that keep people connected

-   Value through costs savings

-   Customized industry solutions

-   Easy to use