How Google Cloud transforms organizations

We live in the era of technology disrupting business as we know it. This offers opportunities rather than threats if your organization is equally as flexible as your (new) competitors. But this is easier said than done. Plus, not only does your organization need to be aware of competitive change, it must also compete with changing customer demands and behavior.

Cloud technology is the go-to technique for transforming a traditional environment. Google Cloud offers transformation opportunities through, for example, its hybrid options, security measures, intelligent data, and AI. This helps identify new revenue streams and effective options for talent management.

Agility
There are four common challenges facing traditional organizations in creating an IT roadmap: Being afraid that five years from now you will realize the whole company is in the wrong ecosystem, lock-in through technical debt and licences, having partners with no incentive to innovate, and an explosion of data. Because of its flexible pay-as-you-go nature and infrastructure that is owned by Google, Google Cloud technology tackles these issues.

In addition, because of its agile nature and ability to leverage existing technology while maximizing performance of cloud assets, Google Cloud creates options instead of lock-ins. Since our cloud platform provides rapid access to a new stack of modern solutions that fuel continuous innovations and improve the ability to respond to changing customer needs, its hybrid IT structure also creates great opportunity for existing vendors to compete on the same platform, with features and customer satisfaction instead of locking businesses into multi-year contractual agreements. Making your business ready for what comes next.

Pay-as-you-go
Secondly, a cloud network offers business agility at a lower cost than on-premise deployment because of Cloud’s pay-as-you-go subscription model. There are no large upfront payments since building in-house hardware and data center capabilities is a concept of the past. Dealing with peaks and lows of processing requirements at a flexible rate reduces discussions around budgets necessary for experimenting, increasing your eagerness to try out new things.

Security
According to Gartner, “By 2020, 60% of digital businesses will suffer major service failures due to the inability of IT security teams to manage digital risk”. How prepared are we for today's growing and sophisticated cyber threats? And how can we keep innovating if security threats don't allow us to have a creative mindset?

At Google, we know that times have changed, and that digital risks have multiplied. Enterprise security has evolved from trust and verify, to zero trust. Google Cloud is secure by design: we have the largest privately managed network with more than 100,000 miles of fiber optic cable, the system automatically redacts sensitive data using more than 90 predefined detectors, and platform resources are regulated through the same robust and authenticated infrastructure that powers other services of Google, securely serving millions daily.

These security standards reduce the risks of trying new things to next to nothing. Innovation isn't just about technology, it's also about having a safe environment to experiment.

Intelligence
In December, Gartner said that a shocking 87% of enterprises have low business intelligence or analytics maturity. That means they are using spreadsheets and not much more, or business units are doing small-scale analytics projects without much central guidance.

Cloud computing arose in the data-driven age. Companies like Google all grew based on figuring out key data points that matter most to our customers. Our cloud system reflects this, as it is built to analyze and adjust workloads, and launch and manage software that is informed by lots of interactive data analyses.

We also see that this world is changing fast. Where we used to live in a physical world and work with manual data gathering, we now see mobility, sensors, and new data sources such as photos from robotic drones. It is our duty to provide insights on these developments in order to bring the best technology learnings and tools we can, allowing you to have the power to better analyze the data that isn't obvious, in order to surprise your clients with more modern solutions and products.

Talent
It's true that great talent is hard to find, and we know that this is particularly true in IT departments. So how do you find and keep talent in today's world? The same way you always did: no dull tasks, endorse creativity, provide good feedback, have a collaborative and open environment, and facilitate remote working.

Your goal is to provide more engaging work so that talent can be even more productive, and reach your customers better. Cloud technology first of all relocates talent, as managing obsolete technology is now a phenomenon of the past. Second, cloud technology has many examples that show how the essence of work can be changed: through projects such as better management tools for cloud or hybrid environments, access to robust and open source software, through competitive learning environments such as Kaggle, and through collaboration technologies that connect people who may be scattered over continents (let alone corporate silos).