L.L. Bean turned to Google Cloud to fulfill its cloud requirements. By modernizing data on, it experienced faster page loads and it was able to access transaction histories more easily. It also focused on value addition instead of infrastructure management. And, it reduced release cycles and rapidly delivered cross-channel services. These collectively improved its overall delivery of agile, cutting-edge customer experience.

Data Modernization with Google Cloud for Success

Many businesses that rely on siloed data find it challenging to make fully informed business decisions, and in turn accelerate growth. They need a unified view of data to be able to draw actionable, meaningful insights that can help them make fact-based decisions that improve operational efficiency, deliver improved services, and identify growth opportunities. In fact, businesses don’t just need unified data. They need quality data that can be stored, managed, scaled and accessed easily.

Google Cloud Platform empowers businesses with flexible and scalable data storage solutions. Some of its tools and features that enable this include:

BigQuery

This is a cost-effective, serverless, and highly scalable multi-cloud data warehouse that provides businesses with agility.

Vertex AI

This enables businesses to build, deploy, and scale ML models on a unified AI platform using pre-trained and custom tooling.

Why should businesses modernize with Google Cloud?

It provides faster time to value with serverless analytics, it lowers TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) by up to 52%, and it ensures data is secure and compliant.

Read this informative post on Cloud Cost Optimization for Better ROI.

Google Cloud Features

Improved Data Management

BigQuery, the serverless data warehouse from Google Cloud Platform (GCP), makes managing, provisioning, and dimensioning infrastructure easier. This frees up resources to focus on the quality of decision-making, operations, products, and services.

Improved Scalability

Storage and computing are decoupled in BigQuery, which improves availability and scalability, and makes it cost-efficient.

Analytics and BI

GCP also improves website analytics by integrating with other GCP and Google products. This helps businesses get a better understanding of the customer’s behavior and journey. The BI Engine packaged with BigQuery provides users with several data visualization tools, speeds up responses to queries, simplifies architecture, and enables smart tuning.

Data Lakes and Data Marts

GCP’s enables ingestion of batch and stream/real-time data, change data capture, landing zone, and raw data to meet other data needs of businesses.

Data Pipelines

GCP tools such as Dataflow, Dataform, BigQuery Engine, Dataproc, DataFusion, and Dataprep help create and manage even complex data pipelines.

Discover how Indium assisted a manufacturing company with data migration and ERP data pipeline automation using Pyspark.

Data Orchestration

For data orchestration too, GCP’s managed or serverless tools minimize infrastructure, configuration, and operational overheads. Workflows is a popular tool for simple workloads while Cloud Composer can be used for more complex workloads.

Data Governance

Google enables data governance, security, and compliance with tools such as Data Catalog, that facilitates data discoverability, metadata management, and data class-level controls. This helps separate sensitive and other data within containers. Data Loss Prevention and Identity Access Management are some of the other trusted tools.

Data Visualization

Google Cloud Platform provides two fully managed tools for data visualization, Data Studio and Looker. Data Studio is free and transforms data into easy-to-read and share, informative, and customizable dashboards and reports. Looker is flexible and scalable and can handle large data and query volumes.

ML/AI

Google Cloud Platform leverages Google’s expertise in ML/AI and provides Managed APIs, BigQuery ML, and Vertex AI. Managed APIs enable solving common ML problems without having to train a new model or even having technical skills. Using BigQuery, models can be built and deployed based on SQL language. Vertex AI, as already seen, enables the management of the ML product lifecycle.

Indium to Modernize Your Data Platform With GCP

Indium Software is a recognized data and cloud solution provider with cross domain expertise and experience. Our range of services includes data and app modernization, data analytics, and digital transformation across the various cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Server, Azure, Google Cloud. We work closely with our customers to understand their modernization needs and align them with business goals to improve the outcomes for faster growth, better insights, and enhanced operational efficiency.

FAQs

The post Data Modernization with Google Cloud appeared first on Indium.

Earlier, businesses were reluctant to move to the cloud due to security fears. The security services offered by cloud service providers have also come a long way in providing best of class defense tools to prevent intrusions and data loss. With security risk coming down, business owners have started trusting cloud service providers more. The added advantage of not having to manage huge server farms and employ a team to manage the infrastructure 24/7 has resulted in huge savings to businesses. Small and traditional businesses can now start concentrating more on their business rather than worrying about their digital back bone.

For businesses who are still on traditional on-premises model, the question always arises as to whether it is the right time for them to deploy cloud migration services. The question of should they or shouldn’t they move to the cloud arises when they see their competitors move to the cloud.

I believe the right time to move to the cloud is best arrived at through a set of introspection on these lines.

Why do you want to move your product/operations to the cloud?

While there are several reasons to move to the cloud, here are some of the main reasons that you should consider.

1. Better reach: New product companies usually build an MVP version that they might build using local infrastructure and tools. They may even test it within a target group. When the MVP is successful and the product is ready to be distributed to a larger audience, they may want to consider moving to a cloud infrastructure that provides greater reach, more flexibility and better control over the data and release processes.

2. Reduce operational cost: Some businesses may want to move to the cloud to reduce cost and realize more value out of the easy access to better infrastructure on the cloud. Pure play business houses who have a small technology team may want to move to the cloud to leverage managed services that are available 24/7 at a fraction of the cost that they will need to spend otherwise. Several auto-scalable services are available in the cloud that enable optimal availability of resources based on the load and hence keep the cost minimal.

3. Reduce time to market: There are several cloud based architectural solutions available in the public domain for standard business models. These are time tested frameworks that can be used to quickly develop your software. Many of these frameworks take care of scalability, high availability and data redundancy, apart from basic security features. Leveraging these frameworks and coupling them with powerful tools like Ansible or Terraform to deploy the infrastructure can greatly reduce the time needed to set up the various environments.

Apart from these, moving to the cloud will reduce technology obsolescence on the infrastructure side and provide a good security cover that will be more expensive to build with an on-premises setup. With more avenues for data collection and cost of storing data going down on the cloud, a cloud-based software is better suited for enabling analytics in future

You might be interested in: 5 Best Practices for Moving Data Workloads to the Cloud

When should you move?

The next big question is, when should one move to the cloud. While this is an important question, the best time for businesses to move to the cloud is when they can realize value out of the move!

The value parameters could be different thigs or a combination of factors. Some of them are (not limited to)

– Cost savings

– Time to market

– Better Security

– Better reach to customers

– Agility

– Avoiding technology obsolescence

– High availability

– Low latency

– Future proofing (data availability for analysis)

Availability of on-demand infrastructure is a boon for small start-ups that want to build small, test the product with a limited trial group and then massively scale up. They can expect to save a lot of cost compared to on-premise development and deployment.

As discussed earlier, the availability of a plethora of tools and pre-designed architecture frameworks reduce the time to build and deploy products greatly. Product companies that want to quickly test the waters with a minimal version of their product, before they release a much bigger & better version, would find value in adopting a cloud native delivery approach.

As the business models may vary, firms should introspect on the cost to benefit of moving to the cloud before they make the plunge. An internal software that is used only by a few members of the company may not be a right candidate to move to the cloud (unless of course there are other considerations like huge data storage, DR, geographically separated teams, etc.).

Some product companies start developing products that work only on the cloud (cloud native development). Other businesses may want to move their data alone to the cloud while still have their application running in-house. Businesses that want to expand their footprint to other regions, may benefit by moving to a cloud based implementation with global accelerators or regional installations. Businesses affected by security breaches might want to leverage state of the art security services offered by cloud providers for safeguarding their client details.

While the reasons may be different, the question of when to move to the cloud is best decided by the value realized by the business by such a move.

Give your organization a reliable platform to innovate with confidence, because your business is worth it, and your customers are worth it!.

Best practices:

Decide on which services / application / data to move to the cloud. Such a list should be the basis for deciding on the cloud platform and services that you want to leverage from cloud providers. A well architected cloud solution will eke out the best value for your business.

Once the list is available, decide on the cloud platform and the process to migrate. A hybrid model will also allow business to test the waters before they move all their applications on to the cloud. It might be a good idea for businesses to move their data alone, or a few applications that require global access, to the cloud first. Back up and disaster recovery using the cloud infra can also be an option.

After moving the first / few applications, thoroughly test the model with all dependencies. Some application may require data from other services which are still hosted on-premises. Make sure that the applications work as expected and without latency, and with the right authorization / authentication strategy. It may also be a good idea to monitor the cost of ownership for running this set up. Also make sure that there are no security loopholes due to the cloud-based implementation. A proper user governance & administration model Is essential for high security.

Many financial institutions may have geographic limitations and hence may not want to move to cloud. Such Fintech organizations can still think of Cloud as their Disaster Recovery Strategy and use it only for BCP purposes.

Migrating to the cloud also offers opportunity for businesses to modernize their applications with several new services that are now available from cloud providers. Along with proper audit and serverless models, the various options for realizing value outweighs status-quo.

The post Looking forward to maximize ROI from Cloud Migration? Here’s how, why and when to do it appeared first on Indium.

Being lightweight, fast, and providing increased accessibility to services are seeing the cloud growing rapidly. Globally, the spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 21.7%, from $396 billion in 2021 to $482 billion in 2022. By 2026, it is expected to be more than 45% of the enterprise IT spending as against 17% in 2021

The 10th annual Flexera 2021: State of the Cloud Report, based on a survey of 750 global cloud decision-makers and users on the use of public, private, and multi-cloud, reveals that:

● 92 percent of the enterprises have implemented a multi-cloud strategy, while 80 percent follow a hybrid cloud strategy

● 49 percent have silo workloads by cloud, and 45 percent integrate data between clouds

● Only 42 percent use multi-cloud management tools

A priority area for the organizations is to optimize the existing cloud deployment and migrate more workloads to the cloud. However, security, governance, and cloud management continue to pose a challenge for businesses following hybrid and multi-cloud strategies.

Challenges to Moving Workloads to the Cloud

The benefits of moving workloads to the cloud include

Scalability: Scaling up or down the workload based on demand fluctuations due to the unlimited availability of resources

Rapid Application Deployment: This is made possible as cloud servers, hosting environments, and serverless functions can be accessed as required

Distributed Infrastructure: Businesses can distribute their workloads across different geographies using the cloud, making IT resources resilient and fail-proof, ensuring business continuity even during disasters

Cost Efficiency: The pay-as-you-use model reduces the investments needed for IT infrastructure

These factors improve the ability of businesses to focus on innovation and delivering improved service to the customers, thereby increasing their competitiveness. However, there is also a disadvantage for every advantage that often sees businesses reverting their workloads to the on-prem systems. Some of the challenges include:

Spoilt for Choice: Businesses today have access to several cloud platforms. This is good news, of course, but it can also be confusing unless the IT team can assess the needs of the organization and find the right fit at the right price.

Application Compatibility: It is necessary to ensure that the applications being migrated to the cloud can run on the cloud. If not, they need to be refactored or even redesigned completely or partly to achieve the desired outcomes.

Resource Availability: Tools and strategies cannot be mapped directly between on-prem and cloud servers. They need to be redefined to suit the cloud requirements for management, security, and monitoring challenges. It also requires different skills for developers and the IT team.

7 Best Practices to Transition to the Cloud

To ensure the success of the workload migration process and experience the expected benefits, we at Indium Software recommend the following best practices. Indium offers cloud engineering services to optimize your investment in the cloud by offering reliable, agile, scalable, and secure solutions.

The best practices include:

Best Practice #1 Lead from the Front: It is important to get the organization’s buy-in for the migration effort to succeed. When the top management shows commitment to the process and takes the team along, it is easier to get the technical practitioners and other users also on board. Highlight the benefits, the challenges, and provide the necessary resources for the transition.

Best Practice #2 Identify the Best-fit Cloud Service: Brand names and reviews on the web may pull you in one or multiple directions. Either way, it can lead to confusion and failure. The best approach to decide on the right fit for your organization is to

– Do a cost-benefit analysis

– Evaluate the ease of deploying the workloads on the service

– Assess the monitoring and management capabilities of the service

– Estimate the security risks

Best Practice #3 Create a Roadmap: We can never have enough of a good thing and the temptation might be to do it all together, in one go. However, it is crucial to assess the effectiveness of an application in the cloud environment and decide whether it can be migrated or needs refactoring/reconfiguration/redesigning, or is best left behind. Also create a roadmap, with critical applications being uploaded first for minimizing disruption to the business.

Best Practice #4 Identify Potential Security Threats: The cloud is considered generally safer and the cloud service providers will have their own security processes in place. However, the threats still exist as any misconfiguration can leave a business’s applications vulnerable.

Therefore, putting the necessary security barriers around the business’s workloads will provide the necessary protection. This needs to be periodically reviewed and upgraded as well.

Best Practice # 5 Cloud Costing: Cost management is simpler in the cloud due to the pay-per-use model it uses. However, there may be other fees associated with the migration. Therefore, understand the pricing model clearly and identify methods to control costs.

Best Practice #6 Assign Roles: Assigning roles and elucidating responsibilities will create a sense of ownership to the migration process and improve the chances of its success.

Best Practice # 7 Plan a Cloud Roadmap: In a constantly evolving technology environment, it is essential to have a strategy that can help manage the uncertainties. While anticipating every change is not possible, a well-thought-out strategy will help provide the required direction.

You might be interested in: Cloud Data Migration Demystified

Indium has expertise in all major private/public cloud platforms and its team of experts can identify the right fit for your organization. Our services span:

● Cloud migration

● Modernization

● Optimization support for improved RoI

We ensure an optimal TCO after a seamless transition, providing the necessary tooling, automation, and experience for a safe and efficient migration to the cloud.

The post 5 Best Practices for Moving Data Workloads to the Cloud appeared first on Indium.