Running an Agile and Secure Digital Practice with Google Cloud

It’s the Year of Reprioritisation. 

Digital transformation and cloud services were a key focal point for businesses before the pandemic, but Google Cloud has seen a clear acceleration, across all industries, in the past 6 months. This acceleration is not just for adoption of digital transformation practices, but more importantly, secure digital transformation processes and platforms.

According to IDC, vendor revenue from sales of IT infrastructure products for cloud environments, including public and private cloud, increased 34.4% year over year in the second quarter of 2020. It’s plain to see the effect that the global shift towards working from home has had on the business world, but it’s necessary to dig a little deeper to understand the agility and technology that are required to do so quickly and safely, if, of course, the shift is to be an effective one.

With that in mind, let’s run through our two main takeaways from Google Cloud’s sessions on security and infrastructure:

• How Google Cloud can get you from business continuity to agility; and
• Why security is more important than ever.

How Google Cloud Can Get You From Business Continuity to Agility

A core behaviour shared by Google Cloud customers is embracing an open platform to support the ability to quickly adapt to change, which is where cloud technology enters the fold.

Continuity of business is the foundation, but at Kin + Carta, we believe it’s critical that scalability and agility is treated as a leading reason for the adoption of cloud, as it enables technology teams to constantly improve and iterate the day-to-day processes of their organisations.

Google Cloud’s network enables companies like PayPal, AutoTrader and our very own dunhumby to migrate existing workflows to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and build new transformation workloads with greater agility and scalability.

As Chris Ciauri, President of EMEA at Google Cloud, put it, a platform for agility allows a business to scale up or down and effectively deliver new services to customers and partners, which opens up a range of opportunities for business in this new landscape.

The coronavirus pandemic has undoubtedly forced businesses to adapt to what could be ‘the new normal’ this year, so having the elasticity and flexibility that Google Cloud provides (being the same platform that runs YouTube, Gmail and much more) has been a lifeline for many organisations and, crucially, a key contributor to the transition from continuity for survival to agility for growth.

Why Security is More Important Than Ever

As covered in the conference and according to Fugue's State of Cloud Security 2020 report, 84% of companies that shifted to distributed working conditions were concerned about cloud security during the transition.

Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio is built on the idea that cloud computing will only increasingly shift towards private, encrypted services that give users the confidence that there is no internal or external exposure of their data.

At Kin + Carta we’ve always had a Secure by Design approach to building our products and choose Cloud services because they are significantly easier to access in a distributed way. When Covid-19 struck, from a security perspective all we needed to do was an audit of which tools people needed access and then carried out some due diligence on them to avoid data leakage. This was a relatively small job as our IT infrastructure was built on the Cloud to support remote working, whether from home or a client site.