case study on google cloud platform

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Current: Preparing teenagers for financial responsibility

About Current

Current is a financial technology company that offers a debit card and app made for teenagers. The app and card give teens hands-on learning with modern financial tools, and connects them with the people, brands, and experiences they value.

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Current uses google kubernetes engine on google cloud to improve time to market for app development by 400% while eliminating downtime for users of its debit card app., google cloud results.

• Improves time to market for app development by 400%
• Eliminates downtime for customers
• Enables deployment of new services in hours versus days
• Reduces total cloud hosting costs by 60%

80% reduction in error resolution time

When it comes to developing good financial habits, it pays to start early. Talking to teens about money and monitoring how they spend it helps set them up for a more financially sound future and can have long-term implications for the rest of their lives.

Instead of handing teens cash, many parents are using Current , a Visa chip debit card and smartphone app that helps teens learn how to budget money. Teens can set savings goals, check their balances, earn money by completing chores, and even give to charity. Parents can set an automated allowance, create and approve chores, and easily track their children’s spending with real-time alerts.

To grow, Current must keep its app secure, reliable, and high performing. As a startup, the company started by developing and hosting its app on a simple infrastructure, managing virtual machines with manual processes. As its user base surpassed 25,000 daily active customers, Current began to notice performance bottlenecks, particularly with the Neo4j graph database it uses to store and expose relationships among users, family members, and their debit cards and connected banks. Running the database on a shared application server made it difficult to measure the cost of the required CPU time and memory footprint. Current also lacked a robust way to log and profile the database.

Current considered using a hosted Neo4j solution, but worried that it would limit its ability to deploy in different availability zones as the company grew. Current was also concerned that a hosted solution would drastically increase costs.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to sustainably grow our user base 7x to more than 175,000 users, and we haven’t experienced any downtime for our services. We’ve also received a lot of collaboration and support from Google, which we weren’t getting from other cloud providers.”

After a short stint with another cloud provider, Current decided to build its own graph database cluster on Google Cloud . The highly available implementation—including a monitoring agent and backup agent—came in at half the cost of a hosted solution or alternative cloud provider according to Trevor Marshall, Chief Technology Officer at Current. Once the engineering team saw the power and reliability of Google Cloud, Current began exploring deeper integration with Google Cloud services.

“Since moving to Google Cloud, we’ve been able to sustainably grow our user base 7x to more than 175,000 users, and we haven’t experienced any downtime for our services,” says Trevor. “We’ve also received a lot of collaboration and support from Google, which we weren’t getting from other cloud providers.”

Accelerating time-to-market

Current now hosts most of its applications in Docker containers, including its business-critical GraphQL API, using Google Kubernetes Engine to automate cluster deployment and management of containerized applications while keeping applications available. Container images are stored on Google Container Registry for fast, scalable retrieval. Integrated logging with Google Stackdriver makes it easy to identify issues, and Current can scale up or down as needed to keep performance high and costs low, with zero downtime for users.

“Moving to Google Cloud reduced our error resolution times by 80% and improved our time to market for app development by 400%. We can iterate quickly, find issues, and redeploy. There’s no reason whatsoever to run Kubernetes outside of Google Cloud, because Google does such a good job.”

With a fully managed environment for containerized applications, Current can deploy new services in hours instead of days while keeping its staffing footprint small. When the company does add team members, they can focus on app development instead of managing and troubleshooting infrastructure.

“Moving to Google Cloud reduced our error resolution times by 80% and improved our time to market for app development by 400%,” says Trevor. “We can iterate quickly, find issues, and redeploy. There’s no reason whatsoever to run Kubernetes outside of Google Cloud, because Google does such a good job.”

Current has released a variety of compelling new features since moving to Google Cloud, including a referral program to recruit more customers and an improved notification feed to inspire more conversations about finances between parents and teens. It also restructured its app to highlight users’ favorite features, including a dedicated allowance section and improved chore management. The new app also communicates with Current’s Kubernetes Engine hosted GraphQL API. Current’s use of GraphQL greatly improves performance by minimizing the data that is sent between the app and the backend, and enables Current’s front-end engineers to share code, increasing developer efficiency.

Improving data and network security

As a financial technology company, Current is always focused on providing the highest levels of security for its customers. Google Cloud facilitates the use of encryption to help protect customer data at rest and in transit to help ensure that customer data is safe when outside the physical boundaries not controlled by Google or on behalf of Google.

For publicly accessible applications, Current configures an ingress resource on Kubernetes clusters to make context-aware load balancing decisions. This ingress also provides a reverse proxy function between users and Current's private network. This helps ensure that no external entity can reach Current’s Google Compute Engine instance fleet directly. Google Cloud also provides Current with the means to forward traffic outside of its private without exposing instances to the public Internet. This gives Current the means to utilize other managed services such MongoDB Atlas, while maintaining a trusted platform.

“Security is one of the biggest benefits of Google Cloud and Kubernetes Engine,” says Trevor. “It was easy for us to configure our environment so that we avoid exposing any public IP addresses for our clusters. When we deploy a new service, we have a recipe that observes security best practices.”

“Google Cloud has allowed us to be highly available, scalable, and cost-efficient, helping us grow from an ambitious startup into a financial technology innovator. We’ve built trust with the families we serve because we’ve been able to offer a great experience.”

Powering a digital workforce

When Current was founded in 2015, the company standardized on Google Workspace for communication and collaboration, using tools such as Gmail and Google Docs , Sheets , and Slides to keep productivity high. Google Workspace administration is so easy that Trevor still handles it all, in addition to leading the company’s tech strategy as CTO.

“Our business depends on Google Workspace,” he says. “It’s simple to use, yet feature-rich and very cost effective. Adding new employees takes a couple of minutes, and they can get to work right away. I can’t imagine using anything else.”

Shaping financial futures

By making it easy for teens and parents to manage and talk about money, Current is preparing a new generation to navigate one of the most challenging aspects of adulthood: financial responsibility. The company’s user base is growing by 20% every month with no signs of slowing, and its Android app just began trending on Google Play. Current is also learning to better manage its own finances. “By avoiding the cost of a hosted Neo4j solution and optimizing resource utilization with Kubernetes Engine, we reduced total cloud hosting costs by 60%," adds Trevor.

“Google Cloud has allowed us to be highly available, scalable, and cost-efficient, helping us grow from an ambitious startup into a financial technology innovator,” says Trevor. “We’ve built trust with the families we serve because we’ve been able to offer a great experience.”

Google Cloud Platform Use Cases: Strategies For Success

Delve into the practical applications of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) across various domains. This article breaks down GCP's services, demonstrating how developers can leverage them for scalable, secure, and efficient solutions.

GCP Core Services

• Setting Up Your GCP Environment

Data Management And Analysis

Scalable computing solutions, security and compliance in gcp, optimizing costs and performance, frequently asked questions, compute engine, storage options, data and analytics.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a robust suite of cloud services that cater to various aspects of computing, networking, storage, and machine learning needs. Let's delve into some of the core services that are essential to developers and programmers.

Compute Engine offers scalable, high-performance virtual machines. You can create and run virtual machines on Google's infrastructure, customizing the environment according to your needs.

App Engine enables developers to build highly scalable applications on a fully managed platform. It supports popular languages like Java, Python, and Node.js.

Cloud Storage is an object storage service that offers high durability and global edge-caching for fast access. It's ideal for storing large, unstructured data sets.

BigQuery is a fully managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. It is a powerful tool for SQL queries run against large datasets.

Each of these services is designed to be flexible, scalable, and cost-effective, providing the tools you need to build a wide range of applications. As you explore GCP, consider these core services as fundamental building blocks for your projects.

Data Management and Analysis are pivotal in leveraging the full potential of Google Cloud Platform. GCP offers various services to handle massive datasets efficiently, providing insights and driving decisions.

Cloud SQL is a fully-managed database service that makes it easy to set up and manage relational databases. It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.

BigQuery is Google's serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multi-cloud data warehouse designed for business agility. It's ideal for running big data analytics.

Dataflow is a fully managed service for stream and batch data processing. It's used for tasks like ETL, batch computations, and continuous computation on streaming data.

Pub/Sub is a scalable, durable event ingestion and delivery system that serves as a foundation for modern stream analytics pipelines.

By integrating these robust services, developers can build comprehensive data solutions that scale with their needs, from handling real-time analytics to understanding large-scale datasets. Each tool is designed to offer high performance, ease of use, and flexibility, fitting a wide array of data tasks in modern development environments.

Kubernetes Engine

Cloud functions.

Scalable Computing Solutions on Google Cloud Platform are designed to grow with your application's needs. From virtual machines to containerized apps, GCP provides a variety of options for scalability.

Compute Engine offers virtual machines that are scalable and customizable. It's ideal for tasks ranging from website hosting to complex simulations.

Kubernetes Engine is a managed environment for deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications using Google infrastructure.

App Engine allows developers to focus on their code, while Google handles the deployment, scaling, and management of the applications.

Cloud Functions is a serverless execution environment for building and connecting cloud services. It's event-driven and automatically scales with your application.

By leveraging these scalable computing solutions, developers can ensure their applications adapt to increasing loads and evolving needs with minimal hassle. Each service provides different levels of control and abstraction, allowing you to choose the best fit for your project's requirements. Whether you're running a small web application or a complex system, GCP's computing services offer the flexibility and performance you need.

Identity And Access Management (IAM)

Data encryption.

Security and Compliance are foundational aspects of Google Cloud Platform (GCP), ensuring that your data and applications are protected and regulatory standards are met.

Identity and Access Management (IAM) provides fine-grained access control and visibility for centrally managing cloud resources. Control who has what access to which resources in your project.

Data Encryption in GCP is inherent and transparent. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit, offering a high level of security for your data.

GCP automatically encrypts all data before it is written to disk. There are no additional actions required from the user to ensure data encryption.

Each aspect of GCP's security and compliance infrastructure is designed to provide a secure, robust environment for your applications and data. By utilizing these tools and resources, you can focus on building and scaling your applications, knowing that the platform is continuously working to protect your assets and comply with regulatory standards. Whether you're handling sensitive information or operating in regulated industries, GCP's security and compliance features provide the necessary tools to keep your data safe and your operations within regulatory parameters.

Efficient Resource Allocation

Performance optimization.

Optimizing Costs and Performance in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is about balancing resource utilization with budget constraints to ensure efficient operation.

Ensuring Efficient Resource Allocation is key to cost-saving. Utilize GCP's tools to right-size your instances and shut down underused resources.

Performance Optimization is about getting the most out of your resources. Utilize GCP's recommendations for scaling and custom machine types to enhance efficiency.

Regularly review performance metrics and adjust your configurations to ensure you are getting optimal performance for the lowest cost.

By implementing these strategies, you can maintain a high-performing system while controlling and often reducing costs. GCP provides the tools and resources needed to monitor and manage your expenses effectively, allowing you to focus on innovation and growth. Balancing performance with cost is an ongoing task, but with the right approach, it's possible to achieve significant savings while maintaining high service levels.

What is Google Cloud Platform (GCP)?

GCP is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, file storage, and YouTube. It offers services in computing, storage, networking, Big Data, machine learning, and the internet of things (IoT), as well as cloud management, security, and developer tools.

How do I get started with GCP?

To get started, you'll need a Google account and to sign up for the Google Cloud Platform. Google offers a free trial with credit to spend on GCP services. Once set up, you can access the Google Cloud Console, where you can create projects, manage resources, and start using GCP services.

How does GCP pricing work?

GCP charges for services on a pay-as-you-go basis. You pay only for the compute time you consume. There are also various pricing models depending on the services used, such as sustained use discounts or committed use discounts for longer-term usage. Google provides a Pricing Calculator to estimate costs.

How secure is Google Cloud Platform?

Security is a key aspect of GCP. It offers robust security features at multiple levels: physical data center security, network security, and data security. Additionally, GCP complies with various certifications and regulations to ensure data is handled securely.

Let’s test your knowledge!

Which service is best for managing relational database services in GCP

Continue learning with these google cloud guides.

• The Google Cloud Platform Dashboard: A Step-By-Step Approach
• Efficient Strategies For Google Cloud Platform Sign In
• Google Cloud Fundamentals: Essential Cloud Computing Guide
• Enhancing Projects With Google Cloud Platform Infrastructure
• Implementing MongoDB On Google Cloud Platform: A Step-By-Step Approach

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Universities and Google Collaborate to Create Google Cloud Platform

Through Internet2 NET+, universities help customize Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service for the academic enterprise and leverage powerful infrastructure to reduce barriers for science and scholarship.

Solution Summary

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has emerged as a key suite of tools to power university infrastructure, research, and teaching. It provides a powerful infrastructure, data analytics, and machine learning to free institutions from the overhead of managing infrastructure, provisioning servers, and configuring networks. But, higher education institutions needed key customizations and enhancements to the service to implement and fully leverage GCP. Through the Internet2 NET+ Program Service Validation process, universities formed a collective voice to work with GCP to customize and enhance the service to meet the data demands of researchers; and the security, scalability, and integration needs of higher education institutions and the extended community.

Collaborators

• Michigan State University (Sponsor)
• Boston University
• Indiana University
• University of Washington
• Washington University of St. Louis

Products & Services

• NET+ Google Cloud Platform
• Internet2 Cloud Connect
• Internet2 Network
• InCommon Federation

Community Resources

• Internet2 NET+ Program
• NET+ GCP Early Adopters Team
• Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT)

The Project

Cloud solutions have become critical to improve operations, reduce costs, and increase the speed of service delivery at academic institutions. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has emerged as a key suite of tools to power university infrastructure, research, and teaching. However, without key customizations for the unique needs of the academic enterprise, there were many impediments to institutions adopting, and researchers utilizing this important solution.

“The NET+ GCP service validation process has given Indiana University access to a unique offering. This includes a community of technical resources and a collaborative environment to think strategically on how to design this service offering—something we could not have done on our own. Cloud adoption is essential for our community to stay competitive in the global marketplace. We are excited to provide the GCP toolset to our teaching, learning, and research communities to see where their imaginations can take it.”– Bob Flynn, Manager, Cloud Services, Indiana University

The problem.

As critical as GCP has become for academic institutions, aspects of the service were developed without a voice from higher education. GCP provides a powerful infrastructure, data analytics, and machine learning to free institutions from the overhead of managing infrastructure, provisioning servers and configuring networks. But “off-the-shelf,” GCP had several barriers to being adopted broadly by higher education institutions

First, GCPneeded help with elements higher education relies on upon, like security and privacy reviews, Internet2 network performance, accessibility, and special business / legal terms.

Further, today’s globally distributed scientific research requires access to data repositories from participating scientists worldwide. Data from experiments all over the world must be accessible to those who need to collaborate. Data egress fees are charges associated with data transfer and are a barrier to scientific collaboration. 

For many central IT units and researchers considering the use of public clouds for their workloads, these unpredictable expenses could potentially add up to significant unfunded expenditures in data in/out charges. Particularly, for researchers, these unpredictable fees could be particularly concerning if they are making their research data available to other researchers for download (as is often required by funding agencies). If higher-than-anticipated demand for their data occurs, data egress charges would surpass their budget allocation.

Moreover, for the Internet2 member community, the idea of bandwidth-based charges runs counter to the two decades of investment in building a high-capacity, high-performance R&E network. The Internet2 Network is designed to maintain a sufficiently high level of capacity such that data transport by researchers and internet developers are never constrained by the cost of bandwidth or contention for capacity. So, for Internet2 members, data egress charges were viewed as an impediment to the effective use of cloud services–which are key to developing new applications and workflows that can advance science and scholarship.

The Solution

The research and education community created Internet2 NET+ to apply a proven community model and leverage collective strength in the development and procurement of cloud services and platforms that serve research and education’s unique needs. 

In 2017, peers encouraged GCP to enter the Internet2 NET+ Service Validation process–the rigorous, community-led evaluation that works with industry cloud providers to customize and enhance services for higher education institutions and the extended community. Michigan State University, along with eight other universities evaluated and validated a number of aspects of the GCP offering, with a special eye to addressing the barriers to adoption and developing capabilities specific to the needs of the research and education community. Through the service validation process, GCP worked with the universities to make many important enhancements to their service. 

Through testing more than 20 different use cases common to cloud infrastructure the team validated individual service functionality (e.g., deploying Kubernetes clusters, or BigQuery) to the meta-context of how do you structure projects, network, security, and logging to make GCP available to a campus with tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of projects. Cloud infrastructure also has a high degree of complexity in managing costs, funding, and charges. All of these aspects had to be considered when validating and documenting the services. 

In 2019, an official service offering was made available through Internet2 NET+ that provided a pre-negotiated, custom contract designed to address the data egress barriers and to provide security, privacy, and accessibility reviews, InCommon identity management integration, Internet2 network performance optimizations, and business/legal terms tailored to the needs of academic institutions.

Also, Google worked with Internet2 and regional infrastructure partners to provide private peering services and direct access to GCP Dedicated Interconnect through the Internet2 Cloud Connect service. Regional and state networks and subscribers to NET+ GCP gain access to over 300 gigabits per second of private peering capabilities with Google Cloud through the Internet2 Network, in addition to resilient national interconnects for private GCP Dedicated Interconnect. 

Further, the impediments caused by data egress fees have been resolved. GCP now provides a data egress discount that reduces charges associated with outbound data originating from GCP by up to 15% of an institution’s total monthly spending. For example, if a campus spends $10,000 on Google Cloud Platform in a given month, and $1,500 of that spend is in data egress charges, the campus will only pay $8,500, effectively waiving all egress fees. GCP billing accounts are eligible for the data egress discount if they are registered with the campus and use Internet2 connectivity, Internet2 Connector network, direct peering with Google, or Dedicated Interconnect(s) to route at least 80% of GCP traffic, and use GCP for research and education workloads.

Now, university infrastructures can better support and advance scholarship and collaborative science. Institutions can more easily adopt, access, and use the resilient, secure, community-enabled GCP service — helping to free institutions from the overhead of managing infrastructure, provisioning servers, and configuring networks with the powerful infrastructure, data analytics, and machine learning solution.

Researchers can more predictably and reliably use public clouds for their workloads and make their data available to other researchers without fears that data egress charges would surpass their budget allocation, and enabling greater collaboration to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

“This is an important milestone for our community. It helps us continue to support our students, faculty, and researchers by providing the technological resources they’ve come to rely on in their everyday work, without the burden of unexpected budget overruns.” — Brendan Guenther, Director for Academic Technology, Michigan State University

Through the unified voice and collaboration of Internet2 members, GCP has now been integrated with capabilities that mirror the fundamental philosophies of the Internet2 community and cyberinfrastructure: high-capacity, high-performance connectivity that never constrains research and development collaboration. 

Together, these efforts and solutions are a testament of how the research and education community is able to work together with industry to solve shared technology challenges and provide new platforms to develop applications and workflows that can advance science and scholarship.

Key Aspects of the NET+ GCP offering include:

• GCP Data egress discount for research and education members of Internet2–helping to address egress cost concerns of central IT teams modeling hybrid environments, where data can move between some workloads in the cloud and others remaining on-premise.
• Free deployment and training for Internet2 higher education members
• Provisions addressing compliance with key regulations and standards, including FERPA and SOC2, among others
• Completion of the Higher Education Cloud Vendor Assessment Toolkit (HECVAT) for both GCP and G Suite–ensuring compliance with industry standards and detail authentication, data encryption methods, disaster recovery plans, and demonstrating a commitment to transparency and documenting the strict security protocols built into the infrastructure.
• Community-based pricing discount
• The ability of a campus to use their own authorized software reseller to acquire the NET+ GCP offering
• Free Orbitera cloud billing reporting and analytics, and Business Associates Agreement (BAA) via Carahsoft, a leading IT solutions provider

About the NET+ GCP Program and Early Adopter Team

The NET+ GCP program is managed by an Internet2 program manager with the support of the NET+ GCP Early Adopter Team. The NET+ GCP Early Adopter Team reviews and prioritizes community feature requests on a periodic basis. Feature requests may be submitted to [email protected] and the Team can be contacted at [email protected]

About Carahsoft

Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®. As a top-performing GSA Schedule and SEWP contract holder, Carahsoft serves as the Master Government Aggregator™ for many of its best-of-breed technology vendors, supporting an extensive ecosystem of manufacturers, value-added resellers, system integrators and consulting partners committed to helping government agencies select and implement the best solution at the best possible value.

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Google Professional Cloud Architect Case Studies

This lesson will help you prepare for the Professional Cloud Architect Exam. We cover the 4 case studies presented in the exam guide, explain  what they are, why they are important, and how to use them to prepare for the exam.

Learning Objectives

Examine the 4 case studies presented in the exam guide:

• EHR Healthcare
• Helicopter Racing League
• Mountkirk Games
• TerramEarth

Intended Audience

Anyone planning to take the Professional Cloud Architect Exam.

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of GCP.

Daniel began his career as a Software Engineer, focusing mostly on web and mobile development. After twenty years of dealing with insufficient training and fragmented documentation, he decided to use his extensive experience to help the next generation of engineers.

Daniel has spent his most recent years designing and running technical classes for both Amazon and Microsoft. Today at Cloud Academy, he is working on building out an extensive Google Cloud training library.

When he isn’t working or tinkering in his home lab, Daniel enjoys BBQing, target shooting, and watching classic movies.

Google case study: Engineering the future with Google Cloud Platform

Aker Solutions used Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage to build a set of digital engineering tools and a collaboration room to leverage its institutional expertise and revolutionize its field development methods.

Google Cloud results:

• Unlocks, accesses and links data from all previous field development projects providing high value insight for future plans
• Drives efficiency with a suite of products automating and supporting all aspects of concept selection, searchable database of reusable methods, assets and data.
• Speeds up the decision-making process with fully featured digital simulations of oil and gas field components as well as economical model for NPV, risk and reliability.
• Improves collaboration with a single platform for multiple teams working on complex projects.

Aker Solutions traces its history back to 1841, when it was founded as the Aker Mechanical Workshop in Oslo, Norway. After making its name in shipbuilding and maritime work, Aker Solutions is now one of the world’s top energy service providers employing more than 14,000 people across 20 countries. Lending its expertise to oil, gas, and wind projects in some of the most challenging environments, the company prides itself on delivering safe, sustainable solutions that benefit customers around the world. Following the oil price crash that began in 2014, the energy industry as a whole had to face a new reality of lowered profits and reduced capital expenditure. By 2016, Aker Solutions saw this squeezing of resources as a perfect opportunity to revolutionize its oil and gas field development methods and digitize its entire process. To do that, it turned to  Google Cloud Platform  (GCP).

We needed to get the investment cost down significantly for developing new fields. We saw a digital solution, based on Google Cloud Platform, as the best way of achieving that as well as stepping up our sustainability. Are Føllesdal Tjønn, Senior VP of Software Engineering, Aker Solutions

Building the field development process of the future

Traditionally, every field development project for an energy company is built from the ground up, independent of other projects that have gone before it with new teams, new materials, and new equipment. While this provides a bespoke precision to each project, it is also expensive, time-consuming and encourages inefficiency. By digitizing its field development process, Aker Solutions wanted to build up a bank of institutional expertise that could be accessed quickly and effectively and minimize the time and cost of field development.

Initially placed under the working title “Project Push” – the idea being that new field projects could be developed “at the push of a button” – Aker Solutions focused its efforts on a number of areas. Firstly, the company wanted a searchable database of digital information for each field development project. This would ensure that successful methods and techniques would live well beyond the life of any single project and could inform projects months and years down the line.

A second pillar of the Push Project was the concept of the “Digital Twin”. The idea was to have a digital representation of field assets that goes far beyond a simple 3D illustration. Aker Solutions wanted to measure and simulate every possible attribute of each field development project, all built within a rich and consistent data structure that would underpin several different applications. “Ideally,” says Are, “we would be able to simulate all asset operations before we physically start building.” This would help Aker Solutions and its customers make the right decisions much earlier in the process, saving significantly on time and money.

GCP for a scalable, flexible, high performance solution

In mid-2016, with the core objectives of searchability, reusability and expedited decision-making, Aker Solutions, together with customer AkerBP, began looking for ways to implement the Push Project. At the time, the company’s IT infrastructure was based on heavy duty enterprise solutions running off on-premises servers. While this had been perfectly adequate for its operations until then, Aker Solutions decided that only a scalable, cloud-based solution could fully deliver the ambitious results it had in mind for the digitization project.

For the latter half of 2016, Aker Solutions tested a number of solutions on the leading cloud providers, teaming up with cloud specialists Computas to help it navigate the cloud-based environment. “Having a local partner in Norway was key for us,” says Are, “and we were also very impressed with Computas’ expertise in agile methodologies like Scrum project management.” After taking the time to assess Aker Solutions’ requirements, Computas recommended Google Cloud Platform as the core of the new solution. “GCP is a platform that allows you to do things in a very quick way. You can get going without any hassle or time wasting,” says Rune Hagbartsen, Executive Director at Computas. “We were able to deliver solutions very quickly and the support form Google Norway was great.”

Another key advantage of GCP for Aker Solutions, was the ability to integrate with the company’s existing enterprise platforms and engineering solutions. Rather than replacing what was already working, Computas and Aker Solutions began building a new infrastructure for Project Push, leveraging the existing stack of the core business.

The use of Google Cloud Platform was an enabler for a deep change in the way software was developed. The Push Project started as a traditional IT procurement initiative but quickly evolved into a strong partnership between Aker Solutions, Aker BP and Computas. This partnership mindset allowed for a true agile development methodology supported by the fundamental flexibility of the Google Cloud Platform. With agility came the possibility to exploit opportunities, and the Push Project evolved from system development to the development of a platform housing the products required by the digitization process.

For the concept of the Digital Twin, Computas and Aker Solutions developed a family of applications built on Google App Engine: “That gave us the ability to open and deploy images very quickly, which helped us a lot,” says Filip Van Laenen, Computas Chief Engineer. The data pipeline was handled with Google Cloud Dataflow and the messaging requirements with Google Cloud Pub/Sub. The scaling ability of Google Cloud Dataflow is a game changer when you need to ingest and process millions of data entities and documents in order to make them searchable. The different products in the Push portfolio take advantage of Google Cloud SQL or Google Cloud Datastore depending on their specific requirements.

Computas developed a way of analyzing usage data using  Google BigQuery , taking data from Google Stackdriver Monitoring. The team used Google Cloud Functions at various places to “glue” functionality together and to integrate with the existing infrastructure. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Storage was used to hold the millions of documents and static assets from new and older field projects. The ability to use a fully managed, elastic storage makes a real difference for an application platform using a lot of documents.

The ability to use REST APIs with Google Cloud Storage was very important for us. It’s a small thing but we saved a lot of work using REST APIs to upload files instead of implementing them ourselves. Filip Van Laenen, Chief Engineer, Computas

Greater efficiency, higher quality outputs, improved collaboration

Two years since it first conceived the idea, Aker Solutions is part way through its massive digitization journey but has already seen remarkable results. “Overall”, says Are, “the new search and Engineering Assistant applications have already resulted in efficiency gains of around 20%. A typical topside project normally takes around a million hours, so cutting 200,000 hours is a very significant saving both for us and our customers,” he says. A product manager is now able to provide an estimate of an industry asset’s weight, such as an offshore platform, in just a few hours, down from days and weeks if they had used the traditional method. Are says that the impact of the changes made can be much bigger than the 20%. He likens the change to shifting from manually washing the dishes to using a dishwasher. “You can do so much more”.

When you improve your efficiency, you can work on the quality of the output. Whether that’s doing more iterations, analysis or looking for new solutions. We’ve not only saved time for our customers, but also improved the quality and safety aspects of our field development projects. Are Føllesdal Tjønn, Senior VP of Software Engineering, Aker Solutions

As well as the efficiency gains, the Push Project has led to teams working more closely with each other. “When the information is all there on a single platform like the Engineering Assistant app, then it helps to keep everyone on the same page,” says Are. With everything on GCP, the company has been able to improve its security procedures for sensitive information. “Before people would use data by copying it from spreadsheets and take it away on their laptops,” says Filip. “Now, it’s held and secured in a database.” More qualitatively, with its emphasis on recording, searching and reusing data, Aker Solutions has brought a new-found objectivity to its field development methods.

“It’s helped us take the subjectivity out of our decision making, which helps us get to the right decisions earlier,” says Are.

Aker Solutions’ journey with GCP and Computas is far from over. With its oil and gas field development projects digitized, Aker Solutions is now preparing to bring its operations teams into the process. The company is currently exploring the suite of machine learning tools from GCP as a way of improving the indexing of its documents, to make searching for the relevant information even quicker than before. In addition, the company is checking how to use Google’s Vision API to help collate, categorize and analyze the millions of PDF documents that it deals with from partners and subcontractors for each project, saving time and minimizing the risk of errors from manual tagging. AutoML Vision is evaluated as a way to let the domain experts directly influence the machine learning required in the process. With the digitization process well underway, automation looks to be the next objective.

“The more we automate, the more we can see to automate,” says Are. “We’re excited about what we’ve achieved so far, but we also see a lot of potential in the journey ahead with GCP.”

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During a year, approximately 16,000 individuals contact karriereveiledning.no with questions about education and employment. How can one automate the extraction of structured information from over 30,000 anonymized conversations? This is one of the challenges Computas' consultants have been working on in collaboration with the Directorate for Higher Education and Competence.

Effective and secure migration to Google Cloud for Protector Insurance

Protector Insurance chose Google Cloud as the platform for its IT infrastructure, systems, and applications. With guidance and support from Google experts at Computas, the migration process went seamlessly

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The knot worldwide starts testing duet ai in google workspace.

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Ukrgasbank: how ukraine’s fourth largest bank relies on google workspace during unprecedented times.

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Unlocking productivity and collaboration with Google Workspace

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Virgin Active: Building a culture of collaboration with Google Workspace

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Xero: Delivering communications and collaboration at scale with Google Workspace including Google Meet hardware

York: Behind every good outcome

ZALORA: Supporting sustainable, secure business expansion with Google Workspace

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eir: Supporting staff to keep more than 2 million customers connected, from home

flaconi: Giving collaboration a makeover with an innovative, customer-first solution on Google Workspace

Ifood: google workspace | how it’s done.

iOPEX Technologies: Driving digital transformation for large enterprises with enhanced security and increased team productivity

kfzteile24: Reducing costs and boosting productivity with Google Workspace

Nurture.farm champions of change, how teams of all sizes connect, create and collaborate.

1. Google Workspace Customer Story: HMH

2. Google Workspace Customer Story: Celestica

3. Google Workspace Customer Story: MullenLowe Group

Hexaware Strengthens Data Capabilities with Acquisition of Softcrylic. Know More

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Data Modernization with Google Cloud Platform for an Automotive Retailer

Cloud Synergy for a robust data foundation and efficient managed services

Our client is a Fortune 500 US-based automotive retailer offering an extensive selection of auto parts, accessories, and diagnostic software. Over the last four decades, they have maintained a commitment to providing quality parts, competitive prices, and excellent customer service, positioning them as a reputable player in the automotive aftermarket sector. They have a strong presence across 50 US states and five countries, serving a diverse customer base, including individual consumers and automotive industry professionals.

Spanning 5 Countries and 50+ US States

The case study with our client reflects a classic business modernization initiative that could be addressed with cloud services. This was primarily necessary due to the dynamic nature and unique variety of its data and the massive scale at which its data was being generated.

As a global retailer managing terabyte-scale data with millions of store records, the constraints of an on-premises setup hindered their ability to scale effectively, enhance service efficiency, and introduce new initiatives—all of which could be achieved with an optimized data ecosystem.

They required a modern data ecosystem that could help manage their data from various business operations, including their vast inventory spanning automotive parts being sold across five countries, B2B and B2C sales services, payments, people management processes, its wide variety of partner websites and e-commerce portals, and aftersales warranties and loyalty programs.

Its new data ecosystem was expected to drive data analytics processes for actionable insights and deliver them to the right decision-makers. Moreover, they needed data cloud services to handle the influx of data and prepare it for the analytics processes needed to drive informed decisions.

What they required:

• They required a modernized data landscape, which we looked to blueprint by revisiting their data architecture, aligning their tech stack, and optimizing their existing data processes.
• Our client’s data landscape involved jobs running continuously 24/7, receiving files, and streaming data loaded into BigQuery tables. We were to be their strong support team to manage batch and streaming job failures round the clock, ensuring their BigQuery tables remained updated and operational.

Google Cloud Platform for Modernized Data Ecosystem

We chose Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as the foundation for our client’s data infrastructure due to its robust capabilities that enable effective scaling and advanced analytics. Its powerful cloud services and tools provide the ideal environment for efficiently handling large volumes of data, ensuring scalability as the client’s data grows.

By leveraging this solution, our client experienced faster data load and processing, improved real-time inventory management, and easier access to comprehensive data for its data-driven teams. These enhancements significantly improved business reporting and empowered them with strategic know-how.

For the transformation, our team implemented a metadata-driven Data Ingestion Framework on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This framework streamlined data processing and scheduling across environments, establishing batch, mini-batch, and real-time data pipelines on GCP while incorporating configurable data quality checks. We established the foundation for a data lake and orchestrated seamless data scheduling across on-premises and cloud environments, ensuring data availability for accelerated sales decisions. The Google Cloud Platform tools we used:

• Google Cloud Storage: Secure and scalable object storage.
• BigQuery: Fast and efficient data analysis for large datasets.
• Composer (Airflow): Workflow automation and task scheduling.
• Cloud Function: Event-driven serverless computing.
• Workflows: Automation of multi-step business processes.
• Cloud SQL: Managed relational database service.
• Dataflow: Real-time data processing and transformation.
• Monitoring and Alerting: Proactive resource health monitoring.
• Cloud Pub/Sub: Real-time messaging and event streaming.

Building a foundation for downstream consumption by analytics and BI applications: This new data ecosystem successfully supported advanced analytics tools for all its reporting purposes. Their data ecosystem now accommodates powerful reporting tools, visualization, advanced analytics functionalities, and an intuitive interface that simplifies and democratizes data access within their organization.

Google Cloud Managed Services for Improved Data Management

In addition to our comprehensive data management services, we also offer Cloud Managed Services with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Our GCP experts provide end-to-end support for deploying, managing, and optimizing cloud infrastructure for in scope services on GCP. This includes setting up scalable and secure cloud environments, implementing data storage and processing solutions, leveraging GCP’s advanced analytics capabilities, and ensuring continuous monitoring and optimization for cost efficiency and performance. With our cloud-managed services on GCP, clients can leverage the power of cloud computing to drive innovation, improve agility, and achieve their business objectives seamlessly.

• Managed diverse data loads: Handled batch, real-time, and ETL tasks on GCP.
• Provided 24/7 batch incident support: Ensured high availability on GCP.
• Resolved upstream data issues: Maintained high data quality on GCP.
• Prioritized critical data loads: Guaranteed timely delivery and optimized resources on GCP.
• Continuous 24/7 monitoring: Proactively detected and addressed issues on GCP.
• Utilized GCP’s niche tech skills: Leveraged BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Dataflow and Composer (AirFlow).
• Addressed talent retention challenges: Provided GCP training for skilled cloud operations.
• We manage production issues, analyze root causes, and offer permanent solutions.
• We ensure 24/7 support across time zones.
• We monitor job statuses for efficiency.
• We identify automation opportunities and streamline manual processes.
• We analyze and optimize job performance for timely completion.
• We manage changes in GCP pipelines.
• We onboard new users and address business queries.

A Comprehensive Data Foundation with Google Cloud

The new data ecosystem helps manage data and drive efficiency for operations by overseeing inventory management for automotive parts sold across five countries, customer data for B2B and B2C sales services, payments, people management processes, its wide variety of partner websites and e-commerce portals, and aftersales warranties and loyalty programs.

This ecosystem also enhances decision-making through real-time analytics, improves data security and compliance measures, and facilitates seamless integration with third-party systems for a holistic and streamlined approach to data management. Additionally, it enables predictive maintenance for automotive parts, personalized customer experiences based on behavior analysis, and data-driven optimization of marketing campaigns for increased ROI.

Cloud-driven Efficiency for Operations

• Ticket reduction by 30% year-on-year: Our streamlined processes and proactive approach lead to a significant decrease in support tickets, ensuring smoother operations across all business verticals.
• Reduction of job failures by 40%: Our focus on permanent fixes minimizes disruptions, resulting in fewer job failures and improved system reliability.
• Continuous improvement in resolution turnaround time: With an average resolution time of approximately 30 minutes per incident, we ensure swift problem-solving and minimal downtime.

Automated Data Operations

• Availability of timely reporting data: We empower informed decision-making and business agility by delivering timely reporting data to end users.
• 24/7 production support: Our round-the-clock support ensures proactive monitoring and swift resolution of job failures, maintaining uninterrupted operations.
• Automation for improved disk space management: Our automated solutions optimize disk space usage, enhancing system performance and resource utilization.

Efficient Data Operations Management

• Efficient handling of onboarding: We seamlessly onboard new pipelines and data users, ensuring smooth transitions and minimal workflow disruptions.
• 24 x 7 SLA-enabled production support: Our SLA adherence guarantees continuous support and high-performance standards, fostering client trust and satisfaction.
• Zero incident backlog: Our proactive approach eliminates incident backlogs, ensuring a smooth operational environment.
• 100% support coverage & resolution SLA compliance: We provide comprehensive support coverage and consistently meet resolution SLAs, ensuring reliable and efficient operations.

In partnering with Hexaware, our client underwent a transformative journey that catapulted them to the forefront of their industry’s global landscape. Leveraging Hexaware’s Google Cloud data foundation and managed services, they experienced transcendence in their data management approach, unlocking unprecedented insights and efficiencies that drove their business forward.

A notable achievement was the seamless integration of diverse data sources, empowering the client to conduct real-time analytics and deliver personalized customer experiences. Hexaware’s managed services ensured high availability, robust data security, and compliance, enabling the client to remain agile and responsive in a fast-paced data environment.

Our comprehensive approach, building synergy between a data foundation and cloud-managed services, enhanced the client’s operational efficiency and positioned them to anticipate market trends, seize opportunities, and maintain their competitive edge. The partnership proved a game-changer, propelling the client into a new era of data-powered success.

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• Google Cloud Platform - Introduction to PhoneInfoga an OSINT Reconnaissance Tool
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Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is an initiative by Google to provide cloud computing services to customers. These services run on the same infrastructure and platform on which Google services such as Gmail, YouTube, etc run. GCP was launched on April 7, 2008, and the complete set of services and the platform is written in C++, Python, Go, Java and Ruby. GCP offers a number of resources with different ways to access those resources. 

Resources offered by Google can be broadly categorized into physical resources and virtual resources. Physical resources include assets such as hard disk drives (HDDs), computers, etc, and virtual machines (VMs) that come under the category of virtual resources that are ubiquitously present around the globe. These data centers are assigned to a particular region (Asia, North America, South America, etc) and each region is further divided into zones. These zones of a particular region are isolated from each other and are identified by a unique name. These unique names are a combination of the name of the region and the name of the zone. For example, zone c of the East Asia region will be named as Asia-east1-c. This distribution of resources is done for specific reasons. First, redundant data is stored at multiple locations which act as a backup in case of system failure. Second, creating zones reduces the distance between the resources and the clients which reduces communication latency and increases efficiency by fastening the working environment. There are rules to access these distributed resources. 

Types of resources offered by GCP   Global, regional and zonal resources are the levels at which resources can be accessed. Global resources include disk snapshots, networks, and pre-configured disk images. These can be accessed by all the other resources also irrespective of the regions and zones in which they are present. Static IP addresses come under the category of regional resources. Resources in this category have constraints that these can be accessed by other resources located in the exact same region. Resources that have Zonal access are VM instances. These also include different types of VM instances and all types of disks. Zonal access means that these resources can be accessed in the same zone only. Different resources have been kept under different access modes keeping in mind the functionalities performed by these resources. 

For example: Let us consider we want to reserve an IP address. Since reserving IP addresses is a regional operation, thus it is kept under the category of regional resources. Similarly, if one wants to create a network, then we know network creation is a global task and it will require many other resources in order to perform its task, thus it is kept under the global category.  To have optimized applications that work with full proficiency, the selection of resources is crucial as well as a tedious task. Thus, it becomes important for the user to know the resources offered and the category each resource belongs to. 

Projects in GCP   Project in GCP is the uppermost level under which all the resources are allocated. It is the management entity of the services. No resource can be allocated outside the project. GCP project consists of various parameters. These parameters are permissions, settings, and other meta-data describing the applications. Communication between resources in a project is executed easily (abiding by the accessibility rules of global, regional, and zonal resources). A project can also access resources used by other projects using a shared VPC or Network Peering.  To identify each project uniquely, every project is assigned a project name that is provided by the user, a unique project ID, which can be provided either by the user or can be generated by the GCP and a project number which is assigned by the GCP.  Each project ID is unique and this ID can never be reused for some other project even if the initial project is deleted. Resource names in the same project must be unique though resource names can be repeated while working on different projects. For billing purposes of the used resources, the project is assigned to a billing account. One billing account can be assigned to multiple projects for billing the resources. 

Modes to access GCP services   There are several ways to access Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services:

• The Google Cloud Console , a web-based user interface that provides a simplified, easy-to-use interface for managing GCP services.
• The gcloud command-line tool , which allows you to interact with GCP services using the command-line.
• The Cloud SDK , a set of tools for developing and deploying applications to GCP, which includes the gcloud command-line tool.
• Google Cloud API , allow to access GCP services programmatically.
• Cloud Marketplace offers pre-configured and ready-to-use solutions from ISVs, SaaS providers and Google which can be easily deployed, integrated and managed.
• Cloud Shell , an online command-line interface that provides a secure and pre-configured environment for running GCP commands directly in a web browser.

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AWS, Google, Microsoft Battle Over $76B Q1 Cloud Market Share

Here’s the exact global cloud market share figures for AWS, Alibaba, Google Cloud, Microsoft and Salesforce for first quarter 2024 as the market increased to $76 billion.

The three largest cloud companies on the planet— Amazon Web Services , Microsoft and Google Cloud —continued to battle for global cloud market share leadership during the first quarter of 2024, as the market ballooned to a record $76 billion.

“Amazon held steady relative to the prior quarter, while Microsoft and Google both saw a marginal increase,” said John Dinsdale, a chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, in an email to CRN. “All three saw their growth rates increase substantially in the last two quarters.”

AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure —combined—accounted for a whopping 67 percent share of the $76 billion global cloud services market in Q1 2024, according to new data from IT market research firm Synergy.

[Related: Microsoft Vs. AWS Vs. Google Cloud Earnings Q1 2024 Face-Off ]

Before breaking down the exact market share figures for the top five cloud leaders during the first three months of 2024—which were AWS, Alibaba, Google , Microsoft and Salesforce—let’s take a quick look at the current cloud services market on a worldwide basis.

$76 Billion Cloud Market In Q1 2024, Up $13.5 Billion

Enterprise spending on cloud companies’ infrastructure services was well over $76 billion during the first quarter of 2024. This represents an increase of $13.5 billion or 21 percent year over year compared to Q1 2023.

“This was a really good quarter for the cloud market with growth rates bouncing back from the relative lows seen through much of 2023,” Dinsdale said. Public Infrastructure as-a-service (IaaS) and Platform as-a-service (PaaS) services account for the bulk of the market, with that section growing 23 percent in Q1 year over year.

“There are still some economic, currency and political headwinds. However, the underlying strength of the market is more than compensating for those constraints, aided in no small part by the impact of generative AI technology and services ,” he said.

Overall, Synergy Research Group is forecasting that the cloud market will continue to expand substantially over the next few years. “We are forecasting that it will double in size over the next four years,” Dinsdale said.

Here are the current enterprise cloud services market share figures for AWS , Alibaba, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce that every partner, investor and customer should know in 2024.

No. 5: Salesforce

Q1 2024 Market Share: 3%

Q4 2023 Market Share: 3%

Q1 2023 Market Share: 3%

CRM and cloud giant Salesforce captured 3 percent of the global cloud services market to rank at No. 5 in the first quarter of 2024.

Salesforce has consistently won approximately 3 percent share global cloud market every quarter over the past three years, according to Synergy data.

The San Francisco-based company generated nearly $35 billion in total sales in 2023, up 11 percent year over year.

No. 4: Alibaba

Q1 2024 Market Share: 4%

Q4 2023 Market Share: 4%

Q1 2023 Market Share: 4%

Alibaba continues to capture about 4 percent share of the global cloud services market as of first quarter 2024.

Alibaba subsidiary, Alibaba Cloud, is the Chinese-based company’s cloud computing business. The cloud company has won between 4 percent to 6 percent global market share over the past several years.

Alibaba’s Cloud Intelligence Group generated nearly $4 billion in sales during fourth quarter 2023, up 3 percent year over year.

No. 3: Google

Q1 2024 Market Share: 11%

Q4 2023 Market Share: 11%

Q1 2023 Market Share: 10%

Since 2019, Google has been the perennial third place winner in terms of global cloud market share. In Q1 2024, the tech giant captured 11 percent share of the worldwide cloud market.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s cloud business, Google Cloud, generated $9.6 billion in revenue during Q1 2024, up a whopping 28 percent year over year.

Google Cloud’s annual run rate is now over $38 billion.

Operating income for Google Cloud—which had been in the red for every year prior to 2023—was $900 million for first quarter 2024.

No. 2: Microsoft

Q1 2024 Market Share: 25%

Q4 2023 Market Share: 24%

Q1 2023 Market Share: 23%

Microsoft continues to narrow its cloud market share gap against AWS as the software superstar seeks to capture a gold medal, not silver.

In Q1 2024, Microsoft won a record 25 percent share of the global cloud services market, up 2 points year over year compared to 23 percent share in Q1 2023. The Redmond, Wash.-based cloud and software giant has ranked No. 2 in the cloud market for nearly a decade.

Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud business generated $26.7 billion in revenue during the first quarter, which means Microsoft’s cloud group has an annual rate of $107 billion.

No.1: Amazon Web Services

Q1 2024 Market Share: 31%

Q4 2023 Market Share: 31%

Q1 2023 Market Share: 32%

AWS is once again the worldwide market share leader in cloud computing, winning 31 percent share of the global market in Q1 2024.

The Seattle-based cloud juggernaut has been the worldwide cloud leader since Amazon pioneered the cloud industry well-over a decade ago. However, Google and Microsoft have both been nipping at AWS’ heels over the past two years. Specifically, Microsoft has gained market share by 2-points over the past year, while AWS’ share dropped 1-point to 31 percent share.

In Q1 2024, AWS reported total sales of $25 billion, representing a 17 percent revenue growth year over year. Amazon’s cloud business now has a record $100 billion run rate.

Other Top Cloud Market Leaders

IBM Market Share Q1 2024: 2%

Oracle Market Share Q1 2024: 2%

Tencent Market Share Q1 2024: 2%

Huawei Market Share Q1 2024: 2%

Prior to 2020, IBM used to crack into the top five for global cloud market share leaders. However, IBM’s share has lowered consistently over the past several years with the company winning 2 percent share in Q1 2024.

Oracle along with Chinese IT giants Huawei and Tencent are also trying to rise about the heated cloud competition. All three companies won around 2 percent share of the global cloud services market in first quarter 2024.

Other companies that won market share of approximately 1 percent during Q1 2024 include Baidu, China Telecom, China Unicom, Fujitsu, NTT, Snowflake, SAP, Rackspace and VMware.

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Price: Starting at $12.50 USD per user, per month

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Price: Starting at $6.00 USD per user, per month

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Price: Starting at $4.67 USD per user, per month

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