Cloud

When public health officials in Quebec set out to provide COVID-19 vaccination services for their 8 million residents in February 2021, they needed an easy-to-use, scalable solution to schedule appointments online. To make it simple for Quebecers to register for vaccines, the goal was to use Clic Santé, a familiar online portal built on Google Cloud and already in use to schedule flu vaccines and other health-related services. Trimoz Technologies, the portal’s creator, prepared to meet high-volumes of traffic by creating a seamless appointment scheduling experience. 

To meet demand, Trimoz relied on Google Cloud – optimizing it for the expected surges. As an enterprise solutions provider to the public sector in Canada, Google Cloud scaled to meet the ongoing surges in traffic to the Clic Santé portal, with the stability and reliability the portal needed. At its peak surge, Clic Santé scheduled  365,000 appointment schedules in a single day, and on average, continues to handle a volume of roughly 50,000 appointments per day.  Since launching their appointment scheduling service, Clic Sante has been able to deploy up to a over dozen new appointment functionalities each month with no service interruptions, while maintaining up to 3,000 vaccination and 1,500 pharmacies sites to serve the population.

Google Cloud services that helped build a more secure, flexible and scalable portal used by millions

The main components of Clic Santé are hosted using different services to give the team at Trimoz more flexibility with their platform functionality. The portal’s user interface, for example, was built using AppEngine,  a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, that hosts websites and automatically scales up and down based on the load. AppEngine allows the portal to deploy its web interface without having to manage the infrastructure. Trimoz implemented Cloud SQL, another PaaS solution, to run instances of relational-type databases without needing to manage the infrastructure. Changing the number of instances based on active users gave them more freedom to scale as needed without affecting portal users.

Various healthcare organizations (CIUSSS and CISSS) required appointment-level metrics gathered from Clic Santé to track progression towards their vaccination goal. To handle this, Trimoz uses BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse service from Google Cloud. This service handles data storage economically and allows for future analysis as needed so Trimoz can ensure all data, at rest and in motion, is encrypted to protect the platform and its users.

A reliable, user-friendly vaccination experience for Quebec

Through the partnership between Trimoz and Google Cloud, the vaccine appointment-scheduling portal handles 80,000 connections on average per day, with zero service interruptions. It also provides a user-friendly interface that can handle swells of traffic as needed. This reliability of the solution was one factor among many that helped reach the goal of vaccinating “75% of the admissible population” three weeks early., making Quebec’s population one of the most vaccinated populations in the world.

The performance and scalability of the platform will now allow Trimoz Technologies to expand into new markets like pharmacies, other healthcare organizations in other Canadian provinces, U.S. or European markets.

Clic Santé in numbers:

More than 7,000,000 unique users50,000 appointments set in average per dayPeak of 365,000 daily appointments80,000 connections per day in average100% uptime of the Clic Santé platform4 to 12 new production releases per month

Google Cloud is already widely available for public sector organizations in Canada. We are actively expanding with new regions and solutions  with the highest compliance and standards and are committed to providing Canada with the quality service they need from a public sector cloud provider. 

To learn more, visit the Google Cloud for Canada public sector solutions page.

Attracting talented individuals with cloud skills is critical to success, as organizations continue to adopt and optimize cloud technology. The lack of cloud expertise and experience is a top and growing challenge for businesses as they expand their cloud footprint and search for skilled talent. 

To help meet this need, we are now offering access to over 500 Google Cloud self-paced labs made available on Coursera. A selected collection of the most popular self-paced labs, known as projects, are available at no cost for one month from April 28 – May 29, 2022. Learners can choose their preferred format to claim one month free access to either a top Google Cloud Project, course, Specialization or Professional Certificate.

What is a lab?

A lab is a learning experience where you complete a scenario based use case by following a set of instructions in a specified amount of time in an interactive hands-on environment. Labs are completed in the real Google Cloud Console and other Google Cloud products using temporary credentials, as opposed to a simulation or demo environment and take 30 – 90 minutes to complete (depending on difficulty level)Our goal is to enable you to apply your new skills and be effective immediately in real-world cloud technology settings.

Many of these labs, known in Coursera as projects, include a variety of tasks and activities for you to choose from to best fit your needs. Combine bite-size individual labs to create a personalized set of learning and upskilling with clear application in a sandbox environment. 

Labs are available for all skill levels, and cover a wide range of topics:

Cloud essentials

Cloud engineering and architecture

Machine learning

Data analytics and engineering

DevOps

Here is a roundup of some popular and trending labs right now:

Getting Started with Cloud Shell and gcloud

Kubernetes Engine: Qwik Start

Introduction to SQL for BigQuery and Cloud SQL

Migrating a Monolithic Website to Microservices on Google Kubernetes Engine

Get a feel for the lab experience

Creating a Virtual Machine is one of our most popular labs, taking place directly in Google Cloud Console. In this beginner level project, you will learn how to create a Google Compute Engine virtual machine and understand zones, regions and machine types. It takes 40 minutes to complete and you’ll earn a shareable certificate.

As an example of more advanced content, Predict Baby Weight with TensorFlow on AI Platformrequires experience to train, evaluate and deploy a machine learning model to predict a baby’s weight. The lab activities are completed in a real cloud environment, not in a simulation or demo environment. It takes 90 minutes to complete and you will earn a shareable certificate.

Kick off your no-cost learning journey today

For direct access to self-paced labs, we recommend that you get started by taking a look at Coursera’s Collection Page, where you can browse labs/projects by our most popular topics, or explore the full catalog to find the cloud projects that are right for your career goals by browsing Google Cloud ‘projects’ on Coursera.

The month of free Google Cloud learning on Coursera is available from April 28 – May 29, 2022, so join us to evolve your skill set and cloud knowledge.

Ready to start your learning Google Cloud at no-cost for 30 days? Sign uphere.

SAP and Google Cloud’s partnership is about expanding what’s possible and enabling innovation. A lot more has become possible for SAP customers since SAP® Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) became available on Google Cloud in 2021. SAP BTP brings together intelligent enterprise applications with database and data management, analytics, integration, and extension capabilities on one platform for both cloud and hybrid environments, including hundreds of pre-built integrations for SAP and third-party applications. People can connect applications and combine data in new ways that help them integrate smarter and better collaborate to find answers and solve business problems faster.

The following are five use cases from customers who are using SAP BTP on Google Cloud to more successfully manage their businesses.

1. Timely insights from combining data from SAP and non-SAP solutions. A North American retailer deployed a joint SAP software and Google Cloud architecture to get better insight into sales teams based on consumer feedback. The company also achieved a closer alignment between supply and demand by positioning product pitches based on availability.

A joint architecture like this would include cloud-native solutions such as the SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Data Warehouse Cloud solutions while leveraging the native AI/ML capabilities and petabyte scale of BigQuery.

2. More cost-effective marketing through SAP ERP correlation. Many retail and consumer goods companies are avid users of Google Marketing Platform when it comes to placing and managing ads. Now these customers are using SAP BTP to drive direct correlations between their ERP supply chain and finance data and their marketing investments executed over Google Marketing Platform. This is helping them operate more cost-effectively by providing fast and contextually enriched answers to cost-related questions, such as: Where should I direct my marketing spend? How do I target campaigns based on inventory and margin? How should I focus my supply chain investments based on campaign, location, and demographics data from Google Marketing Platform? 

3. Accelerated innovation in core systems with containerized apps. The extensibility and API services of SAP BTP are enabling customers to use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to develop and manage custom applications faster and more efficiently. SAP BTP makes direct read/write capabilities in the core of SAP ERP possible, and GKE provides developers with an environment and the tools for using containers instead of traditional environments. The outcome is better capacity utilization, enterprise-grade scalability, faster deployment of new capabilities within core systems, quicker and less disruptive application maintenance, and the ability to “build in” security protections at the start of the app development cycle instead of after.

4. Simplified operations with Google Search and SAP Work Zone. With Google Search embedded into the SAP Work Zone enabled by SAP BTP, daily operations are simplified.  SAP Work Zone provides personalized and integrated employee experiences with centralized access to core business systems. Critical business data that’s used every day is within those systems, and making it easier to quickly find exactly what’s needed helps prevent waiting between process steps, the use of inaccurate or incomplete data, and redundant work.

5. Extend SAP Process Automation with Google services and APIs. This solution is helping customers adapt, improve, and innovate business processes with minimum assistance from busy IT teams.

The SAP Process Automation solution puts capabilities for workflow management, robotic process automation, and AI services into an intuitive no-code interface, allowing anyone to build and share automated workflows across key process owners, and between SAP and non-SAP applications. As part of SAP BTP, SAP Process Automation integrates diverse SAP software systems with Google solutions to simplify business processes. For example, SAP Fiori apps use task automation services from SAP Process Automation to leverage Google Document AI, collect key information from digital documents, and then automatically post the results in SAP. This reduces the manual effort of repetitive tasks and leads to fewer errors and increased data consistency.

These are just five of the ways customers of SAP BTP are benefitting from SAP’s partnership with Google Cloud. Learn more about the SAP on Google Cloud partnership. And join us at SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Florida.

It is hard to understand global payments without understanding SWIFT. For over 40 years, SWIFT, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has secured financial messaging for banks, corporates, brokers, and treasuries in over 200 countries. For example, if you have ever requested a funds transfer from your local bank’s branch or website to a friend or relative who has a different bank in another country, chances are those payment messages went through the SWIFT network. 

Today, I would like to talk about how Google Cloud is collaborating with SWIFT for SWIFT to offer our joint customers the SWIFT Alliance Connect components in the cloud and how Google Cloud products support SWIFT’s security and operational requirements to reliably process core financial messages. SWIFT recently announced the launch of a new solution, Alliance Connect Virtual, which enables their customers to connect to the SWIFT network directly from the public cloud. Alliance Connect Virtual is a new network connectivity solution that enables SWIFT customers to deploy traditional physical hardware based SWIFT VPN connections as virtual appliances in the public cloud. Typically, organizations require either hosting SWIFT infrastructure hardware on-prem or in co-locations or consuming SWIFT services from external third-parties.

For this initiative, Google Cloud is creating a reference implementation of SWIFT components on Google Cloud to help mutual customers satisfy SWIFT security and operational requirements, increase operational efficiency, and accelerate adoption of cloud for their core payment applications. We expect the SWIFT on Google Cloud reference implementations to be generally available (GA) later in 2022 in parallel with SWIFT’s GA launch of the Alliance Connect Virtual products. Some of the many reasons why customers should consider SWIFT on Google Cloud as their preferred solution include:

1) Google Cloud’s security principles focus on a secure-by-design infrastructure, built-in protection, and global network that assists customers in keeping their organizations secure and compliant. Data is encrypted by default, at rest and in transit, to prevent access by any non-authorized entities.

2) Google Cloud currently has29 cloud regions, 88 zones, and 146 network edge locations connected via our private, software-defined, high-performance network across 200+ countries, helping our customers better serve their users around the globe. 

3) Google Cloud’s serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective multicloud data warehouse,BigQuery, enables customers to dynamically increase data from bytes to petabytes, with zero operational overhead. Customers can quickly gain business and operational insights about financial messages with real-time predictive analytics while relying on robust security, governance, and reliability controls for high-availability. 

4) Google Cloud’sAI platform provides customers with one unified experience to create, deploy, and manage models over time, at scale. It is built with groundbreaking ML tools that  enables customers to deploy models faster with MLOps pipeline tooling including configurable management of data and models. 

5) Google Cloud is reducing environmental impact with thecleanest cloud in the industry. Google is carbon neutral today and runs smart, efficient data centers that are twice as energy efficient as a typical enterprise data center. 

Now that you know some of the reasons customers choose Google Cloud, let’s explore some of the customer challenges we aim to solve by moving SWIFT components to the cloud.  

Reducing data center operational costs is one of the key business drivers when customers migrate applications to the cloud. Customers want to run their technology on faster, more scalable, and more affordable infrastructure than their on-prem environments. Virtualized SWIFT components like the SWIFT VPN enable customers to run on optimized virtualization platforms and help customers avoid  separate license agreements with hosting providers. These are all part of a customer’s broader cloud modernization and data center migration initiatives.Customers must deploy SWIFT components in secure and reliable infrastructure to process sensitive financial messages. SWIFT has created the Customer Security Controls Framework (CSCF) which consists of mandatory and advisory security controls for SWIFT users to meet those requirements. A few examples would be the principle of least privilege for physical, network, and application permissions to restrict unauthorized access; encrypting credentials and data in flight and at rest; and providing redundancy and fault tolerance for a highly available platform. These controls evolve over time to combat new and evolving threats and to implement new developments in cybersecurity.

Once customers are confident they can satisfy SWIFT’s security requirements and virtualize the components in a cloud environment, they can accelerate their adoption of cloud native services for their core platforms. This opens up the opportunity for customers to leverage new big data and machine learning technologies to help gain new insights and further analysis of the messaging data. Let’s see what the SWIFT components look like on Google Cloud.

The SWIFT on Google Cloud solution is a packaged, hybrid solution that’s a combination of SWIFT software in Google Cloud and SWIFT hardware components in a colocation facility. The solution can be broken into two logical components: SWIFT VPN or Alliance Connect Virtual and the corresponding SWIFT applications.

Alliance Connect Virtual is the secure VPN communication to and from the SWIFT network to the SWIFT Alliance Gateway (SAG) and SWIFT applications. It leverages the SWIFT VPN  virtual appliance on Compute Engine virtual machines with Cloud KMS as the trusted key store to support FIPS 140-2 Level 2 compliance. Cloud Interconnect provides a high throughput and reliable network to Google colocation and partner peering exchanges. 

The SWIFT applications include both message processing and business analytics products from SWIFT. Google Cloud provides Bare Metal Solutions (BMS) for hosting the SWIFT Alliance Message Hub (AMH) Oracle database and Hosted Private HSM for the SWIFT HSM requirements. Both services provide low-latency VPC connections for the applications. 

The entire architecture includes private VPC networks with stateful firewalls for egress/ingress traffic between SWIFT applications, SWIFT VPN, and the SWIFT network. The SWIFT product and package you purchase will determine the final configuration and architecture.

Google Cloud continuously invests in secure-by-design infrastructure across the cloud stack to protect our customers. Our use of a private fiber network means that customer data spends less time on the public internet, reducing vulnerability. Customers own their data, and control where it is stored, processed, and transmitted. In addition, Google Cloud addresses the requirements of financial sector laws like FFIEC (US) and EBA (EU) and is audited against international standards like ISO 27017 and ISO 27018.

Google Cloud strives to be the best for big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning among cloud providers. Our fully managed, serverless approach addresses performance, scalability, and availability requirements for data platforms and analytics. With no infrastructure to manage, customers can easily leverage products like BigQuery to analyze gigabytes to petabytes of SWIFT message data in minutes, not months. Customers can create risk-based models on the data running high performance computing (HPC) simulations or mitigate the risks of financial crime using fraud prediction and anomaly detection with the Vertex AI platform. 

In addition, sustainability is becoming increasingly important to more organizations and Google has invested deeply to become thecleanest cloud in the industry. Google has matched 100% of the energy consumed by our global operations with renewable energy since 2017 and maintains a commitment to carbon neutrality. Every workload you run on Google Cloud has zero net carbon emissions.

As you can see, Google Cloud’s collaboration with SWIFT enables our customers to deploy SWIFT components on Google Cloud and supports customers’ security goals. Migrating traditional on-prem financial messaging platforms like SWIFT to Google Cloud increases overall operational efficiency and accelerates the adoption of cloud services. If you’re eager to learn more about how Google Cloud is teaming up with SWIFT, please reach out to your Google Cloud sales representative or partner manager. You can also learn about our solutions for financial services customers here.