GCP – Celebrating Women in Tech: Highlighting PacketFabric
March is Women’s History Month – a time for us to come together and celebrate women-led startups and the amazing work they are doing in the tech industry. Our first of four features highlights the founders of PacketFabric—Jezzibell Gilmore and Anna Claiborne—and how they utilized Google Cloud to build their telecommunications startup.
Our rapidly-growing global startup, PacketFabric, was built with the vision to redefine the networking industry, and change the way that businesses connect to the world. In a heavily male dominated field, we joined together to break through the technology industry, and hope to inspire, hire and empower women along the way.
As once co-workers, and also long-time customers in telecom, we constantly felt the pain and frustrations of the archaic ways of the industry. Legacy telecom service providers had failed to evolve network infrastructure. That’s where the idea of PacketFabric was born – a globally interconnected Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform that helps digital businesses connect. Since launching out of stealth in 2017, PacketFabric is now powering top enterprises throughout the globe – and we’re just getting started.
Our team was always built as a fully remote company, and employees live by our motto “Automate everything, all the time” to innovate together and disrupt the entrenched internet infrastructure industry.
PacketFabric
PacketFabric is a private network that provides secure, reliable on-demand services between customers and their cloud service providers, whether private or public. We help our customers automate their network connectivity in order to move their data from one place to another. With this connectivity, customers can build, provision, and change their network infrastructure quickly and painlessly, while saving time and money. Using our network, customers cut down the sales and provisioning time from 60 days to just 60 seconds. Google Cloud tools play a crucial role in driving this improved performance. Additionally, since we are a Google Cloud Direct Interconnect Partner, our customers can connect to Google Cloud for additional services such as data storage from any location.
Some of our customers include leading companies in pharmaceuticals, financial services, technology, media and entertainment, and professional sports leagues, among many other verticals in the enterprise. With the help of Google Cloud, we are able to provide our industry leading customers with industry leading telecoms solutions.
PacketFabric + Google Cloud: A combination for success
As an early adopter of BigTable, we have leveraged Google Cloud’s easy-to-use tools since the start of our company. As we scaled our business, we migrated to CloudSQL for PostgreSQL to capture our massive amounts of telemetry data and bring added value to our customers. PostgreSQL allows us to store customer metrics and create customized solutions, gained from insight data across multiple customer clouds. Our customers now receive detailed, real-time insight into how their network services are performing, giving them more control over their network.
Along with CloudSQL, we get the same serverless capabilities with tools such as Container Registryand Cloud Storage. We use Container Registry to store, manage, and secure our container images. And Cloud Storage so we can easily transfer data between clouds and have easy access to that data.
Just like CloudSQL, Container Registry and Cloud Storage can automatically scale up or down depending on demand, so we pay only for what we use. Most importantly, given Container Registry’s extensible architecture, we can also easily connect it with our existing CI/CD process. Lastly, with the built-in GKE integration, we get access to unique industry-first capabilities such as release channels, multi-cluster support, 4-way auto scaling, along with node auto repair to help improve availability.
Google’s Identity-Aware Proxy is another critical feature in keeping our customer data secure. We can control exactly who has access to what data, as well as access to our Cloud-based applications and VMs running on Google Cloud. This ensures that our multitude of GKE clusters are safe and secure.
Helping Improve Diversity of Women in Tech
From our time in the industry and researching the lack of women in tech, we have found that the problem starts early. Young girls are discouraged from pursuing tech as early as 8-12 years old. As a result, women earn only 18% of Computer Science degrees in the United States.
Increasing representation of women in the tech industry has been top of mind for many of us over the past few years, especially at PacketFabric. It is very important for young girls and women to see themselves represented in tech to empower them to pursue more technical roles and study for STEM degrees. As women co-founders, we hope to serve as supportive voices and positive role models for women of all ages looking to join the tech industry. We hope that seeing more women co-founders like us encourages all women to see the immense power and capacity we have to disrupt the tech industry.
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