Cloud Integration Consulting

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a leading set of cloud computing services that offers IaaS and PaaS products. Google Cloud's share of the public cloud sector trails only Amazon AWS and Azure. Like these competitors, GCP utilizes the same massive infrastructure that hosts its core applications. In Google's case, these apps include Google Search as well as YouTube. The Google cloud stack contains over 100 products that cover compute, data storage, database management, network infrastructure, business analytics, Big Data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, identity, cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), and centralized management.

Progent has experience helping organizations of all sizes to plan, deploy, test, administer, and maintain IT environments based on a variety of network architectures such as on-prem data centers, private clouds, one or more public clouds, or a hybrid mix of onsite and cloud resources. Progent offers quick online or onsite access to top-tier consultants to help you to evaluate the potential benefits and limitations of different network architectures and compare the feature set and pricing structure of Google Cloud Platform vs. alternative cloud offerings.

Progent's certified Microsoft, Linux, and Cisco experts can assist your organization to integrate your current IT infrastructure with the Google Cloud Platform, and Progent's database management experts can help make your business-critical applications cloud ready so they can benefit fully from Google Cloud services. Progent can help you to set up VMs on Google Cloud Compute Engine, plan an efficient storage system using GCP Cloud Storage services, and streamline access management with Google Cloud Identity. Progent can also assist you to use GCP's tools to manage and track your Google Cloud ecosystem so it continually delivers top return on investment.

Key Services Offered for the Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform has more than 100 Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service services addressing virtually all facets of information technology including processing, data storage, database management, networking, administration, cybersecurity, web, mobile computing, and application development. GCP services are offered by subscription. Like other public cloud services, you are charged for the resources you use. Popular Google Cloud services for which Progent offers advanced consulting and debugging include:

Compute Engine is an IaaS service for running Windows and Linux virtual machines in the cloud, comparable to Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines. Compute Engine VMs have transparent access to Google Cloud block storage and advanced infrastructure. Google Cloud offers three types of virtual machines in your choice of standard or custom sizes. Google Cloud's N2 type virtual machine is affordably priced and designed for common applications such as web hosting, business applications, and databases. The C2 type VM supports as many as 60 virtual CPUs for processor-intensive apps such as electronic computer-aided design and simulations. Google Cloud's M2 type virtual machine offers up to 11.5 TB of RAM for memory-intensive applications such as in-memory databases or time-critical analytics. Google's sole-tenant node option features a physical Compute Engine machine for your exclusive use.

Important benefits of the Google Cloud Compute Engine include live virtual machine migration, which lets you keep virtual machines working even during system maintenance, and preemptible virtual machines, low-cost virtual machine compute instances which continue for a max of 24 hours and are designed for running batch jobs that can be paused and resumed intermittently without impacting productivity.

Additional available features for GCP Compute Engine include:

• Always-encrypted local solid-state drive block storage for enhanced performance and data security
• Graphics Processing Unit that can be added to virtual machine instances for CPU-intense applications like machine learning (ML) and 3D visualizations
• Global load balancing for maximizing speed and availability at low cost
• Google Kubernetes Engine for orchestrating containers on Compute Engine virtual machines

Google Cloud Storage is object storage that scales to exabytes of data. Data held in GCP Cloud Storage are logically organized in containers referred to as buckets. Google offers four types of cloud storage, distinguished and priced based on the object's expected duration and its busy/dormant ratio. As you move through the storage types from Standard to Archive, access costs increase, at-rest expense go down, and required minimum storage time goes up. Google's storage classes make it possible to manage expenses by designing the optimal cost/performance profile for your network, and Google's Object Life Cycle Management feature allows you to program the progression of storage objects from hot to cold types over time. All classes feature worldwide accessibility, virtually unlimited scale (but a size limit of 5 TB for any given object, no minimum size, low latency, optional geo-redundancy, and a common suite of security and management tools. A single API applies to all Google Cloud Storage types.

Standard Storage is the default type and is intended for data used frequently or stored only briefly. There is no minimum storage duration. For the highest speed and lowest network usage fees, Standard Storage data should be kept in the same geographical location as the virtual machine instances or the container clusters that interact with the data. Standard Storage delivers the highest average availability across any regional distribution scheme. Nearline Storage is a low cost storage type designed for data accessed infrequently, ideally no more than once per month. Examples of suitable use scenarios are periodic backup and archiving. At-rest costs are less than with GCP's Standard Storage, but access is more expensive, availability is slightly lower, and duration is a minimum of 30 days.

Coldline Storage provides rock bottom storage pricing for at-rest data and is suitable for scenarios where objects are accessed less than once every 90 days Minimum duration is three months, availability is marginally lower than with GCP's Standard and Nearline Storage types, and access costs are comparatively expensive. GCP's Archive Storage, which offers the least at-rest storage pricing and a minimum storage duration of one year, is the best storage service for data kept exclusively for backup or archive scenarios. Access costs for Archive Storage are the highest of any Google storage type.

Cloud Storage Encryption
GCP Cloud Storage always encrypts stored data on the server end prior to writing it to disk. In addition to this standard encryption, you can select other options to encrypt your data. GCP offers two server-side encryption services that cause data to be encrypted after making it to Cloud Storage but before the data is stored to disk. Google's Customer-supplied encryption keys allows you to create and manage your own encryption keys. Google's Customer-managed encryption keys option allows you to create and control your encryption keys via Google's Cloud Key Management Service. Both these server-side encryption options provide an additional level of encryption over and above GCP's standard Cloud Storage encryption service.

If you use client-side encryption before transporting data to Google Cloud Storage, your encrypted data will also undergo server-side encryption.

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) is Google's centralized system for controlling access to network resources and assigning authority for users and services to use network resources for a specified period of time. Examples of GCP resources are Compute Engine virtual machine instances and Google Cloud Storage buckets. Unified and consistent tools give admins the ability to manage access rights for all services available within Google Cloud. Cloud Identity and Access Management features fine granularity in designing policies to assign groups and users permissions to use task-relevant resources while blocking access to non-essential resources.

With Google Cloud IAM, policies are made up of roles; roles are composed of permissions; and permissions are associated with resources. Users or groups are added to policies, and through the policy they gain access rights to the specific resources their roles provide. As an example of Cloud Identity and Access Management's role granularity, the Google Cloud Pub/Sub service can be accessed under a variety of permissions determined by whether a user or group has been given the role of Owner, Editor, Viewer, Publisher, or Subscriber.

Google Cloud IAM policies are hierarchical, cascading down from the organization to projects and then to resources. You can define organization-wide policies, refine them as appropriate for a specific project, and refine them further for a given resource. You can assign policies to individual resources, to a project, or at the top organizational level. Policies assigned to an organization flow down to projects within the organization and then to resources within projects.

Further refinement in controlling resource permissions is provided by permitting admins to include contextual attributes like device security status, IP address, resource type, and date/time. You can control access rights by using the graphical interface of the web-based Cloud Console, through programming by using Cloud IAM methods, or through the gcloud CLI tool. Google Cloud IAM automatically creates a full audit trail to simplify compliance.

Google Cloud IAM is provided without extra cost to all GCP licensees.

Google Kubernetes Engine is a container service for orchestrating and managing containerized apps. Kubernetes was originally created by Google to automate Docker container orchestration and was offered as open source at the end of 2014. Since that time Kubernetes has become the leading platform for managing containerized applications.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is built on Google's Container-Optimized OS and supports Certified Kubernetes, ensuring workload compatibility with other Kubernetes platforms spanning cloud and on-premises environments. To accelerate development, ready-to-go open-source deployment templates for commercial apps are offered on Google Cloud Marketplace.

The Migrate for Anthos service, available at no cost with GKE, enables you to migrate and convert your applications easily from your current infrastructure into Google Kubernetes Engine containers. These workloads can be physical servers and VMs situated onsite, in GCP's Compute Engine, or in other clouds. GKE supports pod and cluster autoscaling for continuous analysis of the CPU and RAM usage of pods and for automatically adjusting processor and memory requests across node pools.

Other features of Google Kubernetes Engine include preemptible VMs, persistent disks, always-encrypted local SSD block storage, global load balancing to optimize performance and uptime, compatibility with both Windows and Linux nodes, the ability to run stateless serverless containers via the Google Cloud Run service, and usage metering for granular visibility into Kubernetes clusters.

Google Kubernetes Engine is compliant with HIPAA and PCI DSS 3.1. For stronger security, GKE Sandbox provides an additional level of protection between containerized Google Kubernetes Engine workloads. Google Kubernetes Engine clusters provide integrated support for Kubernetes Network Policy to filter traffic by applying pod-level firewall security policies. Private clusters in GKE can be confined to a private or public endpoint accessible only to distinct addresses.

GKE charges for each Google Compute Engine instance in a cluster. Usage of GCP Compute Engine resources is priced by the second with a one-minute minimum charge.

Cloud AI Building Blocks allow developers, even with little or no machine learning backgrounds, to integrate Google's leading-edge AI capabilities into their applications. Core capabilities address sight, language, and speech. By using Google's APIs, you can access Google's out-of-the-box AI models and avoid having to deal with creating your own datasets and training your own AI models. As Google's library of pre-trained models expands, you can immediately add leading-edge AI technology to your applications. In addition, Google Cloud AutoML products give you the utilities you need to train, validate and deploy your custom domain-specific ML models. Developers can use any Google Cloud AI Building Block by itself or in combination with other AI tools according to your business requirements.

For AI-enhanced imaging, Google GCP Cloud AI Building Blocks offer the AutoML Vision and Vision API services that allow you to derive useful intelligence from your images. Both products include REST and RPC APIs and allow your app to discern objects and their position within an image. AutoML Vision simplifies training for your home-grown machine learning (ML) models by offering an intuitive graphical interface. Once you tune your models for accuracy, latency and size, you can send them to the Google GCP Cloud or to a variety of edge devices.

Vision API offers programmatic access to Google's pre-trained machine learning models. Developers can quickly classify images via Google's libraries of pre-trained labels. Google Cloud's Vision API uses OCR technology to detect text, in more than 50 languages, contained anywhere within images. Used in conjunction with Google's Document Understanding AI feature, you can use the same ML technology behind Google Search to extract actionable insights from masses of free-form documents. You can discern web objects and pages, isolate a face from other objects and detect facial attributes, and recognize product logos and popular landmarks. You can also detect adult or violent content within images.

Google GCP's AutoML Video Intelligence and Video Intelligence API services, which provide a comparably wide array of capabilities as the Vision services, make it simpler to mine value from videos.

Language Services
Language is Google's strong suit, and Google's portfolio of AI Building Blocks understandably includes a rich suite of services. Google Cloud language products include:

• Cloud Translation API
  This cloud service allows developers to enrich web sites and applications with real-time language translation capability based on Google's pre-trained neural machine translation technology. Google GCP offers a Basic and an Advanced release of Google's Translation API. Both options use Google's pre-trained, general-purpose model and feature automatic language identification, a REST API, seamless HTML support, and the capability to translate between over 100 language pairs. The Advanced version of Google Cloud Translation API adds a customizable glossary to preserve your company's branding in translated text, batch translation support in Google Cloud Storage, the ability to utilize (but not create) custom AutoML Translation models, and an integrated gRPC API. Google's Cloud Translation service charges on a per-character basis.
• AutoML Translation
  This ML tool enables developers to create a custom translation model by training it using your own prepared dataset. The custom dataset is made of matching pairs of sentences in the source and target languages. Google AutoML Translation applies statistical analysis to the pairs from your custom dataset to train the model, tests it, and scores its accuracy. After you review the results of your model, you can modify your dataset and train a new model until you are satisfied with the outcome. You can build custom translation models in more than fifty language pairs. Pricing for using AutoML Translation are based on the hours of training required and the volume of characters you include for translation.
• Cloud Natural Language API
  GCP's Natural Language API marshals a suite of proven machine learning models to help you to grasp the themes and structure of documents. A content classification model identifies content categories within a document, like architecture, finance, or entertainment; an entity analysis model identifies and labels common known entities referred to within the document, like country, company, or athlete); a sentiment analysis model evaluates the author's attitude expressed in the document and the strength of emotion; an entity sentiment analysis model integrates entity and sentiment analysis by identifying known entities within a document and estimating the attitude and the strength of emotion demonstrated towards those entities; a syntactic analysis model extracts structural information by deconstructing text into sentences and tokens (words), which are further parsed into parts of speech and roots. Each API detects the language of the target text if it is not declared. The's Natural Language API is a REST API and uses JSON requests and responses. Target text can be included in the request or resident in Google Cloud Storage.
• AutoML Natural Language
  Google's AutoML Natural Language service enables you to build and refine custom Natural Language models for classification, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis. For example, a sentiment analysis model designed by an airline could learn that a reference to lost luggage in social media reflects a negative rather than positive sentiment. GCP's AutoML Natural Language product makes it simple to create a custom dataset, utilize the dataset to train a model, validate the resulting model, and refine your dataset until the model is suitable to deploy.
• Dialogflow
  GCP's Dialogflow is a a development suite that uses the natural language technology behind Google Assistant to help you to build a conversational interface so your product or service can interact with your users by voice. You can add this capability to a smartphone app, website, voice response system, or any other scenario that could be enhanced with voice conversation. Google's Dialogflow platform can understand text or voice inputs and can respond through text or synthetic voice. Dialogflow can recognize a user's meaning and detect pre-defined entities like time, date, and numbers. You can train your Dialogflow agent to identify your custom entity types by submitting small sample datasets, or you can use more than 40 tested agents as templates. Professional versions of Dialogflow are billed based on audio/phone time and the number of characters and queries.
• Cloud Text-to-Speech
  Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech API transforms text or Speech Synthesis Markup Language to high-fidelity, natural-sounding speech in more than 30 languages and over 180 voices. Google's Cloud Text-to-Speech service supports any application or device capable of sending REST or gRPC requests. This includes phones, PCs, tablets, and IoT devices like cars, televisions, and speakers. Accepted audio coding formats include mp3, Linear16, and Ogg Opus. You can use SSML tags to add pauses, numbers, date and time formatting, etc. Cloud Text-to-Speech is priced per million characters of text submitted.
• Speech-to-Text
  GCP's Speech-to-Text API provides access to leading-edge automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology powered by Google's continually refined deep-learning neural network technology. GCP's Speech-to-Text can translate streaming audio in real time and can be optimized to support various sampling frequencies for phones, video, or voice commands and search. The API supports 120 languages and can identify what language is spoken from a selection of up to four languages. You can specify a maximum of 5,000 words or phrases that relate to your organization, such as brand or partner names. The technology can automatically capitalize proper names and convert spoken numbers into addresses, dates, phone numbers, and currencies. Video transcription can add punctuation, and speaker diarization technology can differentiate among several talkers in a conference. Noise cancellation is built in, and for certain languages you can filter out inappropriate language. Supported encoding formats include FLAC, AMR, PCMU, and Linear-16. Cost is time based.

Progent can assist you to decide which of your applications are suited for Google Cloud and can help you make your legacy apps cloud compatible. Progent has helped clients assess the value of running Google Cloud SQL, using Google Dataproc for local Hadoop, adopting Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine as a virtualization replacement, and deploying MongoDB Atlas on GCP vs. local MongoDB. Progent can provide as-needed remote consulting expertise for short-term tasks to help you quickly resolve occasional technical challenges or Progent can deliver end-to-end project management outsourcing services to ensure your Google Cloud deployment program is successfully completed on time and on budget.

Some of most frequently encountered technical problems businesses face when migrating to GCP or other public cloud platform is setting up firewalls and VPN tunnels to provide users with convenient but secure access to cloud services. Progent can provide the services of Cisco-certified CCIE network infrastructure engineers and firewall specialists for security appliances from leading suppliers like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, SonicWall, and Fortinet to help you to configure or debug firewalls for accessing Google Cloud. To accommodate BYOD computing, Progent's iPhone and iPad management consultants and Android integration consultants can assist you to integrate and administer protected mobile endpoints for your Google Cloud users. Progent can work in concert with your internal IT staff and Google's support engineers to mitigate GCP connectivity problems quickly and affordably.

Popular online consulting services provided by Progent to assist organizations expand their networks with GCP include:

• Check hybrid solution plan for Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines and Google Cloud Storage
• Create and verify VM images for Windows or Linux
• Set up, deploy and troubleshoot VPN tunnels for access to GCP
• Plan integration solutions for firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, SonicWall, and Fortinet and others
• Set up and troubleshoot mobile devices
• Create and implement policies following leading practices
• Fix IP addressing problems
• Define cost-managed plan for Google Cloud Storage
• Optimize query efficiency on Google Cloud SQL
• Automate software license management
• Fix certificate issues

Other public clouds supported by Progent include:

Progent's Azure cloud integration consultants can assist you with any stage of Microsoft Azure integration including needs analysis, readiness assessment, solution design, pre-production testing, deployment, automated administration, performance tuning, software license management, disaster recovery preparedness, security policy enforcement, and compliance assessment. Progent can assist you to set up and debug firewall appliances and VPN connections so your clients can securely access to Azure-based services, and Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting experts can assist you integrate key Microsoft technologies to work in Azure including Windows Server, Exchange, SQL and Skype for Business. Progent can also help your organization to set up a hybrid environment that seamlessly integrates physical datacenters with Azure services.

Microsoft allows you to create transparent hybrid ecosystems that combine Microsoft 365 and local Exchange. This allows you to have certain Exchange mailboxes located on your corporate datacenter and other mailboxes resident on Microsoft 365. Progent's Microsoft-certified Exchange consulting team can assist your organization with any facet of planning, implementing and troubleshooting your hybrid Exchange network. Progent's Exchange specialists can deliver occasional expertise to help you resolve challenging technical bottlenecks and also can provide extensive project management outsourcing to make sure your hybrid Microsoft 365/Exchange initiative is completed on schedule and on budget. To find out more about Progent's online consulting support for integrating Microsoft 365 Exchange and on-premises Exchange environments, refer to Microsoft 365 Exchange Online integration solutions with on-premises Exchange.

Progent's certified Office and Microsoft 365 experts can help companies of any size to integrate Microsoft Office desktop and Microsoft 365 apps including Office Excel, Office Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Project and OneNote into a seamless productivity solution that offers quick return on investment and enables improved business outcomes. Progent can assist your company to interface Office or Microsoft 365 apps with one another and with other key Microsoft platforms such as SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange Server and SQL Server deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Progent's consultants can also assist you to fix compatibility issues with different releases of Office desktop and can provide live online Office and Microsoft 365 instruction to individuals or groups.

Progent's Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration experts offer cost-effective online support to help companies to access Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services such as Amazon EC2 for virtual machine hosting, Amazon S3 for expandable low-latency storage, and Amazon Glacier for value-priced long-term archiving. Progent can assist your IT team with every phase of Amazon AWS migration and troubleshooting including requirements analysis, readiness evaluation, system design, pilot testing, deployment, centralized administration, performance tuning, licensing management, disaster recovery solutions, and security strategies. Progent offers advanced expertise with firewall configuration and VPN technology and can help you create all-cloud or hybrid environments that efficiently integrate Amazon AWS services. Progent can provide as-needed expertise or Progent can provide comprehensive project management outsourcing or co-sourcing to help you migrate smoothly to the Amazon AWS platform.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) is a collection of APIs that allows Amazon sellers to streamline their operations by automating key sales activities such as listings, orders, payments, fulfillment, and reports. By leveraging Amazon's vast online selling environment and automating their sales processes, merchants can expand their reach, lower their cost of sales, accelerate response time to customers, and add to their bottom line. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service developers can collaborate with your development staff and provide programming, workflow integration, project management support, and training so you can shorten development time and costs and expedite your ROI.

Contact Progent for Google Cloud Integration Consulting
If you need help with any facet of integrating your IT system with Google Cloud Platform or any other public cloud service, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.