Cloud Integration Expertise

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a leading set of cloud services that provides Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service products. GCP's penetration in the public cloud market is behind only Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Like these vendors, GCP utilizes the same massive network infrastructure that hosts its most popular online applications. In Google's case, these include Google Search and YouTube. The GCB cloud portfolio contains over 100 products related to compute, storage, database management, networking, business analytics, Big Data, machine learning, AI, access management, cybersecurity, IoT, and unified tools.

Progent has experience helping organizations of all sizes to plan, deploy, test, manage, and troubleshoot IT environments based on various network architectures including on-prem data centers, private clouds, one or more public clouds, or a hybrid combination of local and cloud-based resources. Progent offers fast remote or onsite access to seasoned experts who can assist you to assess the advantages and drawbacks of possible 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 you to expand your existing network resources with the Google Cloud, and Progent's database consultants can help make your business-critical applications cloud capable so they can take full advantage of GCP services. Progent can help you to set up VMs on GCP Compute Engine, plan an efficient storage system with Google Cloud Storage services, and simplify access management with GCP Cloud Identity. Progent can also assist you to use GCP's unified tools to manage and monitor your GCP Cloud environment so it consistently provides maximum business value.

Key Services Offered for the Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud has over Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service services addressing virtually all areas of information technology including processing, data storage, database management, networking, system management, security, web, mobile computing, and application development. GCP services are available by subscription. Like other public cloud platforms, you pay for what you use. Important Google Cloud services for which Progent offers advanced consulting and technical support include:

Compute Engine is a service for running Windows and Linux virtual machines in the cloud, similar to Amazon EC2 or Azure Virtual Machines. Compute Engine virtual machines have transparent access to GCP block storage and state-of-the-art infrastructure. Google Cloud Compute Engine offers three basic classes of virtual machines in your choice of standard or custom machine sizes. Google's N2 type VM is affordably priced and intended for general-purpose applications like web hosting, business apps, and databases. The C2 type virtual machine supports up to 60 virtual CPUs for compute-intensive applications like ECAD and simulations. Google's M2 class VM offers up to 11.5 TB of RAM for memory-intensive apps such as in-memory databases or time-critical analytics. GCP's sole-tenant node product features a physical Compute Engine machine for your exclusive use.

Key features of the GCP Compute Engine include live VM migration, which keeps virtual machines on line even while undergoing system maintenance, and preemptible VMs, low-priced VM compute instances which continue for a max of 24 hours and are designed for executing batch jobs that can be paused and resumed intermittently without impacting productivity.

Other available features for GCP Compute Engine include:

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

Google Cloud Storage is object storage that scales to exabytes of data. All data held in GCP Cloud Storage are organized in containers referred to as buckets. Google provides four classes of cloud storage, distinguished and priced based on the object's expected longevity and its hot/cold ratio. As you move through the storage types from Standard to Archive, access costs go up, at-rest expense decrease, and minimum storage duration increases. GCP's storage classes allow you to manage costs by designing the appropriate cost/performance profile for your network, and Google's Object Life Cycle Management feature allows you to program the migration of storage objects from high-access to low-access types over time. All storage classes share worldwide accessibility, virtually unlimited scale (but a maximum size limit of 5 TB for any given object, no minimum object size, low latency, optional geo-redundancy, and a shared set of cloud security and management utilities. A single API applies to all storage types.

Standard Storage is Google Cloud's default type and is intended for objects accessed frequently or stored only for short periods. There is no minimum storage duration. For the highest speed and least network usage fees, Standard Storage data should be kept in the same geographical region as the virtual machine instances or the container clusters that interact with the objects. Standard Storage offers the highest average uptime across regions, dual-regions, and multi-regions. Nearline Storage is a economical storage option intended for objects accessed only occasionally, preferably no more than once per month. Examples of appropriate use scenarios are monthly backup and archiving. At-rest costs are lower than with GCP's Standard Storage, but access is more expensive, availability is slightly less, and duration is at least one month.

Coldline Storage provides very low storage costs for at-rest data and is suitable for situations where data are accessed no more frequently than once a quarter. Minimum duration is three months, availability is marginally lower than with Google Cloud's Standard and Nearline Storage classes, and access pricing is relatively high. GCP's Archive Storage, which features the least at-rest storage pricing and a minimum storage duration of one year, is the preferred storage service for data kept exclusively for backup or archive purposes. Access pricing for Archive Storage is the highest of any Google Cloud storage service.

Cloud Storage Encryption
Google Cloud Storage always encrypts data on the server side prior to writing it to disk. Added to this routine encryption process, you can select more ways to encrypt your data. GCP offers two server-side encryption services that allow objects to be encrypted after arriving at Cloud Storage but before being written to disk. The Customer-supplied encryption keys allows you to create and manage your own encryption keys. Google's Customer-managed encryption keys alternative enables you to generate and manage your encryption keys via Google's Cloud Key Management Service. Both these server-side encryption options create an additional level of encryption above GCP's standard Cloud Storage encryption service.

If you perform client-side encryption before transporting data to GCP Cloud Storage, your pre-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 granting authority for users and services to use network resources for a specified duration. Examples of Google Cloud resources are Compute Engine VM instances and Cloud Storage buckets. Unified and consistent tools give admins the ability to manage access permissions for all services available within the Google Cloud Platform. Cloud IAM offers fine granularity in designing policies to assign groups and users permissions to use task-relevant resources while blocking access to unnecessary resources.

With Google Cloud IAM, policies are based on roles; roles are based on permissions; and permissions are assigned to resources. Users or groups are assigned to policies, and through the policy they gain access to whatever 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 Identity and Access Management policies are hierarchical, cascading downward from the organization to projects and then to resources. You can define organization-wide policies, refine them as appropriate for a given project, and refine them further for a given resource. You can assign access policies to individual resources, to a project, or at the top organizational level. Policies assigned to an organization cascade down to projects within the organization and then to resources within projects.

Further refinement in controlling resource access rights is offered by enabling administrators to include context like device security status, IP address, resource type, and time. You can manage permissions by using the graphical interface of the web-based Cloud Console, through automation with Google Cloud IAM methods, or through Google's gcloud CLI tool. Cloud IAM automatically maintains a complete audit trail to facilitate regulatory compliance.

Cloud IAM is provided at no additional cost to all Google Cloud licensees.

Google Kubernetes Engine is a Docker container service for orchestrating and managing containerized apps. Kubernetes was originally created by Google to automate Docker container orchestration and was made available as open source in 2014. Since that time Kubernetes has grown to be the most popular solution for managing containerized workloads.

Google Kubernetes Engine is powered by Google's Container-Optimized OS and supports Certified Kubernetes, allowing workload portability to other Kubernetes platforms across cloud and on-premises environments. To streamline software development, prebuilt open-source deployment templates for enterprise-grade apps are available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

The Migrate for Anthos tool, offered for free with GKE, allows you to move and port your workloads easily from your existing infrastructure into Google Kubernetes Engine containers. These workloads can include physical servers and virtual machines located on-premises, in GCP's Compute Engine, or in third-party clouds. GKE allows pod and cluster autoscaling for continuous analysis of the processor and memory usage of pods and for dynamically adjusting CPU and RAM requests across node pools.

Other capabilities of Google Kubernetes Engine include preemptible virtual machines, persistent disks, always-encrypted local solid-state drive block storage, global load balancing to optimize performance and uptime, support for both Windows and Linux nodes, the capability of running stateless serverless containers with the Google Cloud Run service, and usage metering for granular visibility into your Kubernetes clusters.

GKE complies with HIPAA and PCI DSS 3.1. standards. For enhanced cybersecurity, GKE Sandbox provides an extra level of defense between containerized GKE workloads. GKE clusters offer native support for Kubernetes Network Policy to filter traffic via pod-level firewall security policies. Private clusters in Google Kubernetes Engine can be confined to a private or public endpoint with access limited to specified addresses.

Google Kubernetes Engine is priced based on each GCP Compute Engine instance in a cluster. Use of Google Compute Engine resources is billed by the second with a one-minute minimum cost.

Cloud AI Building Blocks enable developers, even with little or no machine learning (ML) experience, to incorporate Google's leading-edge AI capabilities into their applications. Essential services address vision, language, and speech. By using Google's APIs, you can access Google's pre-trained models and avoid having to deal with creating your own datasets from scratch and training and testing your own AI models. As Google's library of pre-trained models expands, you can quickly add leading-edge AI technology to your applications. In addition, Google AutoML products provide the utilities required to train, test and deploy your own domain-specific machine learning models. Developers can use any Google AI Building Block by itself or in any combination with other AI tools according to your business requirements.

For advanced imaging, Google Cloud AI Building Blocks include the AutoML Vision and Vision API products that allow you to derive useful intelligence from image libraries. Both services support REST and RPC APIs and enable your app to discern objects and their position within an image. AutoML Vision streamlines the training process for your home-grown machine learning (ML) models by providing an easy-to-use graphical interface. Once you tune your models for accuracy, speed and size, you can export them to the Google GCP Cloud or to a variety of edge devices.

Google Cloud's Vision API provides integration with Google's pre-trained machine learning models. Developers can quickly classify images via Google's libraries of pre-trained labels. Vision API uses OCR tools to detect text, in more than 50 languages, embedded within images. Combined with Google's Document Understanding AI feature, you can benefit from the same machine learning technology that powers Google Search to derive actionable insights from volumes of unstructured documents. You can detect web objects and pages, distinguish a face from other objects and notice facial attributes, and recognize brand logos and popular landmarks. You can also detect mature or violent content within images.

Google GCP's AutoML Video Intelligence and Video Intelligence API products, which provide a similarly extensive range of features as the Vision services, make it easy to mine value from video files.

Language Products
Language is Google's wheelhouse, and Google's portfolio of AI Building Blocks predictably includes a potent suite of services. Google GCP language products include:

• Cloud Translation API
  This cloud service enables developers to enhance web sites and programs with real-time language translation capability powered by Google's pre-trained neural machine translation technology. Google GCP provides a Basic and an Advanced version of the Translation API. Both options are based on Google's pre-trained, generalized model and feature automatic language identification, an integrated REST API, transparent HTML support, and the ability to translate between over 100 language pairs. The Advanced version of Google Cloud Translation API adds an extensible glossary to preserve your branding in translated text, batch translation capability in GCP Cloud Storage, the ability to utilize custom AutoML Translation models, and an integrated gRPC open source API. Google's Cloud Translation service charges on a per-character basis.
• AutoML Translation
  This machine learning tool allows you to build a custom translation model by training it with your own prepared dataset. The custom dataset consists of matching pairs of sentences in the source and target languages. AutoML Translation applies statistical analysis to the items from your custom dataset to train the model, validates it, and scores its accuracy. After you assess the results of your custom model, you can tune your dataset and train a new model until you are happy with the outcome. You can create custom translation models in more than fifty language pairs. Costs for using AutoML Translation are calculated based on the hours of training used and the volume of characters you submit for translation.
• Cloud Natural Language API
  Google's Natural Language API uses a suite of pre-built machine learning models to help you to grasp the themes and structure of documents. A content classification model discerns content categories in a document, such as architecture, investing, or sports; an entity analysis model finds and labels common known entities referenced within the document, such as country, organization, or athlete); a sentiment analysis model evaluates the author's attitude expressed in the document and the magnitude of emotion; an entity sentiment analysis model integrates entity analysis and sentiment analysis by detecting familiar entities within a document and estimating the attitude and the strength of emotion demonstrated towards those entities; a syntactic analysis model extracts structural organization by deconstructing text into sentences and tokens (words), which are then parsed into parts of speech and roots. Each API identifies the language of the text being analyzed if it is not declared. Google's Natural Language API is a REST API and uses JSON requests and responses. Target text can be included in the request or held in Google Cloud Storage.
• AutoML Natural Language
  GCP's AutoML Natural Language product enables you to create and tune your own Natural Language models for classification, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis. As an example, a sentiment analysis model designed by an airline could be taught that a mention of lost luggage in social media reflects a negative sentiment. Google's AutoML Natural Language service makes it simple to create a custom dataset, use the dataset to train a model, test the resulting model, and tune the dataset until your model is ready for production.
• Dialogflow
  Google Cloud's Dialogflow is a a development suite that uses the natural language technology that powers Google Assistant to enable you to build a conversational interface so your product or service can interact with your customers by voice. You can port this capability to a smartphone app, website, interactive voice response system, or other application that could be improved with voice conversation. Google Cloud's Dialogflow service can understand text or voice inputs and can reply through text or synthetic voice. Dialogflow can recognize a user's intent and detect prebuilt entities such as time, date, and numbers. You can teach your Dialogflow agent to recognize your custom entity types by providing small sample datasets, or you can use over 40 out-of-the-box agents as templates. Commercial versions of Dialogflow are billed according to audio/phone time and the volume of characters and queries.
• Cloud Text-to-Speech
  Google Cloud's Text-to-Speech API transforms text or Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to high-fidelity, natural-sounding speech in more than 30 languages and more than 180 voices. Cloud Text-to-Speech platform supports any application or device able to send REST or gRPC requests. Devices can be phones, desktop PCs, tablets, and IoT devices like cars, televisions, and audio speakers. Supported audio formats include mp3, Linear16, and Ogg Opus. You can use SSML tags to add pauses, numbers, calendar and time formatting, etc. Cloud Text-to-Speech is billed based on million characters of text processed.
• Speech-to-Text
  Google Cloud's Speech-to-Text API gives developers access to advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology based on Google's constantly refined deep-learning neural network algorithms. Google'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 works with 120 languages and can identify what language is spoken from a selection of up to four languages. You can identify up to 5,000 words or phrases that relate to your business, such as brand or stakeholder names. Google's technology can automatically capitalize names and places and convert spoken numbers into addresses, dates, phone numbers, and currencies. Video transcription can add punctuation, and speaker diarization technology can differentiate among multiple talkers in a conference. Noise cancellation is built in, and for certain languages you have the option to block offensive language. Supported encodings include FLAC, AMR, PCMU, and Linear-16. Cost is time based.

Progent can help your organization to decide which of your applications are suited for GCP and can show you how to make your legacy applications cloud ready. Progent has helped clients evaluate running Google Cloud SQL, using Google Dataproc for on-prem Hadoop, adopting Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine as a virtualization replacement, and deploying MongoDB Atlas on GCP vs. local MongoDB. Progent can provide as-needed online consulting expertise for short-term tasks to help you rapidly resolve occasional technical hurdles or Progent can deliver end-to-end project management consulting services to make sure your GCP deployment initiative is completed on time and within budget.

Among the most frequently encountered technical obstacles organizations run into when integrating with GCP or other public cloud is setting up firewalls and VPN connections to give users convenient but secure access to cloud resources. Progent offers the expertise of Cisco-certified CCIE network consultants and firewall experts for security appliances from major suppliers like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Barracuda, SonicWall, and Fortinet to help you to set up or debug firewalls for accessing Google Cloud Platform. To support mobile computing, Progent's iPhone and iPad technology consultants and Android integration experts can assist you to configure and manage protected mobile endpoints for your GCP users. Progent can work in conjunction with your internal IT staff and Google's support engineers to mitigate GCP connectivity problems quickly and economically.

Examples of remote consulting services offered by Progent to assist organizations expand their networks with Google Cloud include:

• Check hybrid system plan for Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines and Google Cloud Storage
• Create and test VM images for Windows or Linux
• Configure, integrate and debug VPN tunnels for connectivity with GCP
• Plan configuration solutions for firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Barracuda, WatchGuard, and Fortinet and others
• Set up and troubleshoot mobile devices
• Define and verify policies based on best practices
• Fix IP addressing issues
• Define cost-managed allocation of GCP Cloud Storage
• Tune query efficiency on Google Cloud SQL
• Simplify license management
• Fix certificate problems

Other public cloud platforms supported by Progent include:

Progent's Microsoft Azure planning and integration consultants can help you with every phase of Azure cloud migration including requirements analysis, readiness evaluation, system design, pre-production testing, deployment, centralized management, performance tuning, license controls, disaster recovery preparedness, security planning, and compliance validation. Progent can assist you to set up and troubleshoot firewall appliances and VPN connections so your clients can safely access to Azure-based resources, and Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting experts can help you set up key Microsoft platforms to work in Azure including Windows Server, Exchange, SQL and Skype for Business. Progent can also assist your organization to create a hybrid ecosystem that transparently combines on-premises datacenters with Azure-based resources.

Microsoft supports transparent hybrid ecosystems that combine Microsoft 365 Exchange Online and on-premises Exchange deployments. This permits you to have some Exchange mailboxes located at your on-premises datacenter and other mailboxes hosted by Microsoft 365. Progent's certified Exchange consultants can assist you with any phase of designing, integrating and troubleshooting your hybrid Microsoft 365/Exchange solution. Progent's Exchange specialists can deliver occasional support to help you resolve challenging technical bottlenecks and also can provide comprehensive project management outsourcing to make sure your hybrid Exchange initiative is successfully completed on time and within budget. To learn more about Progent's online consulting support for integrating Microsoft 365 Exchange and on-prem Exchange systems, refer to Microsoft 365 Exchange Online integration with on-prem Exchange.

Progent's Office and Microsoft 365 consultants can help companies of any size to integrate Office desktop and Microsoft 365 apps such as Office Excel, Office Word, PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, Access, Visio and OneNote into a seamless productivity solution that provides fast return on investment and promotes better business results. Progent can help your company to integrate Office or Microsoft 365 apps with one another and with other key Microsoft platforms including SharePoint, Exchange Server and SQL Server running on-premises or in the cloud. Progent can also help you to resolve compatibility problems with various versions of Office desktop and offers customized online Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 instruction to individual users and teams.

Progent's Amazon AWS integration experts offer cost-effective online consulting to help businesses of any size to integrate Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services including Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for virtual server hosting, Amazon Simple Storage Service (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 needs analysis, readiness assessment, system design and review, pilot testing, deployment, centralized administration, performance tuning, licensing management, backup/restore mechanisms, and security. Progent can provide advanced expertise with firewall configuration and VPN connections and can help you deploy cloud-centric or hybrid ecosystems that seamlessly integrate Amazon AWS services. Progent offers as-needed support or Progent can provide comprehensive project management outsourcing or co-sourcing services to help you migrate efficiently to the Amazon AWS cloud.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service is a library of APIs that enables Amazon sellers to improve the efficiency of their operations by automating crucial sales functions including listings, orders, shipments, inbound and outbound fulfillment, and reports. By tapping into Amazon's extensive online selling environment and automating their sales, merchants can expand their reach, reduce their cost of sales, improve reaction time to customers, and increase their profits. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service consultants can work with your development staff and provide application programming, workflow integration, project management support, and mentoring to help you shorten development time and costs and get to market quickly.

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