Cloud Integration Expertise

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a leading set of cloud computing services that includes IaaS and PaaS products. Google Cloud's share of the public cloud market trails only Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Azure. As with competitors, Google Cloud uses the same extensive network infrastructure that supports its core applications. In Google's case, these apps include Google Search and YouTube. The Google cloud stack contains more than 100 products related to processing, data storage, database management, network infrastructure, business analytics, Big Data, machine learning (ML), AI, access management, security, Internet of Things, and centralized tools.

Progent has experience helping organizations of all sizes to plan, configure, test, manage, and troubleshoot IT ecosystems that use a variety of network models such as on-premises data centers, private clouds, one or multiple public clouds, or a hybrid mix of local and cloud-based resources. Progent can provide fast online or onsite access to high-level consultants to assist you to evaluate the advantages and drawbacks of possible network models and understand the feature set and cost of Google Cloud Platform vs. alternative cloud offerings.

Progent's Microsoft, Linux, and Cisco experts can assist your organization to expand your current IT resources with the Google Cloud, and Progent's database experts can show you how to make your business-critical applications cloud ready so they can take full advantage of GCP products and services. Progent can help you to deploy virtual machines on GCP Compute Engine, design a cost-effective storage system using Google Cloud Storage services, and streamline access management with GCP Cloud Identity. Progent can also help you to use GCP's tools to manage and monitor your GCP Cloud ecosystem so it consistently provides maximum business value.

Key Services Offered for the Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform offers over Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service services addressing nearly all areas of information technology including processing, data storage, database management, networking, system management, cybersecurity, web, mobility, and development. Google Cloud services are offered by subscription. As with other public cloud services, you pay for the resources you use. Important GCP products and services for which Progent offers advanced consulting and technical support include:

Compute Engine is a service for running Windows and Linux VMs in the cloud, comparable to Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. Compute Engine virtual machines have transparent access to GCP block storage and advanced network infrastructure. GCP offers three classes of VMs in your choice of pre-defined or custom sizes. GCP's N2 type virtual machine is value priced and intended for general-purpose applications such as web hosting, business applications, and databases. The C2 type virtual machine supports up to 60 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) for compute-intensive apps like ECAD and simulations. Google Cloud's M2 class virtual machine offers up to 11.5 TB of RAM for RAM-intensive applications like in-memory databases or time-critical analytics. Google Cloud's sole-tenant node option provides a physical Compute Engine server for your exclusive use.

Important benefits of the Google Cloud Compute Engine include live VM migration, which keeps virtual machines working even while undergoing system maintenance, and preemptible VMs, low-cost virtual machine compute instances which continue for up to 24 hours and are intended for running batch jobs that can be paused and resumed at any time without impacting productivity.

Additional available benefits for GCP Compute Engine include:

• Always-encrypted local SSD block storage for enhanced performance and data security
• Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that can be included with VM instances for CPU-intense applications such as machine learning and 3D visualizations
• Global load balancing for maximizing performance and availability at minimal cost
• Google Kubernetes Engine for managing Docker containers on Compute Engine VMs

Google Cloud Storage is object storage that scales to exabytes of data. Objects held in GCP Cloud Storage are organized in containers referred to as buckets. GCP offers four classes of cloud storage, differentiated and priced according to the object's anticipated duration and its access/at-rest ratio. As you move through Google's storage classes from Standard to Archive storage, access costs increase, at-rest expense go down, and required minimum storage duration increases. GCP's storage classes allow you to manage costs by planning the appropriate cost/performance balance for your network, and Google Cloud's Object Life Cycle Management tool enables you to automate the progression of storage objects from hot to cold types as they age. All storage classes share global accessibility, unlimited scale (but a maximum size limit of 5 TB for individual objects, no minimum object size, low latency, optional geo-redundancy, and a shared set of security and management utilities. A single API applies to all Google Cloud Storage types.

Standard Storage is the default class and is intended for data used often or stored only for short periods. There is no minimum storage duration. To get the best speed and least network usage fees, Standard Storage data should be kept in the same geographical region as the VM instances or the container clusters that use the data. Standard Storage offers the top average uptime across any regional distribution scheme. Nearline Storage is a low-priced storage type intended for data accessed infrequently, preferably no more than once per month. Examples of appropriate use cases are periodic backup and archiving. At-rest costs are lower than with Google's Standard Storage, but data access costs more, availability is marginally less, and duration is at least 30 days.

Coldline Storage offers rock bottom storage pricing for at-rest data and is designed for scenarios where objects are accessed no more frequently than once a quarter. Minimum storage duration is three months, availability is slightly lower than with GCP's Standard and Nearline Storage classes, and access costs are comparatively expensive. Google's Archive Storage, which offers the least at-rest storage pricing and a minimum storage duration of one year, is the best storage class for data kept exclusively for backup or archive purposes. Access pricing for Archive Storage is the highest of any GCP storage type.

Cloud Storage Encryption
Google Cloud Storage always encrypts stored data on the server end prior to placing it on disk. Added to this routine encryption, you can choose more options to encrypt your data. There are two supplemental server-side encryption options that allow data to be encrypted after arriving at Google Cloud Storage but before the data is written to disk. Google Cloud's Customer-supplied encryption keys enables you to supply and control your own encryption keys. Google's Customer-managed encryption keys alternative allows you to create and control your encryption keys using Google's Cloud Key Management Service. Both these server-side encryption services provide an extra level of encryption above GCP's standard Cloud Storage encryption.

In case 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 unified platform for controlling access to network resources and assigning authority for users and services to access resources for a specified duration. Examples of GCP resources are Compute Engine virtual machine instances and Cloud Storage buckets. Centralized tools offer administrators the ability to control access rights for all services available within the Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Identity and Access Management features high precision in designing policies to assign groups and users permissions to access only required resources while preventing access to unnecessary resources.

With Google Cloud IAM, policies are based on roles; roles are made up of permissions; and permissions are associated with resources. Users or groups are added to policies, and through the policy they are given access to the specific resources their roles provide. As an example of Google Cloud IAM's role granularity, the Cloud Pub/Sub service can be accessed with a variety of usage right 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 hierarchy-based, flowing down from the organization to projects and then to resources. You can establish organization-wide policies, refine them for a specific project, and refine them further for a specific resource. You can assign access policies to specific resources, to a project, or at the top organizational level. Policies you assign to an organization flow down to projects in the organization and then to resources within projects.

Further refinement in managing resource access rights is offered by enabling admins to include context like endpoint security status, IP address, resource class, and time. You can control access rights via the GUI interface of the web-based Cloud Console tool, through programming by using Google Cloud IAM methods, or through the gcloud command-line feature. Google Cloud IAM automatically maintains a complete audit trail to simplify regulatory compliance.

Cloud Identity and Access Management is included without additional cost to all Google Cloud licensees.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE is a Docker container service for running containerized apps. Kubernetes was initially created by Google to automate Docker container orchestration and was offered as open source in 2014. Since then Kubernetes has grown to be the leading platform for managing containerized applications.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is powered by Google's Container-Optimized OS and supports Certified Kubernetes, allowing workload compatibility with other Kubernetes platforms across cloud and local environments. To accelerate software development, prebuilt open-source deployment templates for commercial applications are available on Google Cloud Marketplace.

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

Other features of GKE include preemptible virtual machines, persistent storage, always-encrypted local solid-state drive block storage, global load balancing to maximize speed and availability, support for both Windows and Linux nodes, the capability of running stateless serverless containers with the GCP Cloud Run service, and usage metering for fine-grained visibility into your Kubernetes clusters.

Google Kubernetes Engine complies with HIPAA and PCI DSS 3.1. standards. For stronger security, GKE Sandbox delivers an extra level of protection between containerized Google Kubernetes Engine workloads. Google Kubernetes Engine clusters offer integrated 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 device accessible only to distinct addresses.

GKE is priced based on each GCP Compute Engine instance in a cluster. Use of Google Compute Engine resources is priced on a per-second basis with a one-minute minimum usage cost.

Cloud AI Building Blocks allow developers, even with little or no machine learning (ML) backgrounds, to integrate Google's leading-edge AI capabilities into their applications. Essential services address vision, language, and conversation. By using APIs, you can take advantage of Google's pre-trained models and avoid having to deal with creating your own datasets and training and testing your own models. As Google's library of pre-trained models grows in sophistication and size, you can immediately add leading-edge AI technology to your apps. In addition, Google Cloud AutoML products provide the tools required to train, test and deploy your custom domain-specific ML models. You can use any Google AI Building Block by itself or in any combination with other AI Building Blocks according to your business requirements.

For advanced imaging, Google Cloud AI Building Blocks offer the AutoML Vision and Vision API products that allow you to derive insights from image libraries. Both products include REST and RPC APIs and allow your app to detect objects and their location inside an image. AutoML Vision simplifies training for your custom machine learning (ML) models by offering an intuitive graphical interface. After you optimize your models for accuracy, speed and size, you can export them to the Google GCP Cloud or to various edge devices.

Vision API offers integration with Google's out-of-the-box models. Developers can quickly classify images using Google's extensive collections of expertly trained labels. Vision API uses OCR technology to identify text, in over 50 languages, embedded anywhere within your images. Used in conjunction with Google's Document Understanding AI feature, you can use the same machine learning technology that powers Google Search to derive actionable insights from masses of free-form documents. You can discern web entities and pages, distinguish a face from other objects and notice facial characteristics, and recognize product logos and popular landmarks. You can also detect mature or violent content in images.

Google Cloud's AutoML Video Intelligence and Video Intelligence API products, which provide a similarly extensive range of features as Google's Vision services, make it simpler to derive information from video files.

Language Products
Language is Google's strong suit, and Google's stack of AI Building Blocks predictably includes a potent arsenal of products. Google GCP language services include:

• Cloud Translation API
  This service allows developers to enrich web sites and programs with real-time language translation capability based on Google's neural machine translation technology. Google GCP provides a Basic and an Advanced version of the Translation API. Both options use Google's pre-trained, generalized model and offer automatic language identification, an integrated REST API, seamless HTML support, and the ability to translate between over 100 language pairs. The Advanced version of Cloud Translation API adds an extensible glossary to reflect your company's branding in translated copy, batch translation support in GCP Cloud Storage, the ability to incorporate custom Google AutoML Translation models, and an integrated gRPC API. Google's Cloud Translation service is priced per character.
• AutoML Translation
  This ML platform enables you to create a custom translation model by training it with your own prepared dataset. The dataset consists of matching pairs of sentences in the original and target languages. AutoML Translation applies statistical analysis to the pairs from your dataset to train the model, tests it, and scores its accuracy. After you review the results of your custom model, you can tune your dataset and train a new model until you are satisfied with the results. You can create custom translation models in more than fifty language pairs. Costs for using AutoML Translation are based on the hours of training used and the number of characters you include for translation.
• Cloud Natural Language API
  GCP's Natural Language API uses a library of standard ML models to assist you to grasp the meaning and structure of documents. A content classification model identifies content categories in a document, like civil engineering, investing, or entertainment; an entity analysis model identifies and tags familiar entities referenced within the document, such as product, company, or public figure); a sentiment analysis model assesses the author's positive or negative attitude expressed in the document and the strength of passion; an entity sentiment analysis model integrates entity and sentiment analysis by identifying known entities within a document and estimating the positive or negative attitude and the magnitude of feeling expressed in relation to those entities; a syntactic analysis model extracts structural organization 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 text being analyzed 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 held in Google Cloud Storage.
• AutoML Natural Language
  GCP's AutoML Natural Language service enables you to create and refine your own Natural Language models for classification, entity extraction, and sentiment analysis. For example, a custom sentiment analysis model created by an airline could learn that a reference to misplaced baggage in social media reflects a negative rather than positive sentiment. GCP's AutoML Natural Language service makes it easy to create your own dataset, use the dataset to train a model, test the resulting model, and refine your dataset until your model is ready for production.
• Dialogflow
  Google Cloud's Dialogflow is a platform that uses the natural language understanding technology behind Google Assistant to help you to create a conversational interface so your product can interact with your users by voice. You can add this technology to a mobile app, website, voice response system, or any other application that could be enhanced with voice interaction. Google's Dialogflow service can understand text or audio inputs and can reply via text or synthetic voice. Dialogflow can recognize a user's intent and detect pre-defined entities including time, date, and numbers. You can teach your agent to identify your own custom entity types by providing small sample datasets, or you can utilize over 40 out-of-the-box agents as templates. Commercial versions of Dialogflow are priced according to audio/phone time and the volume of characters and queries.
• Cloud Text-to-Speech
  Google's Text-to-Speech API converts text or Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) to high-quality, natural-sounding speech in over 30 languages and more than 180 voices. Cloud Text-to-Speech service supports any app or device capable of sending REST or gRPC requests. This includes phones, desktop PCs, tablets, and IoT devices such as autos, TVs, and audio speakers. Accepted audio coding formats include mp3, Linear16, and Ogg Opus. You can use SSML tags in order to add pauses, numbers, date and time formatting, etc. Cloud Text-to-Speech is billed per million characters of text processed.
• Speech-to-Text
  Google Cloud's Speech-to-Text API gives developers access to leading-edge automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology based on Google's continually refined deep-learning neural network algorithms. Google's Speech-to-Text can translate streaming audio in real time and can be optimized to support standard sampling rates associated with phones, video, or voice commands and search. Google's API supports 120 languages and can recognize what language is spoken from a list of up to four. You can identify a maximum of 5,000 words or phrases that pertain to your organization, like brand or partner names. The technology can automatically capitalize proper names and convert numbers into addresses, dates, phone numbers, and currencies. Video transcription includes punctuation, and the speaker diarization feature can differentiate among multiple talkers in a group. Noise cancellation is included, and for some languages you can filter out offensive expressions. Supported encoding formats include FLAC, AMR, PCMU, and Linear-16. Billing is time based.

Progent can help you to decide which of your applications are suited for GCP and can help you make your legacy applications cloud compatible. Progent has helped clients evaluate running Google Cloud SQL, using Google Cloud Dataproc for local Hadoop, adopting Google Cloud Kubernetes Engine as a virtualization substitute, and deploying MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud vs. on-premises MongoDB. Progent can provide as-needed online consulting support for small tasks to help you rapidly resolve occasional technical challenges or Progent can provide end-to-end project management outsourcing services to ensure your GCP deployment program is successfully completed on time and on budget.

Some of most frequently encountered technical issues businesses run into when migrating to GCP or other public cloud platform is reconfiguring firewalls and VPN connections to provide users with convenient but protected access to cloud services. Progent can provide the services of Cisco-certified CCIE network engineers and firewall experts for security appliances from leading vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, SonicWall, and Fortinet to help you to set up or troubleshoot firewalls for connecting to Google Cloud Platform. To support mobile computing, Progent's iPhone and iPad technology consultants and Android integration consultants can help you to configure and administer secure mobile devices for your GCP users. Progent can work in concert with your in-house technical team and Google's support engineers to resolve Google Cloud connectivity issues rapidly and economically.

Popular online consulting services offered by Progent to assist businesses expand their networks with Google Cloud Platform include:

• Review hybrid solution design for Google Compute Engine VMs and GCP Cloud Storage
• Create and test VM images for Windows or Linux
• Configure, integrate and troubleshoot VPN tunnels for connectivity with GCP
• Design integration solutions for firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Barracuda, SonicWall, and Fortinet and others
• Configure and troubleshoot mobile endpoints
• Define and verify policies based on leading practices
• Fix IP addressing issues
• Define cost-effective plan for GCP Cloud Storage
• Optimize query performance on Cloud SQL
• Automate license management
• Resolve certificate issues

Other public cloud platforms supported by Progent include:

Progent's Microsoft Azure cloud planning and integration consultants can assist you with every phase of Microsoft Azure migration such as requirements definition, readiness assessment, system design, pilot testing, implementation, automated administration, performance tuning, license controls, disaster recovery preparedness, security policy enforcement, and compliance assessment. Progent can assist your IT staff to set up and troubleshoot firewalls and VPN connections so your users can securely access to Azure services, and Progent's Microsoft-certified consulting experts can assist you set up key Microsoft technologies to run in Azure including Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL Server and Skype for Business. Progent can also help your organization to create a hybrid environment that transparently combines on-premises datacenters with Azure-based resources.

Microsoft has made a strong effort to enable transparent hybrid environments that combine Microsoft 365 Exchange Online and local Exchange. This allows you to have some Exchange mailboxes located on your on-premises datacenter or private cloud and other mailboxes hosted by Microsoft 365. Progent's Microsoft-certified Exchange consulting team can help your organization with any facet of designing, integrating and troubleshooting your hybrid Microsoft 365/Exchange network. Progent's Exchange consultants can provide as-needed expertise to help you resolve stubborn technical problems and also offer comprehensive project management outsourcing or co-sourcing to ensure your hybrid Microsoft 365/Exchange solution is completed on time and within budget. For more information about Progent's consulting support for hybrid Microsoft 365 Exchange and on-prem Exchange environments, see Exchange Online integration solutions with on-premises Exchange.

Progent's Office and Microsoft 365 consultants can help companies of any size to incorporate Microsoft Office desktop and Microsoft 365 apps such as Office Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Visio and Publisher into a cohesive productivity solution that offers fast ROI and enables better business outcomes. Progent can assist you to interface Office or Microsoft 365 applications with each other and with additional key Microsoft platforms such as SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server deployed on-premises or hosted in the cloud. Progent's consultants can also assist you to resolve compatibility problems with different releases of Office and offers live online Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 instruction to individual users and groups.

Progent's Amazon AWS integration consultants offer cost-effective remote support to assist businesses to access Amazon AWS cloud services including Amazon EC2 for virtual server hosting, Amazon S3 for expandable cloud storage, and Amazon Glacier for value-priced archival storage. Progent can assist your IT team with every aspect of Amazon AWS migration and troubleshooting including requirements analysis, preparedness assessment, system design, testing, configuration, centralized administration, performance tuning, software license management, disaster recovery mechanisms, and security and compliance. Progent can provide advanced expertise with firewall configuration and VPN technology and can show you how to create cloud-based or hybrid environments that seamlessly incorporate Amazon AWS services. Progent can provide occasional expertise or Progent can provide comprehensive project management outsourcing to help you migrate efficiently to the Amazon AWS platform.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) is a library of APIs that enables Amazon sellers to streamline their business processes by automating crucial sales functions such as listings, orders, shipments, fulfillment, and finances. By tapping into Amazon's extensive online ecosystem and automating their sales processes, vendors can expand their market, lower their cost of sales, improve reaction time to customers, and increase their profits. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service consultants can collaborate with your development team and provide programming, workflow integration, project management support, and training so you can shorten development time and get to market quickly.

Contact Progent for Google Cloud Platform Integration Expertise
If you are looking for help with any facet of integrating your network with Google Cloud Platform or any other public cloud service, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.