Cloud Integration Consulting

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a leading set of cloud services that includes Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service products. GCP's penetration in the public cloud sector is behind only Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Like these vendors, GCP uses the same massive network infrastructure that supports its most popular online applications. In Google's case, these include Google Search as well as YouTube. The Google cloud portfolio contains over 100 products related to processing, data storage, database management, networking, analytics, Big Data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, access management, cybersecurity, Internet of Things (IoT), and unified tools.

Progent offers expertise assisting businesses from small offices to enterprises to plan, configure, test, manage, and maintain IT environments based on a variety of network architectures including on-premises data centers, private clouds, one or multiple public clouds, or a hybrid combination of onsite and cloud infrastructure. Progent offers quick online or onsite access to seasoned experts who can assist you to assess the advantages and drawbacks of possible network models and understand the feature set and pricing structure of Google Cloud vs. other public cloud vendors.

Progent's Microsoft, Linux, and Cisco experts can assist your organization to expand your current network resources with the Google Cloud Platform, and Progent's database consultants can help make your key applications cloud capable so they can benefit fully from GCP services. Progent can help you to set up virtual machines on Google Cloud Compute Engine, plan a cost-effective storage system with Google Cloud Storage services, and simplify access management with Google Cloud Identity. Progent can also help you to utilize GCP's tools to manage and monitor your GCP Cloud ecosystem so it consistently delivers maximum business value.

Popular Services Available for the Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform has over Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service services covering nearly all areas of information technology including compute, data storage, database management, networking, system management, cybersecurity, web, mobility, and application development. GCP services are offered on a subscription basis. Like other public cloud services, you are charged for the resources you use. Popular GCP services for which Progent can provide expert 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 VMs have seamless access to Google Cloud block storage and advanced network infrastructure. GCP offers three basic classes of virtual machines in either pre-defined or custom sizes. Google's N2 type virtual machine is affordably priced and designed for general-purpose applications such as web hosting, business apps, and databases. The C2 type VM provides up to 60 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) for compute-intensive applications like ECAD and simulations. GCP's M2 class VM offers as much as 11.5 TB of memory for memory-intensive apps like in-memory databases or time-critical analytics. GCP's sole-tenant node option features a physical Compute Engine machine dedicated to your exclusive use.

Important benefits of the Google Cloud Compute Engine include live VM migration, which keeps VMs on line even during scheduled maintenance, and preemptible VMs, low-cost virtual machine compute instances which last for up to 24 hours and are designed for executing batch operations that can be paused and continued intermittently without impacting operations.

Additional key benefits for Google Compute Engine include:

• Always-encrypted local solid-state drive block storage for enhanced speed and security
• GPU accelerators that can be added to VM instances for processor-intense applications such as machine learning (ML) and 3D graphics
• Global load balancing for optimizing speed and availability at minimal cost
• Google Kubernetes Engine for managing Docker containers on Compute Engine virtual machines

Google Cloud Storage provides object storage that scales to exabytes of data. Objects placed in Google Cloud Storage are logically organized in containers referred to as buckets. Google provides four classes of cloud storage, distinguished and priced according to the object's anticipated duration and its busy/dormant ratio. As you move along Google's storage types from Standard to Archive storage, access expense increase, at-rest expense go down, and required minimum storage time goes up. GCP's storage classes allow you to manage expenses by planning the appropriate price/performance profile for your environment, and Google's Object Life Cycle Management feature allows you to automate the migration of storage objects from hot to cold types as they age. All types share global accessibility, unlimited storage (but a maximum size limit of 5 TB for individual objects, no minimum object size, low latency, optional geo-redundancy, and a shared suite of security and management utilities. A single API applies to all storage classes.

Standard Storage is the default class and is optimized for objects accessed often or stored only briefly. There is no minimum storage duration. To get the highest speed and least network usage charges, Standard Storage objects should be kept in the same geographical location as the VM instances or the container clusters that use the data. Standard Storage delivers the highest average uptime for any regional distribution scheme. Nearline Storage is a economical storage class intended for data accessed only occasionally, preferably once per month or less. Examples of appropriate use scenarios are periodic backup and archiving. At-rest pricing is less than with Google Cloud's Standard Storage, but access costs more, availability is slightly less, and storage duration is a minimum of 30 days.

Coldline Storage provides very low storage costs for dormant data and is intended for situations where objects are accessed less than once a quarter. Minimum storage duration is 90 days, availability is slightly less than with Google's Standard and Nearline Storage classes, and data access costs are comparatively expensive. Google Cloud's Archive Storage, which offers the least at-rest storage pricing but has a minimum storage duration of one year, is the best storage service for data held exclusively for backup or archive purposes. Access costs for Archive Storage are the highest of any Google storage service.

Cloud Storage Encryption
Google Cloud Storage always encrypts stored data on the server side before placing it on disk. In addition to this standard encryption, you can select other options to encrypt your data. GCP offers two supplemental server-side encryption options that cause objects to be encrypted after making it to Google Cloud Storage but before being written to disk. Google Cloud's Customer-supplied encryption keys enables you to supply and manage your own encryption keys. Google Cloud's Customer-managed encryption keys alternative allows you to generate and manage your encryption keys via Google's Cloud Key Management Service. Both these server-side encryption options create an additional layer of encryption above GCP's default Cloud Storage encryption.

If you perform client-side encryption before sending data to Google Cloud Storage, your encrypted data will also be subject to server-side encryption.

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) is Google's unified platform for managing access to resources and assigning authority for users and services to use resources for a specified period of time. Examples of GCP resources are Compute Engine virtual machine instances and Google Cloud Storage buckets. Centralized tools give admins the ability to control access permissions for all services available within Google Cloud. Cloud IAM offers high precision in designing policies to grant groups and users permissions to use only required resources while blocking access to non-essential resources.

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

Cloud Identity and Access Management 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 given project, and refine them even more for a specific resource. You can assign access policies to individual resources, to a project, or at the top organizational level. Policies you assign to an organization flow down to projects in the organization and from there resources in those projects.

Further refinement in managing resource permissions is provided by permitting administrators to include context such as device security status, IP address, resource type, and date/time. You can control permissions by using the GUI interface of Google's web-based Cloud Console, via automation by using Cloud IAM methods, or through Google's gcloud command-line feature. Google Cloud IAM automatically maintains a complete audit trail to simplify compliance.

Google Cloud Identity and Access Management is provided at no additional cost to all Google Cloud licensees.

Google Kubernetes Engine is a container service for running containerized apps. Kubernetes was initially developed by Google to automate Docker container orchestration and was offered as open source at the end of 2014. Since then Kubernetes has become the leading solution for managing containerized applications.

Google Kubernetes Engine is built on Google's Container-Optimized OS and supports Certified Kubernetes, ensuring workload compatibility with other Kubernetes products spanning cloud and on-premises networks. To streamline software development, prebuilt open-source deployment templates for enterprise-grade applications are offered on Google Cloud Marketplace.

The Migrate for Anthos service, offered for free with Google Kubernetes Engine, enables you to migrate and port your workloads easily from your existing infrastructure into Google Kubernetes Engine containers. These workloads can be physical servers and VMs located onsite, in Google's Compute Engine, or in third-party clouds. GKE allows pod and cluster autoscaling for ongoing analysis of the CPU and RAM usage of pods and for automatically tuning CPU and RAM requests across multiple node pools.

Additional features of Google Kubernetes Engine include preemptible virtual machines, persistent storage, always-encrypted local solid-state drive (SSD) block storage, global load balancing to optimize speed and uptime, compatibility with both Windows Server and Linux nodes, the capability of running stateless serverless containers via the GCP Cloud Run service, and usage metering for fine-grained insight into Kubernetes clusters.

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

GKE is priced based on each GCP Compute Engine instance in a cluster. Usage of GCP Compute Engine resources is billed by the second with a one-minute minimum usage charge.

Cloud AI Building Blocks allow software developers, even without machine learning (ML) backgrounds, to integrate Google's leading-edge AI capabilities into their applications. Essential capabilities cover sight, language, and speech. By using APIs, you can take advantage of Google's pre-trained models rather than having to deal with creating your own datasets from scratch and training your own AI models. As Google's catalog of pre-trained models grows in sophistication and size, you can quickly add leading-edge AI technology to your apps. Also, Google Cloud AutoML products give you the tools required to train, test and deploy your custom domain-specific ML models. Developers can use any Google AI Building Block individually or in any combination with other AI tools according to your business requirements.

For AI-enhanced imaging, Google Cloud AI Building Blocks offer the AutoML Vision and Vision API services that allow you to extract useful intelligence from your images. Both products use REST and RPC APIs and enable your app to discern objects and their position inside the image. AutoML Vision simplifies the training process for your home-grown machine learning (ML) models by providing an easy-to-use graphical interface. After you tune your models for accuracy, speed and size, you can send them to the Google Cloud or to various edge devices.

Google Cloud's Vision API provides programmatic access to Google's pre-trained machine learning models. Developers can quickly classify images via Google's collections of predefined labels. Google Cloud's Vision API uses OCR technology to identify text, in over 50 languages, contained within images. Combined with Google's Document Understanding AI technology, you can benefit from the same machine learning technology that powers Google Search to extract useful information from volumes of unstructured documents. You can discern web entities and pages, isolate a face from other items and notice facial attributes, and recognize product logos and popular landmarks. You can also detect mature or violent content within images.

Google Cloud's AutoML Video Intelligence and Video Intelligence API products, which offer a similarly extensive array of features as Google's Vision products, make it easy to extract value 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 services. Google GCP language products include:

• Cloud Translation API
  This service enables you to enrich web sites and applications with real-time language translation capability powered by Google’s pre-trained neural machine translation technology. Google Cloud offers a Basic and an Advanced version of Google's Translation API. Both versions are based on Google's pre-trained, generalized model and offer automatic language detection, a REST API, seamless HTML support, and the ability to translate between more than 100 language pairs. The Advanced option of Google Cloud Translation API adds an extensible glossary to reflect your branding in translated text, batch translation support in Google Cloud Storage, the ability to incorporate (but not create) custom Google AutoML Translation models, and a built-in gRPC API. Google's Cloud Translation service is priced per character.
• AutoML Translation
  This machine learning tool allows developers to create a custom translation model by training it using 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 pairs from your custom dataset to train the model, validates it, and scores its accuracy. After you review the results of your model, you can tune your dataset and train a new model repeatedly until you are happy with the outcome. You can create your own translation models in more than fifty language pairs. Pricing for using AutoML Translation are calculated based on the hours of training used and the number of characters you include for translation.
• Cloud Natural Language API
  Google Cloud's Natural Language API marshals 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 architecture, investing, or sports; an entity analysis model finds and labels familiar entities referred to in the document, such as country, company, or public figure); a sentiment analysis model assesses the author's positive or negative attitude suggested by the document and the magnitude of emotion; an entity sentiment analysis model combines entity and sentiment analysis by detecting known entities within a document and estimating the attitude and the magnitude of emotion demonstrated towards those entities; a syntactic analysis model extracts structural information by breaking text up into sentences and tokens (words), which are then broken down 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. Text to be analyzed can be embedded in the JSON request or held in Google Cloud Storage.
• AutoML Natural Language
  Google Cloud's AutoML Natural Language product allows you to build 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 mention of misplaced luggage in a tweet counts as a negative sentiment. Google'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 tune your dataset until the model is ready to deploy.
• 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 can interact with your users by voice. You can add this capability to a smartphone app, website, interactive voice response system, or other scenario that could be improved with voice conversation. GCP's Dialogflow platform can analyze text or audio inputs and can respond through text or synthetic speech. Dialogflow can recognize a user’s intent and detect prebuilt entities like time, date, and numbers. You can train your agent to identify your own custom entity types by submitting small sample datasets, or you can use over 40 tested agents as templates. Commercial versions of Dialogflow are priced based on audio/phone time and the number of characters and queries.
• Cloud Text-to-Speech
  GCP's Text-to-Speech API converts text or Speech Synthesis Markup Language to high-quality, natural-seeming speech in more than 30 languages and over 180 voices. Cloud Text-to-Speech platform works with any app or device capable of sending REST or gRPC requests. This includes phones, PCs, iPads or tablets, and IoT devices like cars, TVs, and audio speakers. Supported audio coding formats include mp3, Linear16, and Ogg Opus. You can include SSML tags in order to insert pauses, numbers, date and time formatting, etc. Cloud Text-to-Speech is billed based on million characters of text submitted.
• Speech-to-Text
  GCP's Speech-to-Text API gives developers access to leading-edge automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology based on Google's constantly refined deep-learning neural network algorithms. Google Cloud's Speech-to-Text can translate streaming audio in real time and can be optimized to support standard sampling frequencies associated with phones, video, or voice commands/search. Google's API works with 120 languages and can identify what language is being used from a selection of as many as four languages. You can specify up to 5,000 words or phrases that relate to your organization, like product or partner names. Google's technology can automatically capitalize proper names and format numbers into addresses, dates, phone numbers, and currencies. Video transcription can add punctuation, and speaker diarization technology can differentiate among multiple speakers in a group. Noise cancellation is built in, and for certain languages you have the option to filter out inappropriate expressions. Supported encodings include FLAC, AMR, PCMU, and Linear-16. Billing is time based.

Progent can help you to decide which of your applications are appropriate for Google Cloud and can show you how to make your legacy apps cloud compatible. Progent has experience helping clients evaluate running Google Cloud SQL, using Google Dataproc for on-premises Hadoop, adopting Google Kubernetes Engine as a virtualization substitute, and deploying MongoDB Atlas on GCP vs. on-premises MongoDB. Progent can provide on-demand remote consulting support for small jobs to help you rapidly resolve stubborn technical challenges or Progent can deliver comprehensive project management outsourcing services to make sure your Google Cloud deployment initiative is successfully completed on schedule and within budget.

Some of most frequently encountered technical obstacles organizations face when integrating with Google Cloud or other public cloud is reconfiguring firewalls and VPN tunnels to give users easy but secure access to cloud resources. Progent can provide the services of Cisco-certified CCIE network infrastructure engineers and firewall specialists for security gateways from major vendors like Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Barracuda, SonicWall, and Fortinet to assist you to configure or troubleshoot firewalls for connecting to GCP. To support mobile computing, Progent's iPhone and iPad technology consultants and Google Android integration experts can help you to configure and manage secure mobile endpoints for your GCP users. Progent can work in conjunction with your in-house IT staff and Google's support engineers to resolve GCP integration issues rapidly and affordably.

Examples of remote consulting expertise provided by Progent to assist organizations expand their networks with Google Cloud Platform include:

• Check hybrid solution design for Google Compute Engine Virtual Machines and Google Cloud Storage
• Create and verify virtual machine images for Windows or Linux
• Set up, integrate and debug VPN tunnels for connectivity with GCP
• Design configuration solutions for firewalls from Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Check Point, WatchGuard, and Fortinet and others
• Set up and debug mobile endpoints
• Create and verify security policies based on best practices
• Resolve IP addressing problems
• Design cost-managed plan for GCP Cloud Storage
• Optimize query efficiency on Google Cloud SQL
• Automate software license management
• Fix certificate problems

Additional leading cloud platforms supported by Progent include:

Progent's Azure planning and integration experts can help you with every aspect of Microsoft Azure integration such as needs definition, readiness assessment, system architecture, pilot testing, deployment, centralized management, performance tuning, license management, disaster recovery preparedness, security planning, and regulatory compliance validation. Progent can assist your IT staff to set up and debug firewall appliances and VPN tunnels so your clients can safely connect to Azure-based resources, and Progent's Microsoft-certified consultants can help you set up key Microsoft technologies to run in the cloud including Microsoft Windows Server, Exchange Server, SQL and SharePoint. Progent can also help your organization to set up a hybrid ecosystem that transparently integrates on-premises datacenters with Azure services.

Microsoft allows you to create seamless hybrid networks that integrate Microsoft 365 and local Exchange. This allows you to have some mailboxes located at your physical datacenter and other mailboxes hosted by Microsoft 365. Progent's certified Exchange consulting team can assist you with any facet of designing, integrating and troubleshooting your hybrid Exchange network. Progent's Exchange specialists can provide as-needed support to help you through challenging technical issues and also offer comprehensive project management outsourcing to ensure your hybrid Exchange initiative is carried out on schedule and within budget. For more information about Progent's online consulting services for integrating Microsoft 365 Exchange and on-premises Exchange environments, see Exchange Online integration solutions with on-premises Exchange.

Progent's Office and Microsoft 365 consultants can help companies to incorporate Microsoft Office desktop and Microsoft 365 applications such as Office Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Visio and Publisher into a cohesive solution that offers fast ROI and promotes better business outcomes. Progent can help you to interface Microsoft Office or Microsoft 365 apps with each other and with other core Microsoft technologies such as SharePoint Server, Exchange Server and SQL Server deployed locally or in the cloud. Progent can also help you to fix compatibility problems between various releases of Office desktop and offers live online Office and Microsoft 365 training to individuals or groups.

Progent's Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration experts can provide affordable remote consulting to assist businesses to integrate Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services including Amazon EC2 for virtual server hosting, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for expandable cloud storage, and Amazon Glacier for value-priced archival storage. Progent can assist your IT team with every phase of Amazon AWS integration including requirements analysis, readiness assessment, system design and review, testing, configuration, centralized administration, performance optimization, licensing management, backup/restore solutions, and security and compliance. Progent can provide advanced expertise with firewalls and VPN technology and can show you how to deploy cloud-centric or hybrid environments that efficiently incorporate Amazon AWS resources. Progent offers occasional consulting or Progent can provide comprehensive project management outsourcing services to help you migrate efficiently to the Amazon AWS platform.

Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) is an integrated collection of APIs that allows Amazon sellers to streamline their operations by automating key sales functions including listings, orders, payments, fulfillment, and reports. By leveraging Amazon's vast online selling environment and automating their sales processes, merchants can expand their market, reduce their operating costs, improve reaction time to customers, and add to their bottom line. Progent's Amazon Marketplace Web Service (Amazon MWS) consultants can collaborate with your development staff and provide programming, workflow integration, project management support, and mentoring so you can cut development time and get to market quickly.

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