Case Study

As companies increasingly shift to cloud-based solutions, transitioning to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) can appear daunting, filled with complex challenges and pivotal decisions. This transition isn’t merely about embracing new technology; it’s a transformation of the IT infrastructure towards greater agility, scalability, and data-centricity. Establishing a robust foundation for GCP adoption, emphasizing Governance, Security, Visibility, and Automation, is crucial. This approach eases the friction typically encountered by Product teams when adapting to a new platform.

For businesses at the outset of their cloud journey or those refining their GCP strategies, Qualigy Tech’s Cloud Enablement platform, qTOOLS, offers invaluable support. It lays down the essential groundwork for an enterprise’s cloud infrastructure, leading to enhanced security, streamlined workflows, and considerable cost reductions. By leveraging qTOOLS, organizations can navigate the complexities of cloud adoption with greater confidence and efficiency.

Organizational Needs

Adopting Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in an enterprise setting involves several technical challenges. We often hear below from our clients:

Security and Compliance: Implementing and maintaining robust security measures in the cloud is critical. Enterprises need to understand and configure GCP’s security features properly, such as identity and access management, network security, and encryption. Additionally, they must ensure compliance with industry regulations and standards, which can vary by region and industry.

Cost Management and Optimization: While cloud services offer scalability and flexibility, they can also lead to unexpected costs if not managed properly. Enterprises need to develop strategies for monitoring and optimizing resource usage to control costs. This includes understanding the pricing models of different GCP services and implementing cost-effective architectures.

Skill Gaps and Training: This challenge involves both initial training and ongoing education to keep up with new features and best practices.

Integration with Existing Systems: Integrating GCP with existing on-premises systems, third-party services, and other cloud platforms can be challenging. This includes ensuring compatibility, maintaining data consistency, and setting up secure and efficient networking connections. The integration process often requires a deep understanding of both the existing systems and GCP’s capabilities.

Opportunity

We recently helped a client with creating their GCP foundation.

Streamlined Project Management: qGOV provides an automated process for requesting and provisioning new GCP Projects, creating an opinionated Landing Zone for GCP. This reduced the manual effort and time taken to onboard new Projects, ensuring a consistent setup aligned with GCP’s best practices.

Enhanced Security Assessment: qSEC included robust tools for continuous assessment and reporting on the security posture of their GCP resources. By identifying and mitigating potential vulnerabilities, we enhanced their overall security framework.

Effective Spend Categorization and Tagging: We developed a strategic tagging policy to identify various workloads and their associated costs. This tagging strategy was crucial in categorizing cloud spend and was instrumental in subsequent optimization efforts.

Custom Dashboards and Reporting: To provide clear visibility into their GCP environment, we created custom dashboards using qFI. These dashboards offered insights into spending patterns, resource utilization, and security status, enabling informed decision-making.

Details

Automated Provisioning: After detailed discussions, we proposed and created the Organization Folders hierarchy. We defined Organization Policies and assigned them to Project and Folders providing Guardrails for the enterprise workloads. We customized the Project Vending Machine module of qGOV for the client’s specific needs. Using these, we streamlined the provisioning process, ensuring each new subscription was configured with the necessary policies and settings right from the start.

Security Tools: qSEC is a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool with hundreds of security checks. It helps in identifying and measuring security risks. qSEC dashboards report compliance against industry standards like CISv3, NIST Cloud Standards, FedRAMP, etc. We reviewed default checks provided by qSEC and added additional checks to meet the client’s needs.

Tagging Strategy: Tags were carefully designed to reflect cost centers, environments, and project codes, allowing for detailed tracking and reporting of resource usage and spending. Tag hierarchy was defined and implemented to enable proper inheritance for Cost Analysis.

Cost Dashboards: qFI integrates enterprise data with GCP Billing reports to facilitate enriched Chargeback and Showback reports. Using Looker, we built comprehensive dashboards that provided real-time insights into the overall cost, cost per Business Unit, and Platform/Application. Our reports also included spending forecasts, trends, cost anomalies, etc.

Results

• Enhanced Security Posture: With continuous monitoring and automated compliance checks, the enterprise strengthened its defense against potential threats and vulnerabilities.

• Operational Efficiency: The automated processes for subscription management significantly reduced manual efforts and errors, leading to smoother operations and faster deployment of new projects.

• Informed Decision-Making: The custom dashboards provided the enterprise with the necessary tools to make data-driven decisions, further optimizing their cloud environment.