Google Cloud: Accelerating Mexico’s Digital Transformation

Mexico’s business community has arrived at an inflection point in its digital transformation journey, where the business decisions of today will affect their short-term competitiveness and long-term continuity. The success of this transformative business building process will depend significantly on an organization’s resiliency and capacity to make informed business decisions in real-time, according to showcased innovations at Google Cloud Next, Leaders Connect Mexico. 

“The cloud was a major enabler that made it possible to adopt innovations easily and quickly so that industries and organizations had the capacity to reconcile their challenges and be resilient in the face of a turbulent [macroeconomic] context,” said Julio Velázquez, Director, Google Cloud Mexico. As companies look to refine their digital transformation strategies, Google Cloud aims to support and accelerate this undertaking with cutting-edge technologies designed to help companies solve their most critical business challenges, continue growing and drive innovation in their respective industries, according to a press release. 

Limitations established by the COVID-19 pandemic forced companies and consumers alike to convene in the nascent—and still developing—global digital economy. However, considerable customer, operational and supply-chain interactions remained manual. To stay competitive and capture high consumer demand, an expeditious and scalable time-to-market strategy was necessitated, catapulting a horizontal industry migration towards cloud services. The flexibility of cloud services allowed companies to reconceptualize and reconfigure the fundamentals of business delivery, creation and capture at breakneck speed, but it was not without the generation of unintended risk. 

As Mexico seemingly enters a post-pandemic period, companies have begun to shift from a survivalist mode to one of strategic growth. Looking toward 2023, most companies are aware that they need to build new digital businesses to stay economically viable, according to McKinsey’s Global Survey on digital strategy. In practice, top performing companies “are making more aggressive plans to differentiate themselves with technology, with some preparing to reinvent their value proposition altogether,” reads the report.  

So far, the market has outlined two differential success factors: cloud services and data analysis, as anticipated by consulting firm Gartner, which expects both markets to grow significantly in 2023 despite a forecasted economic recession. Google Cloud took lead from these market needs to offer cloud services that enable companies to develop software faster, innovate easily and scale efficiently– while reducing risk. To support expected demand for 2023 and beyond, the company invested in the construction of its first Google Cloud region in Mexico, which is expected to contribute MX$226.3 billion (US$11.4 billion) to Mexico’s GDP and create 117,400 jobs by 2030.

Through its open-source infrastructure portfolio, Google Cloud brings services to on-premise, multiple public clouds and the edge, while individually caring for the operation, governance and evolution so companies can focus on industry specialization. Athos, the modern application platform, extends the reach of Google Cloud services, allowing companies to deliver portability to a variety of locations so engineers can establish operational consistency throughout a multi- cloud environment. Furthermore, companies also have the capacity to build on-top of, or modify existing code without compromising their infrastructure and data autonomy. Altogether, Google Cloud services aims to encourage public and private organizations of all sizes to “disrupt the market and give way to new regional players,” said Velázquez.

Data Cloud tackles organizations inability to substantively extract tangible and measurable value from their data through the combined power of data unification and AI/ML. Through the industry's only unified data platform, companies will have the ability to manage every stage of the data lifecycle from running operational transactions to analytical applications across data warehouses and lakes. At the core of this solution, artificial intelligence and machine learning automatically categorizes data and builds improved insights to suggest the automation of business processes. Instantaneous access to “real-time data and facilitated legibility effectively allows companies to graduate from data delivery to event delivery, a defining differentiator,” said David Ruiz, Data, Analytics & AI Practice Leader, Google Cloud Mexico.

Not overlooking the increasingly hostile threat environment, to protect data assets in its cloud environment, Trusted Cloud provides “a ground-up security transformation” that should ideally be accompanied by an internal cultural transformation, according to Eduardo Palacio, Security & Compliance Specialist, Google Cloud Mexico. Bridging the gap between business decisions and security at all levels of an organization's hierarchy will help organizations avoid costly breaches. Furthermore, this should be accompanied by a habit of routine revisions to keep up to date with proliferating security threats, which can be identified and compared in arguably one of the biggest databases of cyberthreats since its acquisition of cybersecurity firm Mandiant.