Google Cloud launches Mission Critical Services for GCP
Google Cloud on Thursday launched Mission Critical Services (MCS) for GCP, a new premium service for customers that want collaborative support protecting mission-critical workloads. It's Google Cloud's latest effort to step up its support for enterprise customers.
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MCS is available for purchase to Google Cloud's Premium Support customers. It's a consultative service, unlike other mission-critical support offerings in the cloud that typically give the cloud vencor full responsibility for keeping workloads up and running. Google applies the same concepts and methods to MCS that it uses to support its own Google Cloud infrastructure.
"It's no secret that, for customers in the most demanding of enterprise environments, even a minute of downtime can mean millions of dollars of lost revenue," Google Cloud's Customer Experience VP John Jester wrote in a blog post.
Jester cited some industries that would find the service valuable, which range from telecommunications to e-commerce. Customers already using the service include HSBC, which is using MCS to support Kinetic, its digital business banking service.
When a customer adopts the service, Google will work with them to evaluate and improve their architecture, control, observability and measurement. The service includes biannual tune-ups, architecture reviews and other ongoing check-ins. Google says its "highest tier" engineers will monitor workloads to prevent and mitigate the impact of incidents.
"I you have any issues--24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week--we'll spin up a live, war room with our experts within five minutes," Jester wrote.
Under the direction of Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian, the public cloud provider has taken a number of steps to improve its business in the enterprise. For one thing, Kurian has surrounded himself with veterans of the enterprise software industry, including Jester.
It's also taken a number of steps specifically to improve customer service for the enterprise. Over the last year, Google revamped its Voice of the Customer Programs, expanded its Customer Advisory Boards and launched an independently run Google Cloud customer community (C2C). The company also introduced new Compliance and Security Assessments, as well as Assured Workloads for customers in regulated industries.