Data is the currency by which today’s economy operates. Every type of organization — manufacturing companies, services-based enterprises, government agencies, and even small businesses — relies on data to help them innovate, connect with stakeholders, make sense of internal operations, and grow. But as data proliferates at an exponential pace, it’s increasingly challenging for organizations to store, track and derive value from all that information. To help enterprises optimize their data and make it a usable asset, Google has partnered with SADA to develop solutions that help organizations reduce time spent on inefficient searching, and ensure that data can connect among disparate apps to create a user-friendly experience.
At the core of this organizational search capability is Google Cloud Search, which identifies and accesses data across the enterprise landscape. It employs machine intelligence to power search across G Suite and other Google apps, as well as within third party apps and services like databases, file systems, content management systems, and content hosted in enterprise repositories. SADA is helping to broaden the reach of that search, and provides a front-end that delivers the best search experience for users.
SADA’s Google Cloud Search solution uncovers data, irrespective of where it exists, so it can be utilized and deployed for the purpose of generating business insight and gaining a holistic view of organizational knowledge. The search functionality covers data that resides in the cloud, on-premise, and in hybrid environments. Users in need of a specific type of information can, from a single tool, initiate a search request and get results from on-premise data sources, internal cloud-based applications, public cloud data sources, G Suite apps, and third-party apps.
Connecting apps, data, and functionality across the enterprise
In keeping with Google’s legacy of simplifying the complex, Google Cloud Search is built to give users access to data across all applications and sources that touch their environment. With enterprises adopting more and more applications across their IT infrastructure, the complexity of maintaining control of information can increase dramatically. SADA has developed a discipline around adoption and usage of Google Cloud Search to ease the burden of data management and to help enterprises derive significant value from their data in the repositories and workloads they access.
The problem that Google and SADA are solving is ultimately about searching, finding, contextualizing, and delivering usable information from available data. While fundamentally an issue of technology, it is rooted in the need to help organizations increase efficiency. While organizations are rich in data, they can’t use what they can’t find. McKinsey research indicates that 20% of an employee’s time is spent looking for information that is relevant to accomplishing their job. And IDC says that 38% of an employee’s time is sucked up by unsuccessfully searching and recreating content that exists, but that they just are unable to find. Time spent searching comes at an opportunity cost to the organization. It also means that a lot of critical information will be ignored.
SADA has built a variety of connectors to applications like SAP Hana, Salesforce, ServiceNow, MindTouch, internal company databases, and a variety of other sources. With these connectors, users get an easier search process and can go more deeply and broadly across a company’s environment to locate relevant information. The SADA solution uses a simple interface from which users can refine searches by relevant categories. An organization that is highly organized by geography can, for example, search within specific location-based information. Companies can define categories based on products, customers, internal teams, or whatever is most important to their needs.
Use cases for efficiency and discovery
Consider a task like preparing a sales presentation— sales teams have to be responsive, accurate, and create a convincing case that differentiates their service or product against their competitors. In building a presentation, a typical sales person will pull data from Salesforce, a marketing automation solution, and maybe an internal repository that houses product roadmap information. Missing from that, however, could be critical information that’s stored in internal repositories like Sharepoint, in team Google docs, sales optimization applications, or any of a host of other apps that people may not even be aware are being used. Finding something normally requires understanding where it’s supposed to be. SADA’s Google Cloud Search solution helps users discover data that they might otherwise not know exists.
Companies can also provide better customer service through better search. Connectors built by SADA for Jira, Confluence, Jive, learning management systems, and other support-related applications can help a company discover information that can be put to use to solve customer issues quickly. Especially for employees in the field who are engaging directly with customers, Google Cloud Search can dramatically lower costs (less time searching, more time solving) as well as improve the type and efficacy of support that employees can offer.
In the case of healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, data is not just a competitive advantage, it can contribute significantly to solutions that improve lives. Google Cloud Search gives companies the ability to identify critical data points from among all types of technical documentation stored in all different types of applications and repositories. Using the SADA solution for Google Cloud Search, they are able to search by chemical compound names to uncover research, trial results, and specifications that can be relevant and critical to their work. More detail and better information can help lead to important discoveries.
Rigorous security across all data sources
Google and SADA applications are built on the premise that security isn’t just a one-and-done proposition. It has to operate in continuously changing environments to identify potential vulnerabilities and isolate risks. Google has, from inception, been dedicated to a continuous innovation mindset that enables Google Cloud Search to benefit from the latest and most effective ways of thwarting malicious activity before it can wreak havoc and damage a business. These innovations include:
Key management: Google Cloud Search uses Security Key Enforcement (two-factor authentication), and Key Management Service, an encryption tool to maintain a protection layer around searched data in transit and at rest. With that protection, it can also allow data to interact with data from other sources (databases, applications, APIs) to deliver more useful assets to users.
Storage and hardware: Google uses the Titan chip to support and facilitate all cloud operations. Because it has built-in authentication and access management capabilities to ensure legitimate traffic between machines and different types of hardware, Google Cloud Search users get the benefit of security at the storage and computer layers, which protects data being searched, irrespective of where it resides.
Application security: Securing applications and the connections among disparate apps is a top priority for customers operating in the cloud. Google Cloud Search employs a data loss prevention (DLP) API that enables scanning of sensitive data types, and uses an Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) which is designed to identify and track access for all data sources.
Organizations are always looking for ways to use information to give them a competitive advantage. But that information has to be easily discoverable and usable before it can demonstrate value. Customers of all types and sizes are already finding that SADA’s approach to Google Cloud Search is helping them find, use, and transact data to get better results from product development, customer engagement, and ongoing innovation.
