The last 12 months have been busy for us at Google Cloud. Our customers told us they wanted to have more support as they continued to scale their businesses on our global infrastructure. So, we overhauled our Voice of the Customer Programs, expanded our Customer Advisory Boards, and launched a brand-new, independently run Google Cloud customer community (C2C). We also rolled out Event Management Services for retailers and other businesses dealing with peak traffic loads—and introduced new Compliance and Security Assessments and Assured Workloads to make it easier for customers in regulated industries to configure their cloud environments.

Today, we’re raising the bar even further with the launch of Mission Critical Services (MCS) for GCP. 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. Capital markets firms rely on algorithmic trades that occur within milliseconds; telecommunications firms need to ensure calls are routed quickly to call centers around the world; and even popular shopping apps can lose consumers for life if their online experiences are broken. The cloud technologies and architectures underpinning these experiences are critical to ensuring long-term survival—and long-term success.

MCS for Google Cloud is a new service available for purchase by Premium Support customers. Unlike many premium services in the market that offload the entire burden of mission-critical support to the cloud vendor, MCS is a consultative offering in which we partner with you on a journey toward readiness. And what makes MCS truly unique is that it’s built on the same methodologies we use in support of our own Google Cloud infrastructure, including a set of core concepts and methods that our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams have developed over the past two decades.

How Mission Critical Services works

When rolling out MCS at your organization, we partner with you on a step-by-step process through assessment, remediation, and onboarding, where we bring your architecture, control, observability and measurement into Google-standard Mission Critical Operations mode. For example, during the assessment phase, we’ll ask questions such as:

• Architecture—Is your architecture designed with resiliency in mind?
• Control—Do you have the right balance of control and agility in operating your mission-critical environment?
• Observability—Are you instrumenting the right monitoring systems and signals?
• Measurement—How are you setting and raising service-level objectives to improve your most critical applications and services?

Of course, once you’ve engaged with our MCS team, we’re there to help you drive continuous improvement of your environment through our biannual tune-ups, architecture reviews, and other ongoing check-ins. Our highest tier of engineers will have deep familiarity with your workloads, allowing us to monitor, prevent, and mitigate impacts quickly, delivering the fastest response in the industry. For example, if 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.

HSBC, one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organizations with more than 40 million customers globally, is using MCS for GCP to provide a superior experience and uptime for business banking customers using its HSBC Kinetic service. Kinetic is an app-based banking solution that offers a full suite of banking services, including direct debits, cashflow management, integration into third-party accounting services, and more.

“HSBC Kinetic is transforming digital business banking and the customer experience. We’re excited to use Mission Critical Services from Google Cloud, which offers expedited GCP technical team engagement and continuous improvement. The collaboration with Google Cloud helped us to grow confidence and ensure our new HSBC Kinetic service for business banking customers is a success,” said Paul Frost, HSBC Chief Architect, Wholesale Banking Technology 

We’re committed to delivering enterprise-ready services to meet your mission critical needs—whether it’s a global-scale launch, ensuring Black Friday and Cyber Monday goes off without a hitch, or delivering public services to citizens in times of crisis. MCS is available now for GCP customers who subscribe to Premium Support, have the minimum recommended Technical Account Manager coverage, and have qualified mission-critical environments. Please connect with your Google Cloud sales representative to learn more.