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MARCUS EAST: Good afternoon, everybody.
My name's Marcus East.
I have the best job in the world,
in that I'm the Chief Technology Officer for National
Geographic.
And what you just saw on screen there
was just a slice of the National Geographic image collection.
Now, we don't think of those assets just as digital files.
Every single one of those pictures that you saw
tells a story.
They're the stories of adventurers who've
been around the world to explore unknown places,
photographers who are trying to capture
their knowledge of the world, or researchers
who are trying to help us better understand
the planet around us.
And we take our responsibility at National Geographic
very seriously as the custodians of those images
because those images help to tell stories,
and those stories help to improve people's knowledge
of the planet Earth, of its people, its animals,
and its places.
And by doing so, we hope that we can help people to care more
about the planet because if they care more about the planet,
they're more likely to protect the planet.
And so our team is incredibly excited that not only do we
do things that are fantastic from a technology perspective,
but we have an opportunity to do things that are actually
meaningful to society.
So those beautiful images, many of which that you recognized,
obviously have to be supported by a great technology platform.
And at National Geographic, we had what
we called a system called SPI.
And SPI was effectively the home for these wonderful images.
It had roughly 17 terabytes of data,
housing two million iconic images
that have really helped over the last 130 years
to shape the narrative coming out of National Geographic.
It probably won't surprise you to hear
though that over the last 20 years, the team that's
responsible for running our image collection had built--
they would describe it as lovingly hand built--
an application in Java that was over a period of 20 years
iterated upon.
We discovered there was not much documentation unfortunately.
I'm sure that's a situation that none of you
have ever experienced before.
It was hosted on premise.
And it was managed by an operations team
without technical oversight.
And from my perspective, when I first
joined National Geographic two years ago, it was obvious to me
that it had what we describe as a suboptimal information
security posture.
Now, that's a situation that was clearly not acceptable to us.
And interestingly, that system that
was housing the crown jewels of National Geographic
found itself under intense scrutiny.
And our VP of Information Security came to me.
And she said, Marcus, I think we have a bit of a problem.
This system is not really fit for purpose.
In terms of the legacy that we're protecting,
we need to do something about this.
And we unfortunately took the decision
to take that system offline.
And we worked with the business team
to come up with a solution.
We helped them to remediate the issues.
And after many, many months of this,
we realized that this was actually not going to work.
And we had to take some drastic action.
Our CEO came to my office and said, Marcus,
we need to do something here.
I'd like your team to take responsibility for this.
And this was in November of 2018.
Your team has to take responsibility for this,
has to fix this application, and get it back online.
And as he was leaving my office, and he said, and by the way,
it must be up by January 2019.
So that's obviously not something
that you ever want to hear.
We had a situation where the crown
jewels of our organization were in a system that needed help.
We had a very limited time in which to do something.
And the thing that was driving the need to do something
was what we call our Storyteller's Summit, where
all of the famous photographers that tell these National
Geographic stories around the world
were coming to Washington DC to National Geographic
headquarters in order to celebrate photography.
And obviously, that was not going
to be a great story if we didn't have the archive up
and running.
The good news is we like a challenge
in the Products and Technology Function
at National Geographic.
In fact, two of my colleagues here,
Melissa Wiley, our VP of Digital Products,
and Mike Debnam, our VP of engineering,
huddled with me in my office.
And we said, what are we going to do here in order
to resolve this problem?
We didn't have much time.
We were familiar with the cloud.
We had spent a lot of time working on a migration
to the cloud.
But we realized that this needed to be something
special, something more.
We decided to reach out to our friends at Google Cloud.
And the reason that we did that was
not just because we felt that they had incredible technology
and a great solution to the problems that we were facing,
but we felt there was an alignment of values.
In our conversations with them, we
understood that they cared as much about the environment
as we do.
Things like sustainability were things
that they talked about when proposing to us using Google
Cloud as a possible platform.
And we then set about, just before Thanksgiving,
the process of putting this incredibly valuable archive
back online.
Google worked very closely with us, both from a technology
perspective, but also from a professional services
perspective.
We introduced a third party called Globant.
And, in fact, that was Google's suggestion.
We already had an existing relationship with Globant,
so we were very happy to work with them.
And you can imagine what the next eight
weeks was like with a team of people working around the clock
to take this legacy application, to move it into Google Cloud,
to protect it.
In this case, we used technologies
from both [? Oracle ?] and Akamai
to protect access to that application.
And we were able to get it up and running in time
for the Storyteller Summit.
Now that's not something that we would necessarily
want to do again.
I would not encourage anyone in the room who's a technologist
to sign up for an eight week mission
critical deployment to the cloud, but we did it.
And I would say that it was incredibly
rewarding to work with both Google Cloud
and Globant to get that done.
You can't have a CTO on the stage
without an architectural diagram, of course.
I don't have time to go into this.
But what I would say is that one of the beauties for us
in working with Google Cloud was the flexibility
that they brought.
I think when Tarik made his opening comments,
he really brought that home with this focus
on solving business problems.
The fact that we had other systems that
were connected to SPI and other systems that
were dependent on it wasn't an inhibitor
to working with Google Cloud to get this application up
and running.
So what about the future?
We've obviously been able to take this application
and get it into Google Cloud, make
it available to our photographers
and our internal stakeholders again.
And that's been wonderful.
In fact, I received hugs and kisses from our photographers
as a result of us having done that.
But there is an interesting future.
One of the reasons that we chose to work with Google Cloud
was our excitement about tools such as AutoML and the Cloud
Vision API that would allow us to do things such as enriching
the metadata that goes with these wonderful images
that we have in our image collection.
And we believe that we can utilize the power of GCP
and some of the native capabilities in Google Cloud
to build even more compelling stories and even more
compelling experiences in the future.
But the most important thing is that the legacy
of our photographers is now safe.
And these are not just the legacies
of these individual photographers.
In some respects, they are part of the legacy of humanity.
These are stories that need to be told
that people need to understand.
And I'm delighted to say that working with Google Cloud,
we were able to secure the image collection not
just for ourselves, but for many, many generations to come.
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