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MIKE DANIELS: Hi.
I'm Mike Daniels, vice president of Global Public
Sector at Google Cloud.
And it's my pleasure to be presenting
at our first digital Next OnAir.
Over the past several months, every one of us
has been touched by the enormous sacrifices
that brave frontline workers at hospitals, pharmacies, grocery
stores, and distribution centers have made to allow our world
to continue to recover.
This moment in time has changed the way we live and work.
It has inspired so many of us to reimagine what's possible
and challenge the status quo to deliver digitally.
For government organizations and academic institutions,
this change has brought unheralded speed, innovation,
and resiliency forward to service all
when we've needed them most.
From the first phase of the pandemic,
Google Cloud has had the humbling opportunity
to help public sector organizations around the world
respond to COVID-19.
Agency and academic leaders at the highest levels
have called upon us to partner and solve their most mission
critical challenges together.
In the beginning, we helped our customers
navigate the rapidly evolving situation
with agile digital solutions.
In a matter of days and weeks, we
helped implement government telework and virtual operations
to ensure essential services continued.
For instance, more than 70,000 employees
working in the Veneto region of Italy's health care system
rely on G Suite to maintain their high level of service
in patient care during the COVID-19 crisis.
We helped bring millions of students
online for distance learning when schools closed.
In New York City alone, we rolled out Google Classroom
to more than 1.3 million students
to continue the school year virtually at home.
In March, cumulative daily meeting minutes
on the Google Meet platform surpassed 2 billion minutes
per day.
We supported disease monitoring, control,
and tracing programs to help government leaders better
understand the effect of the virus spread at scale.
For example, the State of Georgia
developed a web portal produced by MTX Group in coordination
with Google to help the state perform
contact tracing of people who test positive for COVID-19.
As the situation has evolved, our conversations
have shifted to focus on helping our customers improve
the economic situation.
We've partnered with states to modernize
decades old infrastructure to help millions in need
with unemployment benefits.
And we're working together to mitigate risk and ensure
other critical services remain intact, such as food assistance
or child and elder protective care
as unemployment rates have risen to unprecedented levels.
We're incredibly proud of the positive impact
our public-private partnership has
had for so many of our customers and for the citizens
across the world.
There is no better example of the good we can do together
than what happened at the epicenter of this virus,
the State of New York.
Hear directly from Commissioner Reardon of the New York State
Department of Labor on how Google Cloud helped
New York reimagine how to support
their constituents at scale in response to COVID-19.
Commissioner, thank you so much for joining me today
and for answering these very important questions.
ROBERTA REARDON: Thank you so much for having me with you.
I'm eager to share the experiences and what we've
learned here in the State of New York from working with Google.
MIKE DANIELS: How did COVID-19 challenge and test
your organization?
ROBERTA REARDON: We have handled literally three years
of claims in barely three months.
In one week, we had 8.2 million phone calls
come into our telephone claims center,
and we normally handle about 50,000 calls
a week in that center.
So you can imagine the volume was just overwhelming.
Our online application, we took in 6 million sign-ons
in a week, and normally, we have 350,000 sign-ons.
So it was just--
it was unimaginable.
Before the pandemic, our website supported 800,000 claims
a year, and we have 2.7 million claims in a little
under three months.
So it was a tsunami, and it was a tsunami that just kept
coming and coming and coming.
It created a massive amount of frustration and anxiety,
both within my department, but also for all New Yorkers.
I mean, think about here we were in a pandemic.
People were essentially locked in their houses.
They couldn't go to work.
They were frantically trying to get online to get--
or on the phone to the unemployment insurance benefits
that they needed, and they couldn't get through to us.
We knew that New Yorkers needed help.
We knew that we needed a new system desperately,
and we needed to act fast.
And that's where Google stepped in.
MIKE DANIELS: How did Google Cloud
help you respond to the influx of unemployment insurance
applications?
ROBERTA REARDON: The Google Cloud team
partnered with ITS and us, and the first thing
they did was they were able to build us
a new workable front door.
And in that first 24 hours that that front door existed,
we had more than 100,000 people successfully
log in to our site, into our system,
and that was a game changer.
MIKE DANIELS: What lessons have been
learned from this experience?
ROBERTA REARDON: We have all been working seven days a week,
16-hour days for three months.
And the really critical part of this
is that the Google team has been right there with us.
I know that ITS and Google would be
up at 1 o'clock in the morning running
tests on new functionalities to make sure
that they would work before we made
them go live, long conversations over weekends, early morning,
late night.
The lesson is that for a government
to use technology services, we have
to have a partner who's going to be as committed to the outcomes
as we are.
We are deeply committed to serving
the citizens of New York State.
And Google is also deeply committed to that as well.
And that really makes a difference to us.
We can count on that.
And then, of course, the ability of the cloud to scale,
absolutely critical.
Because remember that first 100,000 people coming
in the front door at once--
our mainframe computer could not handle that by itself.
So having the cloud, having them, as I say,
drift up to the cloud for that moment and then
come into the mainframe was really--
that's what we needed to do.
MIKE DANIELS: How has COVID-19 changed your approach
to digital transformation now and in the future?
ROBERTA REARDON: With this pandemic,
we're going to have to have virtual services.
We're not going to be able to collect people into a room,
either for testimony or for resume writing workshops
or for any other kind of service.
So at least until there's a vaccine
and we know that it's safe to gather,
we're going to have to do our work in more virtual ways.
People were very frustrated with our legacy system
because it was old, and it behaved in a different manner.
We need to give people some comfort when
they come to the government for service
that we're speaking their language.
Now, government services, by their very nature,
are more dense.
We have to have higher security.
We have to-- in UI, we have to have a lot of fraud protection.
So there are things that we have to do
that will, by its very nature, slow down some of the services,
but at least that first interface needs
to feel familiar, and we're very aware of that.
The other thing that we figured out during all of this
is our ability to communicate with claimants in a more
robust way, signposts--
your application has been received, we're processing it,
we're working on your application,
it's time for you to go certify for your weekly benefits--
flagging for businesses that there
are things they need to do.
All of that will be done on the web virtually.
And it's going to really improve our service,
and it's going to improve the experience of the citizens
of New York who need it.
MIKE DANIELS: Commissioner, thank you for your time,
and we look forward to building our partnership together.
ROBERTA REARDON: Thank you for having me.
It was a pleasure to do this.
It was a pleasure to work with all of you.
Good luck in everything.
MIKE DANIELS: Our work with New York State
is just one of many examples we've
seen where our customers' fortitude, perseverance,
and agility to fulfill their mission digitally.
And as we now enter into the second phase of the pandemic,
recovery, these qualities will continue
to be critically important.
With reduced budgets and funding,
government and academia will need
to continue embracing digital solutions to operate quickly,
securely, and at scale.
Google Cloud's mission has always
been to accelerate digital transformation
through data-powered innovation with the best
infrastructure, platform, security, industry solutions,
and expertise.
And we know that true public sector modernization
requires choice.
Our hybrid and multi-cloud solutions empower our customers
to avoid vendor lock-in and embrace progress and speed
to leverage their data to improve their missions
and deliver better constituent experiences.
In the cloud, our customers can gain access
to leading AIML capabilities to help organizations
quickly derive insight from data and drive modern experiences
for citizens.
By moving to the cloud, not only are
you modernizing your infrastructure,
but inheriting best in class, globally
secure infrastructure, and resilience capabilities.
You can take advantage of systems
that are always up to date, designed
with security at every level.
Over the past several years, Google
has taken industry leading steps to ensure
customers have the ultimate control over access
to their data.
At Next OnAir, we're pleased to announce several new privacy
solutions for the first time.
Confidential computing offers new capabilities
to encrypt customers' data even while it's
in use, complementing our default, at rest,
and in transit encryption everywhere.
Confidential computing is the future of cloud computing.
It enables cloud migration for highly regulated industries,
like public sector and addresses concerns about third party data
access in use, removing cloud adoption barriers.
Assured workloads make it easy for customers
to deploy, validate, and attest that their applications are
running in a configuration that complies
with specific regulations or standards.
This is especially important for our government customers who
need to ensure the right security
and operational controls are in place
to protect their data and systems.
It has been wonderful to rapidly innovate and deliver
critical technology capabilities to help you meet your needs.
We thank our customers and our partners
for the amazing work you have done with us,
and we look forward to helping you
build a new future together.
And if you haven't already, be sure to explore and engage
with all of the great content available
over the next several weeks from Google Cloud Next OnAir