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Google is at the heart of a lot of crucial investments into the changing technology landscape. In recent years, the company has helped the world to innovate and evolve with solutions in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data management. Now, organizations in the fintech arena are also exploring the possibilities of the Google Cloud when it comes to helping users manage their digital currencies. One of the world's leading cryptocurrency management platforms, Blockchain.com, recently shared details of its increasing reliance on the Google Cloud Platform.
According to Blockchain.com, the GCP is essential to helping the organization manage it's growing user base and expanding demands around data processing. The blockchain-based business has been using the Google Cloud Platform since 2011 when it first opened. It's using the cloud environment to support the work that takes place within the official Blockchain.com data centres. With the help of Google, Blockchain.com can support around 39 million users across 140 countries.
Accessing so much data for users requires a lot of technical infrastructure, complex domain knowledge, and more. Not to mention, there's a lot of work involved in processing the entire data chain time-wise too. According to Blockchain.com, without the help of Google, this would have become a serious problem for the business, which required severe overhead and in-house IT.
Easing the Data Burden with the Google Cloud
To ease some of the data management burden that huge cryptocurrency companies like Blockchain.com have to deal with, the technology team began to host some of its IT infrastructure within the GCP compute engine instances. The team also adopted some of the database server technology available from Google Cloud, along with some capabilities from Google's Stackdriver and Cloud SQL tools.
According to the business, replacing the previous database with Cloud Spanner alone has been enough to generate operational overhead savings of about 30%. What's more, to make sure that the funds stored in the platform are safe and secure, Blockchain.com has also implemented some of Google's security tools. For instance, Blockchain.com is using Google's Cloud Identity Access Management tools and firewall technology to protect the blockchain transactions that take place on the website.
According to the Head of Platform Engineering for Blockchain.com, Lewis Tuff, GCP makes it easy to get all the fundamental aspects of security in the cloud ironed out. Cloud Identity Access Management, as well as access to the VPC firewall, mean that Blockchain can keep their resources locked down. The offerings ensure that businesses can control access to specific resources according to the least privilege principle. Additionally, Blockchain.com can implement multiple layers of defense within its operating environment too.
The team at the company noted that leveraging Stackdriver's functionality for monitoring and logging will enable them to remain aware of any unusual activities as they happen in real time.
Building a Complete Google Cloud Strategy
The Blockchain.com team are also using Google's Cloud Identity Aware Proxy, or IAP to manage their user identity verification needs, within the customer-facing part of the platform, and within back-office environments. According to Tuff, Google makes it very easy for business leaders to authenticate and manage applications based on accounts within the G-Suite. This is a huge step forward for Blockchain.com because the company has a vast number of back-office and internal applications to handle. These solutions can now be managed through a more granular and reliable series of role-based access rights.
Alongside the range of tools and facilities that Blockchain already uses with Google, the company now has its sights set on incorporating a wide selection of microservices into its IT infrastructure too. This will involve using more of the expanding portfolio of managed services that are becoming available to access as part of the Google portfolio.
The team at Blockchain.com believe that it makes sense for them to continue developing their cloud strategy with Google's help, now that they're so deeply ingrained with the GCP. The Google Cloud Platform allows Blockchain to manage their environment more securely, without having to worry about things like spinning up individual VMs and managing the entire failover and backup strategy independently.
