When Dassana co-founders Gaurav Kumar and Parth Shah, formerly founder and founding engineer at RedLock (now Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks), set out on a new startup journey in 2020, they knew exactly where to start: sign up for Google Workspace.
“Every startup I’ve been at, we used Google Workspace,” said Kumar. “We’ve been using it for so long, and we’re all used to it. It’s like drinking water—you don’t think about it.”
“We’re big on user experience,” explained Shah. “Google is one of the few companies out there that is all about building the right kind of user experience that’s easy to follow. The sharing capabilities are amazing and, of course, easy to use. Docs, Sheets, Slides—we use all of it.”
Dassana, which emerged from stealth with $5 million in seed funding earlier this year, is a next-generation security data lake. It provides a holistic picture of security risk across an organization and its business units by ingesting large volumes of structured data in a schema-less fashion. Their success is a great testament to why startups are choosing not only Google Workspace, but a range of Google Cloud products.
Though the Dassana team was comfortable with Workspace from the start, not all their early technology choices were the best fit for the company, and Google Cloud services became more crucial as the startup evolved. For example, the team opted to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to start their cloud journey, but ultimately started to explore other cloud options when they decided to run their technology platform on Kubernetes.
“We started looking into which cloud platforms provide the best Kubernetes experience,” said Kumar. “Hands-down, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) had the best experience. If you look at product velocity and how GKE has evolved over time, from its early days to GKE Autopilot and all the features and other native integrations—nothing even comes close.”
In particular, Kumar noted that the native integration between Google Workspace and GKE was particularly unique and useful. “When I go to Google Workspace and then go to GKE, my identity is already there,” he said. “I don’t have to integrate or manage anything. If I disable an account in Workspace, it’s also disabled on GKE.”
Another advantage is that GKE allows you to set up Google Groups to work with Kubernetes role-based access control (RBAC) for GKE clusters. This lets administrators maintain users and groups outside of GKE and assign RBAC permissions directly to Groups in Workspace without any extra engineering work or overhead management.
“I can actually use my Workspace identity to give granular controls to my GKE workloads. The integration of Google Groups in GKE and Kubernetes is a lifesaver. It’s saved us a lot of hassles,” said Kumar. Kumar also noted that the platform delivers better performance compared to other solutions thanks to the low latency of Google Cloud’s global network.
Like many startups, Dassana has found a powerful combination in Google Workspace and GKE on Google Cloud that lets them connect technologies, easily collaborate with their teams, and rapidly build their product. The team also recognizes the necessity of continued innovation, and is exploring additional Google Cloud products to help them accelerate their momentum. For example, Dassana plans to use the performance and scale of Cloud Storage buckets to store the company’s data. The team is also investigating how to save time by using Pub/Sub to integrate data directly from Google Workspace and other sources for security analytics.
To learn more about why startups like Dassana are choosing Google Workspace and Google Cloud to accelerate their growth and reach their goals, visit our startup solutions pages for Google Workspace and Google Cloud.
By: Avi Negrin (Product Marketing Manager, Technology & Startups, Google Cloud)
Source: Google Cloud Blog
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