Javan: Hello again, and welcome to Module 2. Here I'll be talking about the core GCP strengths when building applications. Increasingly, competitive advantage for organizations is enabled by technology. Organizations use technology to develop new products faster than competitors, gain deeper insights into their customers, and derive more value from their data they already have. You might have heard about companies who build self-driving cars using innovative technology, or drug discoveries influenced by big data and artificial intelligence, or chat bots developed for retail stores. More and more, we're seeing examples of companies becoming digital with an increase in connected devices and accelerated advances in technology. How can you and your organization make a similar innovative leap? Well, cloud technology makes many of these industry advances possible. However, simply migrating your infrastructure to the cloud is not enough on its own. Let's take a closer look at what it really takes for organizations to make innovative leaps within their industries. If an organization is to stay ahead of its competitors, it needs to equally modernize the types of applications it builds and the way in which they're developed. An application in this context is any program or group of programs that is designed to enable an end user to perform a task or activity. A web browser, a spreadsheet, an email client, a game, or a photo editor, these are all examples of applications. Others such as enterprise resource planning systems, or ERPs, are line-of- business applications that help to run an organization. Many of an organization's applications will involve data in some way. The applications might collect data, process it, analyze it, or serve the data to other applications. This means that organizations need to think about data storage in conjunction with application development. With that, here's what I'll cover in this module. I'll discuss different patterns for modernizing and developing an organization's applications with Google Cloud, I'll look at the problems associated with traditional application development and maintenance, then I will explain GCP's core strengths for application development and the role of data storage in application management. And finally, I'll provide an overview of GCP storage and database services and their business value. First, let's look at how your organization could approach application modernization and development with Google Cloud.
