CBS News and CNET Senior Producer Dan Patterson talked with Philip Moyer, VP of Industries for Google Cloud, about G Suite and Google Meet has helped people and students work from home, safely, amid the coronavirus quarantine. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Philip Moyer: I have to start with this because it’s just so out in the open and that’s the work from home. You know, over in Europe as an example, only six out of 10 people in Europe had ever worked from home. And 40% of the workers have never, never done work from home. You’ve got students, 290 million students around the world and the majority of them were in classes. And so we’re seeing just this rapid transition, like we helped the Veneto government be able to rapidly move 70,000 employees to be able to work from home using G Suite and Meet. There’s a transformation in the nature of work and the ability for it to be able to communicate. It’s been really interesting. I think everyone is experiencing being in front of your computer as much as a lot of people are right now, the volumes of emails and the volumes of meetings are going through the ceiling.

SEE: Coronavirus: Critical IT policies and tools every business needs (TechRepublic Premium) 

There’s that aspect I think that organizations are getting there from just a sheer collaboration perspective. But then over in terms of the things that we’re seeing in digital transformation, governments are rapidly standing up applications to be able to do things whether or not it’s around unemployment or around information, content delivery of websites… we’re seeing government stand up very rapidly, and so we’re seeing organizations shift–I’ll call it kind of their communication mechanisms–rapidly to online.

And then we’re seeing organizations as quickly as possible digitize the core things that they need to do to be able to implement commerce. So manufacturers have to digitize their supply chain; they have to know the weaknesses in their supply chain. So if you recall that all the work that came out of the financial industry around “know your customer” during the financial crisis because we didn’t know where a lot of the assets were that were problems, well, we’re starting to see already organizations going to “know your supplier” at a much deeper level.

One of the things that we’re really proud of is our security profile inside of Google. We start with a notion of trustless security where at our core encryption is at the base of everything we do. So, when you think about what we’re on right now, Google Meet, we’re encrypting the stream between you and I and back to our servers is fully encrypted. The data as it actually lays on, it comes down to resting in the storage is encrypted. And every organization that we’re bringing, that this data is coming into, we’re working with them to do data, to do encryption in transit, encryption at rest, and being able to provide high degrees of security. To get into this Meet, we had a 10-digit code out of a potential 25 digits. And so we’re trying to secure collaboration. And then we’re also working with organizations that bring that really high-grading encryption to every single thing that we do.

More interviews with Google Cloud’s Philip Moyer: How COVID-19 is affecting the needs of organizations and How Google Cloud is helping companies scale up quickly due to COVID-19

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