Ministry of Environmental Protection: Preventing pollution with innovative cloud-based technology
About Ministry of Environmental Protection
The Ministry of Environmental Protection is the Israeli government ministry charged with protecting the environment from pollution and environmental hazards, as well as leading the fight against climate change. Responsible for limiting the emissions of Israel's manufacturing sector, it has the power to monitor and prosecute polluters.
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Contact usAfter migrating to Google Cloud, the Ministry of Environmental Protection could scale resources up or down to develop cutting-edge solutions to monitor pollution levels and protect the environment.
Google Cloud results
- Time spent scaling up resources to build solutions down from eight months to just days with Google Cloud
- Able to model street-by-street air-pollution forecasts with high-power computing
- Ingesting data from cameras, sensors, and drones provides new ways to monitor and prosecute polluters
- Able to intricately map urban noise pollution with BigQuery
Enables street-by-street air-pollution forecasts
From the sparkling Mediterranean Sea to the majestic desert dunes, Israel's resources are not just beautiful backdrops, but the foundation for a healthy environment, a robust economy, and a vibrant quality of life.
Facing a variety of sources of air pollution—from industry, transportation, waste, agriculture, fires in open areas, etc.—makes the Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection's job as important as ever.
Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection is a force for positive transformation of the country's environment and the entity charged with safeguarding the country's precious natural resources. On the shores of Northern Israel near Acre for example, the Ministry is spearheading a remarkable restoration project. In this former industrial area, their efforts are focused on reversing the legacy of contamination, ensuring a clean and safe environment for generations to come.
The challenge of keeping Israel's resources clean
"Our main business is licensing, inspection, investigation and, when necessary, prosecution of Israel's manufacturing sector," explains Erez Avital, CIO at Israel's Ministry of Environmental Protection. "We need to know about any hazard, emission, or industrial waste, so that we can monitor and control it, to ensure that the environment is protected for the public."
However, with large swathes of Israel's varied landscape lacking any kind of power or internet connectivity, it can be difficult to keep up with the offenders. Illegal waste dumping, for example, can be tough to track, leading to a lot of labor-intensive, time-consuming activities to stay on top of polluters.
Held back by aging infrastructure and long lead times
Now running on Google Cloud, the Ministry is able to leverage cutting-edge technology to close the gap, with drones, cameras, sensors, and data analysis all helping to transform the way that it tracks, monitors, and analyzes pollution. Prior to the Ministry's migration to Google Cloud in 2022, its on-premises computing infrastructure made it difficult to harness these technologies and develop projects at speed.
"The technology we had was very poor," explains Avital. "We couldn't operate live camera feeds, we didn't have the ability to work with drones. And whenever we wanted to develop something, the delivery time was too long and too expensive."
"With Google Cloud, the resources are much more available. It's much easier to scale up resources and then scale them back down when we no longer need them. We don't need to waste time and money replacing or upgrading hardware. We can get started in a matter of days."
—Dima Spector, Cloud Architect, Ministry of Environmental ProtectionAs a government department, every time the Ministry started a project, it needed to undergo a lengthy procurement process to acquire any additional on-premises hardware needed to build the solution. This delay would often run into months, limiting the team's flexibility to develop and try out new products.
In 2022, the Ministry of Environmental Protection began migrating its infrastructure to Google Cloud as part of the Israeli Government's cloud services tender. Since then, developing a specialized solution to help with its monitoring work is far faster and more efficient.
"With Google Cloud, the resources are much more available," says Dima Spector, Cloud Architect at the Ministry of Environmental Protection. "It's much easier to scale up resources and then scale them back down when we no longer need them. We don't need to waste time and money replacing or upgrading physical hardware. We can get started in a matter of days."
The migration of the on-premises workloads to Google Cloud started with an assessment of the environment using Google Cloud's Stratozone (now part of Migration Center). The IT environment was identified and mapped to the appropriate Google Cloud services. Then, Google's Migrate to Virtual Machines (M2VM) tool was used for ongoing replication of the VMs to the cloud. "The use of Google's first-party tools was simple and straightforward, and allowed us to perform the migration efficiently, with minimal downtime and with low risk, since we also had the option to test the workload in a sandbox environment in the cloud before performing the on-premises shutdown and cutover," said Spector.
And to ensure business continuity, the Ministry has architected its cloud infrastructure with a comprehensive disaster tolerance in mind and has implemented a resilient disaster recovery plan. By combining multi-zone deployment, regional disks, managed instance groups, and backup to regional cloud storage, the Ministry's platform can withstand major disasters affecting individual zones. Automatic failover and self-healing capabilities can help it minimize downtime, and data replication and automatic instance management allow it to accelerate recovery in the event of a catastrophe.
Mapping air pollution with scalable cloud-based resources
This flexibility is changing the way that the Ministry is able to monitor and control pollution. In terms of air pollution, for example, it is currently in the development phase of a project to ingest data from air-quality sensors around the country into Google Cloud, where it will combine them with historical meteorological data to build statistical models capable of forecasting precise levels of air pollution on a street-by-street basis throughout the city of Tel Aviv.
"Our statisticians require a lot of high-power computing to be able to build such detailed models," says Spector. "Previously, it would have taken months just to be able to predict one day's worth of air pollution, effectively making this kind of modeling impossible. Now, with Google Kubernetes Engine, we can provide unlimited resources for as long as they are needed and then scale them down when the modeling work has finished. It's much more flexible."
Once in production, the Ministry hopes to use this solution to model air pollution in cities across the country, enabling it and other governmental departments to make better decisions around how to mitigate against its effects, such as controlling emissions, planting trees, or changing regulations.
Driving changes in legislation with new technological capabilities
The Ministry is hoping to use its technological capabilities to drive law changes around waste management, too. Using Google Cloud, the Ministry is developing a project to ingest live feeds from traffic cameras to identify which trucks may have dumped waste at unlicensed sites. Where the Ministry previously lacked the capability to monitor trucks, it now hopes to use this new tool to instigate a change in the law to compel truck drivers to install IoT devices that allow the Ministry to monitor them more closely, with a view to further reducing the illegal dumping of waste.
"Before Google Cloud, we couldn't even think about making this law, because we didn't have the technology to monitor the trucks. Now, with Google Kubernetes Engine, we have solved the technical part and we just need to wait for the law to change to make the most of these capabilities."
—Dima Spector, Cloud Architect, Ministry of Environmental Protection"Before Google Cloud, we couldn't even think about making this law, because we didn't have the technology to monitor the trucks," says Spector. "Now, with Google Cloud, we have solved the technical part and we just need to wait for the law to change to make the most of these capabilities."
Noise pollution is another area where the Ministry is now making advances with the help of Google Cloud. Typically, noise pollution is only addressed when someone makes a complaint, by which point the noise may have ceased. Now, the Ministry is developing a project using BigQuery and Cloud Functions to place sensors across Israeli cities to intricately map and control noise pollution in urban areas. This would enable residents to use the data to make decisions about where they want to live and work, as well as empowering legislators to take remedial action.
Combining data sets for new insights on environmental protection
As the Ministry uses Google Cloud for more monitoring projects, its goal is to use BigQuery to create a data lake of all the environmental data it is monitoring, to enable data scientists, researchers, and academics to access it for their own research. The hope is that they will be able to identify patterns and correlations in the data that the Ministry wouldn't have been able to identify before, giving the Ministry further insights into how best to monitor, control, and regulate against pollution.
"With Google Cloud, we are now free to focus on the purpose of the Ministry, without being restricted by our technology. It has given us the tools we need to focus on preventing pollution, and protecting the environment for the Israeli public."
—Erez Avital, CIO, Ministry of Environmental ProtectionFor Avital, the Ministry's ability to use technology to find new ways to protect the environment is a result of the freedom that Google Cloud has given it to experiment and build customized solutions in an agile way.
"With Google Cloud, we are now free to focus on the purpose of the Ministry, without being restricted by our technology," says Avital. "It has given us the tools we need to focus on preventing pollution, and protecting the environment for the Israeli public."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Ministry of Environmental Protection
The Ministry of Environmental Protection is the Israeli government ministry charged with protecting the environment from pollution and environmental hazards, as well as leading the fight against climate change. Responsible for limiting the emissions of Israel's manufacturing sector, it has the power to monitor and prosecute polluters.