OroraTech: Protecting Earth's forests from space with Google Cloud
About OroraTech
OroraTech watches and protects forests from space. With innovative, thermal-infrared cameras mounted on satellites, OroraTech's Wildfire Solution helps governments, local authorities, NGOs, and other customers around the world to detect fires early, monitor forests in real time, and assess risks and damages.
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Contact usOroraTech migrates the core infrastructure of its Wildfire Solution to Google Cloud, helping customers around the world detect and prevent wildfires with high availability and reliability.
Google Cloud results
- Helps customers monitor forests and detect wildfires by providing data globally with high availability and reliability
- Accelerates international growth with global Google Cloud infrastructure that complies with international data security guidelines
- Enables faster wildfire detection with machine learning (ML) models trained with Vertex AI
- Frees up time by abstracting lower levels of infrastructure, enabling the OroraTech team to focus on more value-generating tasks
Helps protect 1.6 million km² of forest
The world's forests need our help. In 2021, wildfires consumed the equivalent of around 16 football pitches of trees per minute. Because healthy forests are vital to human and animal life, it's crucial to detect these wildfires early. And to get the best vantage point over Earth and its forests, you need to go to space.
OroraTech is an intelligence-as-a-service company delivering thermal data for a sustainable Earth. With the first two thermal sensors already launched and sending data from space, OroraTech kicked off its constellation of 100 cameras to continuously monitor the Earth's temperature and provide data-based trends. Its leading Wildfire Intelligence Solution helps to spot fires quickly, assess risks and hazards before they arise, and analyze the damage once the dust has settled. From Australia to Chile, the OroraTech Wildfire Solution is used by commercial forestry, governments, local authorities, and NGOs around the globe, protecting more than 1.6 million km² of forest worldwide.
United by a shared vision of a sustainable planet
Like many big ideas, the OroraTech story began small—with a university project addressing the need for better and faster wildfire prevention. Soon after it was founded, the company was accepted into the Google for Startups Accelerator: Sustainable Development Goals program, marking the beginning of a long-lasting collaboration with Google Cloud.
"Starting with Google Cloud enabled us to build a strong network and receive a lot of support from trusted mentors right from the beginning," says Florian Mauracher, Co-founder and Engineer, OroraTech. "Moving forward with Google Cloud offers the opportunity to expand on a global scale, leveraging the outstanding network and datacenter infrastructure. That's why the choice was clear for us."
A shared vision of a sustainable future was another deciding factor for Mauracher and his team: "We're protecting forests, so sustainability is at the core of what we're doing. It matters not just to us, but also to our impact-oriented investors. That's why we're working towards becoming a carbon-neutral company, and that includes our cloud usage. The fact that Google Cloud is aiming to operate entirely on carbon-free energy by 2030 is crucial for our own sustainability goals."
"Starting with Google Cloud enabled us to build a strong network and receive a lot of support from trusted mentors right from the beginning. Moving forward with Google Cloud offers the opportunity to expand on a global scale, leveraging the outstanding network and datacenter infrastructure. That's why the choice was clear for us."
—Florian Mauracher, Co-founder and Engineer, OroraTechMonitoring forests 24/7, all around the world
In just one month, spread across two one-hour maintenance periods, OroraTech migrated its customer-facing infrastructure to Google Cloud with minimal downtime. Today, the core infrastructure of the company's Wildfire Solution runs on Google Cloud, ensuring that the service is reliable and responsive. With containerized applications, leveraging Cloud Storage with Docker Swarm as the orchestration service, the Wildfire Solution scales with the number of users, maintaining high availability regardless of the workload.
"From early detection to real-time monitoring, our Wildfire Solution is time-sensitive for our customers and needs to be available at all times," says Mauracher. "Thanks to the high availability standards of Google Cloud, we had zero outages or infrastructure related incidents in the past year."
OroraTech uses machine learning to better process the imagery and other data gained from its sensors in space. "By training ML models with Vertex AI, we're making sure that our solution is constantly getting better at detecting fires and predicting risks," adds Mauracher.
"From early detection to real-time monitoring, our Wildfire Solution is time-sensitive for our customers and needs to be available at all times. Thanks to the high availability standards of Google Cloud, we had zero outages or infrastructure related incidents in the past year."
—Florian Mauracher, Co-founder and Engineer, OroraTechBuilding a global approach to solve the wildfire challenge
Wildfires are a global problem that requires a global solution, and Google Cloud empowers OroraTech to live up to its global vision. In order to achieve international growth, the company needs to mitigate risks and adhere to the various compliance standards of businesses and governments around the world.
"We're very active in the public sector, where we have to comply with especially strict guidelines pertaining to data security," says Mauracher. "Whether we're working in Australia or Canada, we can run everything in a local cloud if we need to, and count on Google Cloud to ensure data security to the highest standards."
In times of expansion, it's all hands on deck. Rather than deal with infrastructure issues, OroraTech's small team needs to focus on improvements to its Wildfire Solution and the challenges ahead. "By abstracting lower levels of infrastructure, we're able to spend less time and effort on infrastructure and maintenance tasks," says Mauracher. "This enables our employees to focus on more value-adding work." Thanks to these efficiency gains, the OroraTech team has been able to spend even more time developing exciting new features, such as High-Resolution Burnt Area Detection and Mapping or cross organization collaboration for incident management.
Expanding globally and beyond
Over the past few years, wildfires have become one of the most powerful symbols of the dangers of global warming. The OroraTech team has its work cut out for them, and they're ready to expand on all levels. That includes new offices around the world, from the US to Australia, new features for its Wildfire Solution, and solutions for new industries.
Because fires wreak not just environmental, but also economic havoc, OroraTech is planning to launch a new insurance product. "After a fire, insurance companies are the ones who have to pick up the bill," says Mauracher. "Naturally, they're looking for ways to reduce the damage, and that's where we come in. In the future, we might even offer our insurance solutions via the Google Cloud Marketplace."
But to discover the most exciting area of expansion for OroraTech, you need to look up. OroraTech is now building its own thermal sensor network. With this unique network of cameras in space, OroraTech will be able to cover even more of Earth's surface and detect wildfires even faster. They'll also be able to analyze even more data pertaining to Earth’s surface temperature and other factors, to paint a holistic picture of climate and weather events.
"With support from Google Cloud, we've been able to bring our Wildfire Solution to customers around the world, helping them to protect our forests," says Mauracher. "But that's just the beginning. By launching our own thermal cameras into space, we're building a holistic wildfire intelligence platform, and we're happy to have Google Cloud along for the ride."
"With support from Google Cloud, we've been able to bring our Wildfire Solution to customers around the world, helping them to protect our forests. But that's just the beginning. By launching our own thermal cameras into space, we're building a holistic wildfire intelligence platform, and we're happy to have Google Cloud along for the ride."
—Florian Mauracher, Co-founder and Engineer, OroraTechTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About OroraTech
OroraTech watches and protects forests from space. With innovative, thermal-infrared cameras mounted on satellites, OroraTech's Wildfire Solution helps governments, local authorities, NGOs, and other customers around the world to detect fires early, monitor forests in real time, and assess risks and damages.