WPP unlocks the power of data and creativity using Google Cloud

Over the past year, our customers have shared many stories with me about how cloud technology is transforming their businesses. One theme that frequently comes up is how the cloud enables marketers to deliver better customer experiences across online and offline campaigns, email, apps, websites, and more. By stitching together these consumer touchpoints via the cloud, marketers can ultimately produce more seamless, consistent experiences—and better outcomes for the businesses they support.One of the companies at the forefront of this transformation is WPP. As the world’s largest advertising holding company, WPP operates across 112 countries and supports nearly three-quarters of the Fortune 500 with media, creative, public relations, and marketing analytics expertise. It can be challenging for a company operating at this scale to manage and unlock the value of its data across its businesses. Information can become siloed, with valuable insights lost within the organization. In 2018, WPP CEO Mark Read recognized this challenge and set forth a new vision. By better aligning his company’s technology, creative and talent, WPP aims to deliver transformative experiences for audiences and superior results for its clients.“Creativity and technology are the two key pillars of WPP’s future strategy. Creativity is what differentiates us and technology allows us to scale. In the first year of our transformation journey we have invested significantly in our technology capabilities and our strong partnership with Google Cloud is key to helping us realise our vision. Their vast experience in advertising and marketing combined with their strength in analytics and AI helps us to deliver powerful and innovative solutions for our clients,”  said Mark Read, WPP CEO.  To fast-track its business transformation, WPP chose Google Cloud for our technology and expertise, and is focusing on 3 key initiatives:  Campaign Governance—Creating better ways of working through cloud-driven automation for campaign set-up, creative management, reporting and optimization across the WPP network.Customer Data Management—Bringing together data points from the customer, market intelligence and WPP data into an open data platform to enable better insights, planning and activation.  WPP AI—Utilizing Google Cloud’s ML tools and technology to help fuel innovation in WPP’s analytics, campaign optimization, content intelligence and customer experience practices.WPP is deploying Google Cloud across multiple projects—from building a media planning stewardship system, to improving campaigns with the use of tools for image recognition, sentiment analysis, and natural language processing. By incorporating cloud technology into WPP’s daily practices, teams can speed up their time-to-insight and uncover new opportunities for clients. Also, by connecting Google Cloud to other products like the Google Marketing Platform, WPP can deliver better experiences for their audiences across media and marketing.WPP has already begun putting its data-forward thinking to work. For example, Wunderman Thompson, a global agency within WPP, worked with GlaxoSmithKline to develop theTheraflu Flu Tracker. Using statistical data from Mexico’s National Institute of Epidemiology, along with weather data and other indicators, it developed deep learning models on Google Cloud that predicted where and when flu cases would occur in Mexico, with up to 97% accuracy. Wunderman turned this knowledge into relevant digital ads that communicated the risk of flu in the 32 federal entities in Mexico. This campaign increased e-commerce sales by nearly 200%, won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and helped people be better informed about flu likelihood.This is just one example of how WPP is tapping into data, obtaining insights at-scale and using creativity to produce meaningful business results—and it’s only the beginning. We are proud to collaborate with WPP to deliver truly transformative experiences to consumers using Google Cloud.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

Lumberyard Beta 1.21 jetzt verfügbar

Wir freuen uns heute sehr über die Veröffentlichung von Amazon Lumberyard Beta 1.21 mit mehr als 70 Verbesserungen, Fehlerbehebungen und Funktionen für Designers, Animatoren, Programmierer usw. Klicken Sie hier, um Lumberyard 1.21 noch heute herunterzuladen.
Quelle: aws.amazon.com

Announcing user delegation SAS tokens preview for Azure Storage Blobs

Cloud storage often serves as a content source for browser and mobile applications. This is typically achieved using application-issued, pre-authorized URLs which provide time-limited access directly to specific content without requiring a service to proxy this access.

Azure Storage supports this pattern through the use of shared access signature tokens (SAS tokens). These tokens grant specific, time-limited access to storage objects by signing an authorization statement using the storage account access key, which is controlled by account administrators. While this approach provides the required limited access to clients, it sometimes represents an over-provisioning of access to these token-issuing services since this provides full control over the entire account where they may only require read access to specific content.

Today we are launching a preview for a new kind of SAS token, user delegation SAS tokens. By extending the recent release of Azure AD and Azure role-based access control (RBAC) for Azure Storage, lower-privileged users and services can now delegate subsets of their access to clients, using this new type of pre-authorized URL. Clients retrieve a user delegation key tied to their Azure Active Directory (AD) account, and then use it to create SAS tokens granting a subset of their own access rights.

This means, for example, that an application component with only read access to end-user content could be configured to issue short lived read-only URLs to clients without the risks involved with storing and using the powerful account access key. Azure Storage access logs will also reflect client use of these SAS tokens as associated with the Azure AD principal of this application component.

During this preview, you can generate user delegation SAS tokens with your own code or use Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI. Remember, you will first need to grant RBAC permissions to access data to the user account that will generate the SAS token. Learn more about granting RBAC access to your blob data in our documentation here.

How to create a user delegation SAS token

The preview capability is available now for everyone, for non-production use. No registration is required.

For developers, here is an example using .NET code to generate a user-delegation SAS token. It also shows our new .NET client libraries for Storage and integrated Azure.Identity libraries.

client = new BlobServiceClient(accountUri, new DefaultAzureCredential());

//define permission set to read blob, valid from low for a specified number of minutes
BlobSasBuilder builder = new BlobSasBuilder()
{
ContainerName = containerName,
BlobName = blobName,
Permissions = "r",
Resource = "b",
StartTime = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow,
ExpiryTime = DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.AddMinutes(tokenLifetime)
};

//refresh user-delegation key as necessary, valid for up to a maximum of 7 days
if (currentUdk == null || currentUdk.SignedExpiry <= builder.ExpiryTime)
{
currentUdk = client.GetUserDelegationKey(DateTimeOffset.UtcNow, DateTimeOffset.UtcNow.AddDays(7)).Value;
}

//generate a signed SAS token using the user-delegation key
string sasToken = builder.ToSasQueryParameters(currentUdk, accountName).ToString();

You can find a complete working example in the Azure Storage documentation.

Users can also use our command line tool previews to generate user-delegation SAS tokens. Here is an example using Azure CLI to generate a read-only SAS based on the user’s credentials:

$ az login
$ az storage blob generate-sas
> –account-name myaccount
> –container-name container
> –name file.txt
> –permissions r
> –expiry 2019-08-30
> –auth-mode login
> –as-user
> –full-uri
Argument '–as-user' is in preview. It may be changed/removed in a future release.

https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/container/file.txt?se=2019-08-30&sp=r&sv=2018-11-09&sr=b&skoid=8c93ed4c-3e11-43f4-9307-3664c9c16554&sktid=9341f370-b982-47de-b7c1-8dbe61328559&skt=2019-08-28T22%3A57%3A38Z&ske=2019-08-30T00%3A00%3A00Z&sks=b&skv=2018-11-09&sig=7trGEakY86Uj5rXsH2ApiyCZfxFgNnh6NFy4wcnmfmQ%3D

Check out our documentation for more detailed examples in Azure PowerShell and Azure CLI.

User delegation SAS tokens for Azure Blobs allow for issuing pre-authorized URLs from lower privileged identities, and are available in preview in all Azure clouds and locations. Please read more about them in our documentation, and give them a try. We would love to hear your feedback at AzureStorageFeedback@microsoft.com.
Quelle: Azure