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Limitless Data. All Workloads. For Everyone

Today, data exists in many formats, is provided in real-time streams, and stretches across many different data centers and clouds, all over the world. From analytics, to data engineering, to AI/ML, to data-driven applications, the ways in which we leverage and share data continues to expand. Data has moved beyond the analyst and now impacts every employee, every customer, and every partner. With the dramatic growth in the amount and types of data, workloads, and users, we are at a tipping point where traditional data architectures – even when deployed in the cloud – are unable to unlock its full potential. As a result, the data-to-value gap is growing. To address these challenges, we are unveiling several data cloud innovations today that allow our customers to work with limitless data, across all workloads, and extend access to everyone. These announcements include BigLake and Spanner change streams to further unify customer data while ensuring it’s delivered in real-time, as well as Vertex AI Workbench and Model Registry to close the data to AI value gap. And to bring data within reach for anyone, we are announcing a unified business intelligence (BI) experience that includes a new Workspace integration, along with new programs that further enable our data cloud partner ecosystem. Removing all data limits Today, we are announcing the preview of BigLake, a data lake storage engine, to remove data limits by unifying data lakes and warehouses. Managing data across disparate lakes and warehouses creates silos and increases risk and cost, especially when data needs to be moved. BigLake allows companies to unify their data warehouses and lakes to analyze data without worrying about the underlying storage format or system, which eliminates the need to duplicate or move data from a source and reduces cost and inefficiencies. With BigLake, customers gain fine-grained access controls, with an API interface spanning Google Cloud and open file formats like Parquet, along with open-source processing engines like Apache Spark. These capabilities extend a decade’s worth of innovations with BigQuery to data lakes on Google Cloud Storage to enable a flexible and cost-effective open lake house architecture. Twitter already uses storage capabilities with BigQuery to remove the limits of data to better understand how people use their platform, and what types of content they might be interested in. As a result, they are able to serve content across trillions of events per day with an ads pipeline that runs more than 3M aggregations per second. Another major innovation we’re announcing today is Spanner change streams. Coming soon, this new product will further remove data limits for our customers, allowing them to track changes within their Spanner database in real time in order to unlock new value. Spanner change streams tracks Spanner inserts, updates, and deletes to stream the changes in real time across a customer’s entire Spanner database. This ensures customers always have access to the freshest data as they can easily replicate changes from Spanner to BigQuery for real-time analytics, trigger downstream application behavior using Pub/Sub, or store changes in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for compliance. With the addition of change streams, Spanner, which currently processes over 2 billion requests per second at peak with up to 99.999% availability, now gives customers endless possibilities to process their data. Remove the limits of your data workloadsOur AI portfolio is powered by Vertex AI, a managed platform with every ML tool needed to build, deploy and scale models, and is optimized to work seamlessly with data workloads in BigQuery and beyond. Today, we’re announcing new Vertex AI innovations that will provide customers with an even more streamlined experience to get AI models into production faster and make maintenance even easier.Vertex AI Workbench, which is now generally available, brings data and ML systems into a single interface so that teams have a common toolset across data analytics, data science, and machine learning. With native integrations across BigQuery, Serverless Spark, and Dataproc, Vertex AI Workbench enables teams to build, train and deploy ML models 5X faster than traditional notebooks. In fact, a global retailer was able to drive millions of dollars in incremental sales and deliver 15% faster speed to market with Vertex AI Workbench.With Vertex AI, customers have the ability to regularly update their models. But managing the sheer number of artifacts involved can quickly get out of hand. To make it easier to manage the overhead of model maintenance, we are announcing new MLOps capabilities with Vertex AI Model Registry. Now in preview, Vertex AI Model Registry provides a central repository for discovering, using, and governing machine learning models, including those in BigQuery ML. This makes it easy for data scientists to share models and application developers to use them, ultimately enabling teams to turn data into real-time decisions, and be more agile in the face of shifting market dynamics.Extending the reach of your dataToday, we are launching Connected Sheets for Looker, and the ability to access Looker data models within Data Studio. Customers now have the ability to interact with data however they choose, whether it be through Looker Explore, from Google Sheets, or using the drag-and-drop Data Studio interface. This will make it easier for everyone to access and unlock insights from data in order to drive innovation, and to make data-driven decisions with this new unified Google Cloud business intelligence (BI) platform. This unified BI experience makes it easy to tap into governed, trusted enterprise data, to incorporate new data sets and calculations, and to collaborate with peers.Mercado Libre, the largest online commerce and payments ecosystem in Latin America, has been an early adopter of Connected Sheets for Looker. Using this integration, they have been able to provide broader access to data through a spreadsheet interface that their employees are already familiar with. By lowering the barrier to entry, they have been able to build a data-driven culture in which everyone can inform their decisions with data. Doubling down on the data cloud partner ecosystemClosing the data-to-value gap with these data innovations would not be possible without our incredible partner ecosystem. Today, there are more than 700 software partners powering their applications using Google’s data cloud. Many partners like Bloomreach, Equifax, Exabeam, Quantum Metric, and ZoomInfo, have started using our data cloud capabilities with the Built with BigQuery initiative, which provides access to dedicated engineering teams, co-marketing, and go-to-market support. Our customers want partner solutions that are tightly integrated and optimized with products like BigQuery. So today, we’re announcing Google Cloud Ready – BigQuery, a new validation that recognizes partner solutions like those from Fivetran, Informatica and Tableau that meet a core set of functional and interoperability requirements. Today, we already recognize more than 25 partners in this new Google Cloud Ready – BigQuery program that reduces costs for customers associated with evaluating new tools while also adding support for new customer use cases. We’re also announcing a new Database Migration Program to help our customers efficiently and effectively accelerate the move from on-premise and other clouds to Google’s industry-leading managed database services. This includes tooling, resources, and knowledgeable experience from alliances like Deloitte, as well as incentives from Google to offset the cost of migrating databases.We remain committed to continued innovation with the leading data and analytics companies where our customers are investing. This week Databricks, Fivetran, MongoDB, Neo4j, and Redis are all announcing significant new capabilities for customers on Google Cloud.All of these announcements and more will be shared in detail at our Data Cloud Summit. Be sure to watchthe data cloud strategy sessions, breakouts, and get access to hands on content. There is no doubt the future of data holds limitless possibilities, and we are thrilled to be on this data cloud journey.Related ArticleReady to solve for the future? Data Cloud Summit ’22 is coming April 6Hear from customers, leaders and builders from Google Cloud at Data Cloud Summit 2022 to get the insight you need for your data organizationRead Article
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How Managed Security Service Providers can accelerate their business with Google Cloud Security’s Partner Program using Google Chronicle

Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) can deliver high-value security services for customers, helping to drive efficiencies in security operations across people, product, and processes. In an environment where the threat landscape continues to be challenging, MSSPs can allow customers to scale their security teams driving enhanced security outcomes. At the same time, MSSPs operating their own SOC team can face challenges – from core operating capabilities around an increasing number of alerts, to the shortage of skilled security professionals, to the highly manual and “tribal knowledge” investigation and response approach. MSSPs are generally constantly looking at opportunities to enhance customer satisfaction, while providing advanced security operations capability. To help, we are excited to announce our new Chronicle MSSP Program, which will offer MSSPs around the world the ability to provide scalable, differentiated, and effective detection and response capabilities with our cloud-native SIEM product, Chronicle. In a highly competitive environment where customers have little to differentiate between various MSSP providers, we are helping to turbocharge our MSSP partners with specialized services offerings, enabling branded portals and advanced threat detection, investigation, and response capabilities. “We are proud to partner with Google Cloud Security to solve functional challenges that exist in security for our customers. As a major partner and a distributor/MSSP, we are excited to leverage this new  program, helping our customers and delivering security outcomes”—Robert Herjavec, CEO, Herjavec Group and Fishtech GroupOur partners can help drive success for their business with: Google-scale partnership support to help grow your business – Go-to-market with a team that are incentivized to sell your solution. Help unlock greenfield accounts and expand into new territories quickly.   More controls over margins, and easy, straight-forward pricing – The modern licensing model gives MSSPs advanced control over their margins.  Building differentiated solutions that demonstrate your expertise – Chronicle MSSPs can add their solution on Chronicle to help make their solution both unique in the market and easier to sell. MSSPs can drive additional leverage with branded reporting, unique solutions, and advanced threat intelligence.Additionally, our partners are able to utilize key technical differentiators in Chronicle to help drive value for customers: API driven multi-tenancy – We can make it easier for you by helping to streamline and automate customer management workflows and enable the delivery of fully featured instances in a few API calls.Ingest everything, helping to ensure no more blindspots – Chronicle is designed to ingest data from any cloud – even the voluminous datasets (e.g. EDR, NDR, Cloud). This ability can enable security data to exist in one place, and perhaps more importantly, aliased and correlated into a timeline of events. This capability can enable SOCs to begin to operationalize their data into meaningful signals.Help prioritize threats and quickly respond to alerts  with context-aware detections – With context-aware detections in Chronicle, the supporting information from authoritative sources (e.g. CMDB, IAM, and DLP) including telemetry, context, relationships, and vulnerabilities are available as a “single” detection event. Our partners can use this capability to write context-driven detections, prioritize existing alerts, and drive fast investigation.Simply put, Google Chronicle will help reduce the MTTR (mean time to respond) for our partners by helping to minimize the need to wait for contextual understanding before making a decision and taking an investigatory action, which can lead to greater customer and cost benefits. We have partners already using the Chronicle MSSP program. Our partners like  CYDERES, Netenrich, and Novacoast, among others, have used this program to help accelerate customers’ security operations modernization journeys. We at Google Cloud are helping to drive innovations that are foundational to security operations and helping our partners support customers effectively. The Chronicle MSSP Program builds on the momentum of our MSSP program for VirusTotal, which can provide our partners with world-class crowdsourced threat intelligence. To learn more about the Chronicle and VirusTotal MSSP programs, register for our MSSP webinar.  For more information about the Chronicle MSSP Program, contact us at gcsecurity-mssp@google.com. Additionally, learn more about our VirusTotal MSSP programRelated ArticleIntroducing Community Security AnalyticsIntroducing Community Security Analytics, an open-source repository of queries for self-service security analytics to help you get starte…Read Article
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Enhance your analysis with new international Google Trends datasets in BigQuery

Sharing and exchanging data is a critical element of any organization’s analytics strategy. In fact, BigQuery customers already share data using our existing infrastructure, with over 4,500 customers swapping data across organizational boundaries. Creating seamless access to analytics workflows and insights has become that much easier with the introduction of Analytics Hub and surfacing datasets unique to Google.Last summer, the Google Trends public dataset was launched to democratize access to Google first-party data and drive additional value to our customers. At no additional cost, you can access Top 25 stories and Top 25 Rising search queries in the United States through a SQL-interface, unlocking countless new opportunities to derive insights from blending Google Trends datasets with other structured data sources. Since launching in June of 2021, over 30 terabytes of the Google Trends dataset have been queried by users across the United States. From joining the Search Trends data to Nielsen Designated Market Area (DMA) boundaries to know where to activate marketing campaigns, to creating term forecasts and predictions to hypothesize and experiment product development, there are a broad range of applications across many business and consumer profiles.  Through the secure and streamlined access to this highly desirable data in BigQuery, business and consumers alike are finally able to make better data-driven decisions at scale.With the success of the Google Trends dataset launch in the United States, we knew that meeting the needs of our global counterparts would be a fast follow. After all, we are citizens of a global economy and must do better to accommodate the world we operate in. As such, we began our journey to provide a more comprehensive view of how trends occur across the globe for our customers.What’s new?Today, we are excited to announce the expansion of the Google Trends public dataset beyond the US to cover approximately 50 additional countries worldwide. This is available in public preview and covers all major countries where the Google Trends service exists today. Most of the features of the international Google Trends dataset will mimic its United States counterpart, backed by the same privacy-first mindset. The international dataset will remain anonymized, indexed, normalized, and aggregated prior to publication. New sets of top terms and top rising queries will continue to be generated daily, with data being inserted into a new partition of their respective table. The expiration date of each top term and top rising set (e.g. each set’s partition) will also stay at 30 days. Every term within a set will still be enriched with a historical backfill over a rolling five year period. Learn more about the schema of each table in the dataset listing.In addition to surfacing the top trends in the United States by Designated Market Area (DMA), the international dataset will provide the daily top stories and top rising queries by ISO country and sub-region. Countries and/or sub-regions may be excluded based on data-sharing regulation and policies. The sheer scale of coverage and reach now increases multi-fold by simply applying similar or existing use cases to different parts of the globe.International Google Trends dataset now available in the Google Cloud Marketplace or Analytics Hub.Working with the international Google Trends datasetJust like all other Google Cloud datasets, users can obtain access without charges of up to 1TB/month in queries and up to 10GB/month in storage through BigQuery’s free tier and leverage the BigQuery sandbox, all subject to BigQuery’s free tier thresholds.To begin exploring the global Google Trends dataset, simply query the international tables for the top 25 and top 25 rising terms from the Google Cloud Console. To minimize the data scanned and processed, utilize the partition filter, as well as country and region filters (if possible) in your query:code_block[StructValue([(u’code’, u”SELECTrn *rnFROMrn `bigquery-public-data.google_trends.international_top_terms`rnWHERErn refresh_date = DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL 1 DAY)rn AND country_code = ‘CA’rn AND region_name = ‘Alberta'”), (u’language’, u”)])]Sample data:We’ve also updated the Looker dashboard to incorporate the new global dataset, and it even includes filtering for the countries and regions you care about most.What’s next for Google Cloud Datasets?We are continuing to progress forward in the path to making Google’s first-party data universally accessible. Stay tuned for updates on more dataset launches and availability, as well as our integration with Analytics Hub. In the meantime, explore the new international Google Trends dataset in your own project, or if you’re new to BigQuery spin up a project using the BigQuery sandbox.Related ArticleTop 25 Google Search terms, now in BigQueryGoogle Trends datasets for the Top 25 terms and Top 25 Rising terms now available in BigQuery to enhance your business analysesRead Article
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Cloud CISO Perspectives: March 2022

Two themes have been resonating for me across the security industry over the last month. The first is a topic from my personal blog that I wrote more than two years ago: Resilience is about Capabilities not Plans. Collectively, organizations have proven their ability to be resilient in light of many disruptive events like a pandemic, natural disasters, and cyber conflicts. Our resilience will only continue to be tested in existing or new ways into the future. Organizations that prioritize testing and re-testing capabilities across their people, process and technology vs. plans alone will continue to be the most resilient. The next theme is focusing on building secure products, not just security products. As an industry, we can be doing more in this area as recent weaknesses in security products have demonstrated. Security is the cornerstone of Google’s product strategy. We build secure solutions and products that strive to make security easier as well as secure-by-default choices that lead to the security outcomes we want our customers, users and employees to achieve.Below, I’ll recap the latest updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team, industry highlights and upcoming events. Event UpdatesMcKinsey Webinar on Security as Code: Next week, I’ll join the McKinsey team for a webinar on Security as Code to break down how the cloud can help make organizations more secure. Ensuring the safe adoption of cloud computing is becoming an increasing priority across the industry, reflecting the benefits that an organization can achieve from digital transformation. Increasingly, the cloud is viewed not as a risk to manage, but a means of managing risk in new, innovative and more substantial ways, while also improving an organization’s security posture. We’ll cover this and more during the webinar. Register here.Cloud Security Talks: Threat Detection & Response Edition: Earlier this month, we hosted our first Cloud Security Talks of 2022. The sessions covered all things security operations (SecOps) across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments, highlighted product innovations and updates, and talked about how threat detection, investigation and response fits into our invisible security vision. Check out the on-demand sessions to learn more. Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources from our cloud security teams this month: Security Federated workload identity with Certificate Authority Service (CA Service): To help support our customers’ implementation of zero trust strategies across all their IT environments, we announced that Google Cloud Certificate Authority (CA) Service can issue certificates for workloads reflecting their federated identities, even if the workloads are hosted on-premises or in other clouds. There’s a session in our Q4 2021 Zero Trust Security Talks on this topic that’s available on demand as well.New threat detection capabilities in Google Chronicle: The Chronicle team released the public preview of context-aware detections designed to create efficiencies for customers’ detection and response journey. Customers can use this contextualization to write better detections, prioritize existing alerts, and drive faster investigations. Community Security Analytics: As part of our efforts to help customers move toward Autonomic Security Operations, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team announced Community Security Analytics, a set of open-sourced queries and rules designed to help detect common cloud-based threats. Account Defender in reCAPTCHA Enterprise: Enterprises need tools to help fight online fraud targeting their user accounts and payments. To help, the reCAPTCHA Enterprise team introduced account defender, a new feature built into reCAPTCHA Enterprise that helps businesses determine if an action aligns or deviates from the account owner’s typical behavior.Chrome’s ongoing efforts to keep enterprises safe: For a long time Chrome has been the first line of defense to protect our employees and users against malicious URLs and content on the web. The security capabilities built into Chrome can help IT administrators strengthen their organization’s posture. Also of note, the new Chrome 2.1 CIS Benchmark covers independent recommendations on which Chrome policies to configure to help support organizations’ security and compliance needs.  Introducing Automatic Certificate Management Environment: We introduced an enhancement of Certificate Manager (in preview) which allows Google Cloud customers to acquire public certificates for their workloads that terminate TLS directly or for their cross-cloud and on-premise workloads. This provides Cloud Customers with a common certificate lifecycle management capability based on ACME without a single point of failure.Industry updatesHealthcare: In our latest healthcare security series post, Taylor Lehmann and Seth Rosenblatt from Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team discuss the value of sustainable visibility mechanisms for cybersecurity teams working in global healthcare organizations to help secure and preserve patient care and safety. U.S. Public Sector: Accelerating U.S. government security and compliance implementations: To help accelerate cloud adoption of cloud services, Google Cloud’s Public Sector Professional Services Organization (PSO) offers specialized consulting engagements. These engagements include helping customers on their journey to achieve Agency ATOs for the cloud products and services they use and developing zero trust strategies and architectures to help organizations meet requirements under the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity.Modernizing the U.S. Federal Government’s Approach to Cyber Threat Management with Autonomic Security Operations: The Google Cybersecurity Action Team released its latest whitepaper that details how Google Cloud can help drive federal agencies’ ability to meet the White House cybersecurity analytics requirements of EO 14028 and OMB M-21-31. Scaling and securing the cloud for defense applications: Read our latest blog post on how our secure cloud access solution built in partnership with Palo Alto Networks is helping Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) users access services in any commercial cloud environment, while performing the required security actions of logging, threat analysis, and session control.Fortifying Federal Networks: Google Workspace provides security based on zero trust concepts that support the business and operations of government, easy collaboration across teams regardless of location, and seamless access from any endpoint. To help federal agencies navigate implementations, our Work Safer program is available through many partners like Carahsoft. Financial Services: Cloud and the future of financial markets: Cloud Googlers participated in a fireside chat at FIA Boca 2022 to discuss the future of markets and policy, the new technologies that are already paving the way for greater speed and transparency, and how cloud can help promote greater resiliency, performance, and security in financial markets. The team also published a detailed paper on this topic.ComplianceCloud vendor due diligence services: One way we help our customers scale and accelerate their cloud assessments is by collaborating with third party risk management (TPRM) providers to provide independent due diligence services and platforms to help automate vendor risk management based on the data they collect and provide. By enabling our TPRM assessors to examine the controls present in our infrastructure and operations, they can develop independent and unbiased audit reports that can be shared directly with our customers. We currently work with industry-leading TPRM providers such as CyberGRX, TruSight, and KY3P to deliver high-quality risk assessments for our customers globally. Learn more in this blog post. Data governance in the cloud: Along with a corporate governance policy and a dedicated team of people, implementing a successful data governance program requires tooling. Google Cloud offers a comprehensive set of tools that enable organizations to manage their data securely, ensure governance, and drive data democratization.To have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox, sign-up for our newsletter. We’ll be back next month with more security-related updates.Related ArticleCloud CISO Perspectives: February 2022Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables shares his thoughts on the latest security updates from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team.Read Article
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Save big by temporarily suspending unneeded Compute Engine VMs—now GA

One of the best aspects of the cloud is the ability to purchase and use only what you need. This enables you to take advantage of modern and performant computing while fine tuning cost optimization.     With Suspend/Resume, Generally Available today, you have even more control over your Google Cloud resource consumption. Similar to closing the lid of your laptop, Suspending a Google Compute Engine VM will save the state of your instance to disk allowing you to pick up where you left off when you Resume it later. While your instance is in the SUSPENDED state, you no longer pay for cores or RAM, instead you only pay for the storage costs of your instance memory. Other VM running costs such as OS licensing may also be reduced. How it worksSuspending an instance sends an ACPI S3 signal to the instance’s operating system. This results in 2 significant advantages compared to similar functionalities from other cloud providers. First, this allows for broad compatibility with a wide selection of OS images without requiring you to use a cloud specific OS image or installing daemons. Undocummented and custom OS images that respond to the ACPI S3 signal may also work with Suspend. Feel free to try it out! Secondly, storage is dynamically provisioned when Suspend is requested and is separate from the instance’s boot disk. This is in contrast to implementations in other clouds that require you to ensure that you have sufficient empty space in your boot disk to save the instance state which may increase the running costs of your VM. This also ensures that your suspended instance only consumes as much storage as it needs.Use casesMany Google Cloud users have already realized huge savings from Suspending their virtual desktops or developer environments when they are not in use. For example: “Utilizing Compute Engine’s suspend and resume functionality has allowed BigCommerce to reduce operation costs of our Compute Engine-driven development environment. BigCommerce allows each engineer to customize their environment’s “working hours,” which triggers suspension at the end of each work day and resumption at the beginning of the next day. This has reduced our Virtual Machine Instance usage times from 168 hours a week to 60 hours a week per environment on average, enabling us to save thousands of dollars each month. We expect these cost-efficiency savings to only increase as our Engineering organization grows.”—Aaron Humerickhouse, Manager, Engineering at BigCommerce Another use case is to accelerate horizontal scaling by Resuming suspended instances. While Compute Engine instances have very quick creation times, booting the operating system and loading applications may take longer than you would like when urgently trying to meet a demand spike. One way to address this issue is to initialize instances with the critical applications and Suspend them. When you Resume them later, they should be productive much more quickly than instances created from scratch.  Next stepsLearn more with our Suspend/Resume documentation.Related ArticleTau T2D VMs now in GA : Independent testing validates market-leading price-performanceT2D VMs powered by 3rd Generation AMD EPYC processors (code-named Milan) are now available for the Compute Engine Tau family in preview.Read Article
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Federated workload identity at scale made easy with CA Service

At the end of 2021, we announced the ability for Google Cloud Certificate Authority (CA) Service to issue certificates for workloads reflecting their federated identities, even if the workloads are hosted on-premises or in other clouds. We are excited to announce this capability is now generally available, advancing our work to support customers’ implementation of zero trust strategies across all their IT environments. At the core of a zero trust approach to security is the idea that trust needs to be established via multiple mechanisms and continuously verified. A zero trust approach to end user access (such as Google’s BeyondCorp model or using our BeyondCorp Enterprise product offering) establishes trust in end-users by considering identities and context. A zero trust approach to protecting workloads on cloud-native infrastructure (such as Google’s BeyondProd model) creates trust between workloads by defining and enforcing access policies based on service identities, rather than the IP addresses of the host infrastructure.Users can create credentials for service identities using Certificate Authority Service, a highly available and scalable private certificate authority that can be used to issue workload credentials (in the form of certificates) reflecting the workload’s identity. The certificates issued by the service conform to standards (RFC 5280) so you can specify name constraints limiting which domain names the CA can issue certificates to (a capability currently in preview) or you can request custom extensions in the certificate (e.g., for your unique application semantics). The new federated identity feature means that even if you manage your workload identities in other clouds or in on-premises environments with Active Directory, you can now issue a certificate from CA Service reflecting their federated identity. As a result, by using these certificates, you can avoid manually configuring access policies using IP addresses. Further, using CA Service allows you to issue certificates at scale (with the principle of least privilege) saving significant time and resources while increasing security. Based on early feedback from customers, these savings are proving to be hugely valuable.Jonathan Perry, Managing Director, Consolidated Trade Ledger, at Goldman Sachs, recently spoke about his experience with this new capability and how Google Cloud continues to democratize security for users, saying: “At Goldman Sachs, the key principle for our zero trust strategy is homogeneity and CA Service is a super important piece of this strategy. The fact that we can use the same technology to talk to on-premises workloads and get point-to-point connectivity to Google Cloud services with zero trust principles is fantastic. Building CA Service on our own would have been difficult and would not have provided the same integration with all other cloud services, like GKE or Traffic Director, that we benefit from today.”At-scale certificate issuance for federated workload identities is extremely difficult to build and manage without a capability like CA Service, and shows the value that a managed cloud service provides when moving to a zero trust approach. Jonathan discusses this in more detail during a Google Cloud Security Talks presentation, which is available on-demand if you’d like to learn more about how Goldman Sachs is applying a zero trust approach to its identities and workloads on-premises.In addition to CA Service, another Google Cloud product that’s useful in implementing the BeyondProd approach is VPC Service Controls (VPC-SC). VPC-SC enables users to define and enforce a security perimeter around multi-tenant Google Cloud services such as BigQuery. With VPC-SC, you can define a service perimeter around a set of Google Cloud services (grouped together using projects) and define zero trust access policies (for instance, based on the identity of the caller) for all the services in a project.  In the example below, there are three services (BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Compute Engine) within the service perimeter. The perimeter provides an additional layer of protection on top of Google Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM), which can be used to manage the identity of the workload. Access to resources outside the perimeter will be blocked, even if an attacker is using valid credentials. Moreover, the VPC-SC perimeter blocks any data flow from within the boundary to outside of the boundary, providing strong data exfiltration protection.CA Service can also be configured to run inside a VPC-SC service perimeter, further supporting zero trust principles by limiting certificate issuance to a set of service accounts coming from authenticated devices with certain attributes or limiting CA configuration to authorized networks and sets of managed devices.In a recent presentation called “Bringing BeyondProd to Life with Google Cloud,” Christian Gorke, Head of Cyber Center of Excellence, Big Data and Advanced Analytics, at Commerzbank AG, discussed how CA Service and VPC-SC are foundational capabilities for his organization to build their compliance as code framework, where every resource and access model is programmed and automated. He said: “As a financial institute in Europe, we are part of a strictly regulated environment. At the same time, we process confidential and personal data, for which we need to reduce the data exfiltration risk. Our goal is to minimize data movements outside of Commerzbank AG and between development, testing, and production environments, but even further, between organizations within Commerzbank AG itself. It is where VPC Service Controls come into play and provides us with a tool to control data flow even in the presence of insider threats – based on zero trust principles. Without a solution, we would need to invest a great deal of time and resources and still run into scalability issues. In addition, with Certificate Authority Service, we finally can minimize our certificate issuance tooling and leverage scalable security backed by HSM across all Google Cloud.”As customers look to build identity-based zero trust policies, VPC-SC and CA Service are two Google Cloud services that can help make implementing the BeyondProd principles a reality.  Getting started with CA Service is easy; the product overview documentation is a great place to begin. If you’re interested in exploring the new feature to federate a third-party identity and obtain certificates, give it a try today and see for yourself how easily you can integrate certificates within your cloud-native applications.To learn more about Google’s BeyondProd approach, we encourage you to watch the “Applying Zero Trust Principles Beyond Access with BeyondProd” session on-demand. Be sure to also check out all of the other great sessions from the zero trust Security Talks event in December, as well as the threat detection and response sessions from our Security Talks event earlier this month!Related ArticleAnnouncing general availability of Google Cloud CA ServiceGoogle Cloud CAS provides a highly scalable and available private CA to address the unprecedented growth in certificates in the digital w…Read Article
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Introducing our new cohort of startups for the 2022 Google Cloud Accelerator Canada

In January,  we put a call-out to startups across the country to participate in our second Google Cloud Accelerator Canada cohort. Looking at the incredible response to our inaugural program last year, it’s clear that Canadian organizations across every sector, from healthcare and education, to retail, manufacturing and public services, are leaning in on cloud technology to drive growth and innovation. Today, we’re pleased to announce a new class of groundbreaking startups for the Google Cloud Accelerator Canada. This 10-week virtual accelerator brings the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’re excited to offer these startups cloud mentorship and technical project support, along with deep dives and workshops on product design, customer acquisition and leadership development for cloud startup founders and leaders. We received so many great applications for this program and want to welcome the eleven startups that make up the 2022 Google Cloud Accelerator Canada class: Ad Auris (Vancouver, BC): An end-to-end audio creation platform. Used by digital publications to convert their written work into great-sounding audio, instantly.Booxi (Montreal, QC): Booxi is an appointment scheduling software designed for retailers. Their mission is to Make Commerce More Human and help retailers offer a personalized experience to every customer.Cadence (Saskatoon, SK): Cadence is a digital executor assistant, supported by Certified Executor Advisors. Their web app automates Estate Settlement tasks.f8th (Toronto, ON): f8th’s continuous authentication transparently and passively authenticates users and detects fraudsters in real-time without impacting the user experience.IRIS (Burlington, ON): IRIS is a smart cities infrastructure technology company. They help urban and rural communities extend the life of their public infrastructure.Origami XR (Toronto, ON): Origami is a spatial computing company that makes it easy to scan a physical environment using the LiDAR in your phone, and create a 3D digital twin that rivals output from professional scanning equipment.Pharmaguide (Richmond Hill, ON): PharmaGuide specializes in equipping healthcare providers with solutions to increase efficiency and improve patient outcomes. Through direct integrations with multiple health platforms, they can intelligently analyze data and flag patients that could benefit from treatment modifications.Schoolio (Toronto, ON): Schoolio OS aims to bridge teachers, parents and tutors into a single ecosystem, focusing on education transparency, inclusive curriculum and a holistic approach to success measurement.Shaddari Inc. (Montreal, QC): Shaddari Inc. is a precision medicine company that has developed an A.I. that can tell instantly whether a vaccine will be efficient against a new variant of a virus.SmartONE Solutions (Markham, ON): SmartONE creates smart communities, by connecting the smart homes in multi-family residential developments over a common network to transform community living.Tiggy (Vancouver, BC): Tiggy is a 15-minute grocery delivery service on a mission to forever change the way we buy everyday essentials.We heard from a few of the startups from our cohort about their aspirations for the program.”The Accelerator will help build all aspects of our company with growth and efficiency in mind,” said Krystian, CTO and Co-Founder of Cadence. “It’s an amazing opportunity to learn from Google’s leaders, with access to all of the Cloud Platform services that will allow us to build our product in a cost efficient, scalable and secure way.””We’re excited to access the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology as we continue to scale globally,” said Emil Sylvester Ramos, co-Founder of IRIS. “In addition to Cloud mentorship and technical project support, we look forward to working with Google’s IoT and AI/ ML for the further development of our technology and to work with Google’s Smart Cities teams to help create safer, smarter and more resilient communities and infrastructure.””We are looking forward to building connections with many of Canada’s top startups to share ideas and continue to grow our own technical knowledge,” said Eugene Bisovka, Co-Founder, Tiggy Delivery Corp. “We’re also excited to try Google technologies that we haven’t used yet for improving our own order batching algorithm.”It’s an exciting opportunity to work with these founders and startup teams to help grow and scale their business. Programming for the Google Cloud Accelerator Canada begins April 11 and we can’t wait to get started.Related ArticleApplications are now open for the second Google Cloud Accelerator Canada CohortWe’re inviting Canadian cloud-native technology startups to apply for the second Google Cloud Accelerator Canada cohort.Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Contact Center AI reimagines the customer experience through full end-to-end platform expansion

Providing best-in-class customer service is crucial for the success of your business. Contact centers are a critical touch point, as they have to balance between representing your brand and prioritizing customer care. When your customers seek help and support, they expect efficient service that is accessible through modern voice and digital channels. In short, customer expectations are increasing—and that’s a problem if your contact center infrastructure and solutions are becoming outdated.  All of these factors are why today, we’re announcing Google Cloud Contact Center AI Platform, an expansion to Contact Center AI that offers an out-of-box, end-to-end solution for the contact center. It brings together the advantages of AI, cloud scalability, multi-experience capabilities, and tight integration with customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to unify sales, marketing, and support teams around data across the customer journey.Improving customer experiences from all angles Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI helps you leverage AI to scale your contact center interactions while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction. Over the last two years, we have built a large group of partners, including the largest contact center and customer experience ISVs and our system integrator ecosystem, to bring Contact Center AI to customers. Today, we are helping enterprises across industries and geographies to cost-effectively reimagine contact center experiences. For example, Marks & Spencer reduced in-store call volume by 50%, and similarly, The Home Depot improved call containment by 185%, all while significantly increasing customer self-service engagement.Adding to our Contact Center AI capabilities, Contact Center AI Platform is purpose-built for customer relationship management, extending your ability to offer personalized customer experiences that are consistent across your brand, whether delivered through a virtual agent, a human agent, or a combination of both. It eliminates many long-running pain points, from managing data fragmentation to replacing rigid customer experience flows with more engaging, personalized, and flexible support. With this addition, Contact Center AI now lets you: Orchestrate the customer journey by creating modern experiences that can be embedded in their chosen channels with mobile/web software developer kits (SDKs), compatible with iOS and Android;Leverage CRM as a single source of insight into the customer experience, to unify content, increase personalization, and automate processing with CRM data unification;Manage multiple channels without pivoting across voice, SMS, and chat support;Predict customer needs and route calls appropriately with AI-driven routing, based on both historical CRM data and real-time interactions;Automate scheduling, schedule adherence monitoring, and manage employee scheduling preferences with Workforce Optimization (WFO) integration;Provide customers with self-service via web or mobile interfaces using Visual Interactive Voice Response (IVR).Helping you do more with contact centersThe addition of Contact Center AI Platform provides your partners the ability to integrate with Contact Center AI, so you can enjoy a more seamless experience operating your customer service center, with a complete view of the customer in a single workspace that includes real-time AI intelligence, native agent call controls, and real-time call transcription. For example, we are expanding our partnership with Salesforce to integrate Contact Center AI with Service Cloud Voice to deliver a unified Service Cloud agent console and Customer 360. “Customers are continually raising their service expectations, and our research tells us 79% of consumers believe the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services,” said Ryan Nichols, SVP & GM, Contact Center, for Salesforce Service Cloud. “Through intelligence, workflows, and a deeper understanding of the customer, Salesforce’s Service Cloud Voice paired with Google’s Contact Center AI will empower agents with a seamless experience to help them wow customers.”We are also excited to partner with UJET, an innovative and experienced Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) provider. UJET offers secure user-centric design, scalability, and mobile-focused solution, with turnkey implementation, strong omnichannel capabilities, and best-in-class user experience, making their product a natural fit into Google’s contact center vision. To learn more about the partnership, see here.Delivering impact for customers Contact Center AI is already making a difference for our customers such as OneUnited Bank, the largest Black-owned bank in the U.S. “OneUnited Bank has been in partnership with Google Cloud and UJET, as well as a long-standing customer of Salesforce. The expansion and enhancements of Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI, along with its deeper integration with Salesforce, means better return on investment as we drive towards evolving our contact center to deliver exceptional client experiences,” said Teri Williams, President and Chief Operating Officer at OneUnited Bank.Fitbit, which boasts more than 29 million active users, is also reaping the benefits. “Fitbit relies on Google Cloud and UJET to provide support to our customers with a mobile-first approach. This collaboration, in combination with a strong Salesforce integration, has helped us modernize our entire customer support experience,” stated Cassandra Johnson, VP, Devices & Services Customer Care & Vendor Management Office, at Google.According to industry analyst Sheila McGee-Smith of McGee-Smith Analytics, “Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI is already a force in the contact center industry thanks to its early focus on AI for customer experience.” She continued, “Through their partnerships with UJET and Salesforce, as well as these expanded capabilities, Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI Platform will help define the future of customer service by powering more secure, engaging, and personalized customer experiences.”Contact Center AI Platform is supported by a host of integration partners, including Accenture, CDW, Cognizant, Deloitte, HCL, IBM, Infosys, Quantiphi, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro. We will also continue to partner closely with the contact center and customer experience (CX) ISVs that our customers already rely on. If you already have a contact center solution provider, you can still integrate Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI into your existing environment. To learn more about how you can leverage the power of AI to reimagine your contact center experience, visit our Contact Center AI page.Related ArticleReaching more customers with Contact Center AI: 2021 Wrap-upExplore Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) and its momentum in 2021Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Go 1.18 and Google Cloud: Go now with Google Cloud

On March 15th, the Go team announced Go 1.18 GA, the latest release of the Go programming language. The culmination of over a decade of design delivers the features our developers demanded: generics, fuzzing, and module workspaces. With this release, Go becomes the first major language to integrate fuzz testing into its core toolchain without using third-party support, further establishing Go as a preferred language for developing secure applications.Go was created at Google in 2007, designed to help developers build fast, reliable, and secure software. Unlike traditional languages, Go was built for the modern multi-core computing world. Go has emerged as a modern language for developing cloud applications, services, and infrastructure. Today Go powers several of Google’s largest products, and is used by many customers to scale their businesses. Organizations big and small love Go and the community of Go developers, known as “gophers” has grown into a global network with over 2 million users worldwide. Using the power of Go in the CloudWhen looking at the public repos, over 75% of CNCF projects including Kubernetes and Istio are written in Go and 10% of developers are writing in Go worldwide (as of May 2021). Google delivers high performance infrastructure to run key, cloud native, Open Source projects. Our modern cloud infrastructure is based on Kubernetes at its core and our strong support for Istio and Knative have formed the base of some of our leading services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), our managed application platform with Anthos, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run. Google uses Go extensively for a wide range of applications from our indexing platform that powers Google Search, to the server side optimizations that power Chrome’s 1B+ users, to the infrastructure on which Google cloud is built. Release HighlightsWith this new release of Go 1.18, Generics are the biggest change to Go since the language was created. Go developers told us that they feel that Go lacks critical features, with generics being the main missing piece. With Go 1.18, new and existing Go developers can take advantage of the productivity, performance, and maintenance benefits that generics can bring. We’ve already begun to see the new kinds of libraries and projects gophers are building with generics in its short beta period, and expect this creativity to grow as time goes on. This Go release also brings native support for fuzzing. Fuzzing is a type of vulnerability testing that throws arbitrary data at a piece of software to expose unknown errors and is emerging as a common testing scheme in enterprise development. Go is now the first major language to provide fuzzing support with no third-party integrations necessary, allowing developers to start building secure software with minimal additional cost. Go’s innovative approach to fuzzing can provide not only security for the current code but also ongoing protection as code and dependencies evolve.  With attacks on software becoming more common and complex, vulnerability detection can be a critical part of the enterprise development lifecycle, and Go’s fuzzing capabilities catch vulnerabilities earlier in the lifecycle.Build securely using Go At Google we are helping to make Open Source software secure. Open source software is a connective tissue for much of the online world. At Google, we’ve been working to raise awareness of the state of open source security and are committed to helping secure the software supply chain for organizations. Go has been designed to create secure applications, helping to minimize risk as much as possible. Go applications compile down to a single binary without local dependencies. It’s not uncommon to see an application built using only the standard library, or only a couple well-vetted Go dependencies. Go’s dependency management uses tamper-evident  transparency log, with built in tooling that helps ensure your dependencies are what you can expect. Go has native encryption, which is used across much of the internet, including key components of Google. Go even supports distroless containers, where there are zero local dependencies to worry about. Google Cloud products like Cloud Build, for CI/CDand Artifact Registry, for container management, and have direct access to Go’s vulnerability database and can provide you instant warnings about security threats. “At Google we are committed to helping to secure the online infrastructure and applications upon which the world depends. A critical aspect of this mission is being able to understand and verify the security of open source dependency chains. The 1.18 release of Go is an important step towards helping to ensure that developers are able to build secure applications, understand risk when vulnerabilities are discovered, and reduce the impact of cybersecurity attacks” said Eric Brewer, VP Infrastructure, Google FellowThis launch is a significant milestone for Go that helps developers from around the world build more performant and secure applications that run on any infrastructure. For more information on this release and how to get started with Go, please visit.
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform

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Bootstrap your startup with the Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups : A Look into the Start Series

Bootstrap your Startup with our technical guided seriesAt Google Cloud, we want to provide you with the access to all the tools you need to grow your business. Through the Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups, leverage industry leading solutions with how-to video guides and resource handbookscurated for startups. This multi-series contains 3 chapters: Start, Build and Grow, which matches your startup’s stage of growth:The Start Series: Begin by building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish.The Build Series: Optimize and scale existing deployments to reach your target audiences.The Grow Series: Grow and attain scale with deployments on Google Cloud.Kick off with The Start SeriesThe Start Series is designed to help your startup begin building, deploying and managing new applications on Google Cloud from start to finish. The series contains 12 videos and is dedicated to those who are starting out their cloud journey with Google Cloud. From setting up your project, to choosing the right compute option, to configuring your networking to managing your databases, and understanding support and billing – the Start Series guides you at every step of the journey. Check out our website and our Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups full playlist.Coming up next – The Build SeriesLaunch into the next part of the journey continuing from the Start Series, with the upcoming Build Series, where we will be focusing on the optimization and scaling of existing deployments to help your startups reach your target audiences.Join us by checking out the video series on theGoogle Cloud Tech channel, and subscribe to stay up to date. See you in the cloud!Related ArticleGet started, build and grow your Startup on Google CloudAnnouncing the launch of Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups, a video series for technical enablement aimed at helping startups to…Read Article
Quelle: Google Cloud Platform