Google Launches Smart Canvas to Stir-up Collaboration in Google Workspace
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After more than a year of remote collaboration, many people are showing signs of digital fatigue. Throughout the pandemic, millions of employees bridged the physical distances with their colleagues by making themselves more available, joining a deluge of virtual meetings, and leaning into a dizzying array of tools and applications. As part of our mission to build the future of work, we’re addressing these challenges in Google Workspace.
As we announced today at I/O, we’re launching smart canvas—a new product experience that delivers the next evolution of collaboration for Google Workspace. Between now and the end of the year, we’re rolling out innovations that make it easier for people to stay connected, focus their time and attention, and transform their ideas into impact.
Specifically, we’re enhancing the apps that hundreds of millions of people use every day—like Docs, Sheets, and Slides—to make them even more flexible, interactive, and intelligent. With smart canvas, we’re bringing the content and connections that transform collaboration into a richer, better experience in Google Workspace.
When we launched Google Docs and Sheets 15 years ago, these apps introduced the world to a new way of working. They enabled anytime, anywhere teamwork—a stark contrast to the legacy tools that were designed for an era of individual work on office desktops. For over a decade now, we’ve been pushing documents away from being just digital pieces of paper and toward collaborative, linked content inspired by the web. Smart canvas is our next big step.https://www.youtube.com/embed/SDBbFETGiA4?enablejsapi=1&
Making collaboration more flexible and helpful
The evolving hybrid work model gives new urgency to existing collaboration challenges. How do teams stay focused and connected as they work together, regardless of where people are located? With smart canvas, we’re building deeper connections across Google Workspace to transform collaboration anywhere it happens.
For example, we’re taking something that people already use every day—@-mentions—to open up new, powerful collaboration capabilities. New interactive building blocks—smart chips, templates, and checklists—will connect people, content, and events into one seamless experience.
Already available, when you @ mention a person in a document, a smart chip shows you additional information like the person’s location, job title, and contact information. And starting today, we’re introducing new smart chips in Docs for recommended files and meetings. To insert smart chips into your work, simply type “@” to see a list of recommended people, files, and meetings. From web or mobile, your collaborators can then quickly skim associated meetings and people or preview linked documents, all without changing tabs or contexts. Smart chips will come to Sheets in the coming months.
Additionally, we’re making it easier to drive projects forward by streamlining common team workflows. Starting today in Docs, checklists are available on web and mobile, and you’ll soon be able to assign checklist action items to other people. These action items will show up in Google Tasks, making it easier for everyone to manage a project’s To Do list.
We’re also introducing table templates in Docs. Topic-voting tables will allow you to easily gather team feedback while project-tracker tables will help you capture milestones and statuses on the fly. And a new document template for capturing meeting notes will automatically import any relevant information from a Calendar meeting invite, including smart chips for attendees and attached files.
With our new pageless format in Docs, you’ll be able to remove the boundaries of a page to create a surface that expands to whatever device or screen you’re using, making it easier to work with wide tables, large images, or detailed feedback in comments. And if you want to print or convert to PDF, you’ll be able to easily switch back to a paginated view.
Meanwhile, you’ll be able to toggle between new views in Sheets to better manage and interact with your data. Our first launch will be a timeline view that makes tracking tasks easier and faster. This flexible view allows you to organize your data by owner, category, campaign, or whichever attribute fits best. Using a dynamic, interactive timeline strengthens your ability to manage things like marketing campaigns, project milestones, schedules, and cross-team collaborations.
Fostering human connection—wherever people work
With smart canvas and innovations in Google Meet, we’re making it easy to bring the voices and faces of your team directly into the collaboration experience, to help people share ideas and solve problems together from anywhere. As part of that, we’re building tighter integrations between our communication and collaboration tools so you can pull content into conversations and conversations into content.
Starting today, we’re rolling out the ability to present your content to a Google Meet call on the web directly from the Doc, Sheet, or Slide where you’re already working with your team. Jumping between collaborating in a document and a live conversation without skipping a beat helps the project—and the team—stay focused. And in the fall, we’re bringing Meet directly to Docs, Sheets, and Slides on the web, so people can actually see and hear each other while they’re collaborating.
Live captions and translations in Google Meet will also play a crucial role in keeping people connected as they work together in distributed teams. We currently offer live captions in five languages, with more on the way. And we’re introducing live translations of captions later this year, starting with English-language live captions translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, or German, with many more languages to follow.
With recent enhancements to Google Meet, we’re also giving people more control and flexibility over the meeting experience, including more space to see people and content, plus the ability to pin and unpin content and video feeds. And to help with meeting fatigue, you can now turn off your self-feed entirely.
Because we know that collaboration is fluid and fast-moving, we’re making it easier for teams to give feedback on the fly and to move seamlessly between conversations and building content together. Teams can now jump from a discussion in Google Chat directly to building content together. Creating and editing Sheets and Docs from Google Chat rooms is already live in our web experience, and we’ll enable it for Slides in the coming weeks. And to gauge the team’s reactions along the way, we’re introducing emoji reactions in Docs in the next few months.
Working smarter and safer
Google Workspace is already infused with powerful intelligence that enables people to make the best use of their time and attention. Whether it’s with the two billion grammar suggestions we surface in Docs every month, or the intelligent file suggestions in Drive’s Priority and Quick Access features that cut file finding time by 50%.
To help everyone work smarter, in the next few months we’re introducing additional assisted writing features in Docs on the web. This includes warnings about offensive words and language, as well as other stylistic suggestions that can speed up editing and help make your writing more impactful. We’re also adding more assisted analysis functionality in our Sheets web experience, with formula suggestions that make it easier for everyone, not just analysts, to derive insights from data. Sheets intelligence helps you build and troubleshoot formulas, making data analysis faster and reducing errors.
As smart canvas evolves, we’re making it easy for businesses to connect the apps and tools they rely on to Google Workspace. This builds on our history of supporting a variety of add-on features that take the friction out of collaboration—from adding e-signatures directly in Google Workspace with DocuSign to the Salesforce connector that integrates with Sheets. To help people work even smarter, we recently announced that AppSheet Automation is generally available, so that you can automate time-consuming tasks—like approving invoices and onboarding new hires—without having to write a single line of code.
Looking ahead, we’re planning to build additional APIs so you can bring the information and actions you need from third-party tools directly into smart canvas elements like smart chips, checklists, and table templates.
And because trust is at the center of all collaboration within Google Workspace, today we’re also launching advanced capabilities that help protect users against security threats and abuse as they work together.
Transforming how people work to deliver real-world innovation
While there’s no one way to collaborate, we know from our customers that transforming how people work results in real-world innovation.
Google Workspace fuels a new way of working together. It lets our teams around the world—whether they’re in the office, at home, or in the grocery store aisle—work more flexibly and translate their ideas into new ways of delighting customers.
—Thibaud Cainne, Global Head of Tech Infra and Digital Workplace, Carrefour
Transformation happens at all levels, and often in every tool. We were able to get 17,000 of our people to make the shift from Excel to Google Sheets in just six months by demonstrating how we could optimize, automate, and connect spreadsheets and their data. That kind of collaboration leads to real-world innovation for our clients.
—Monica Andrea Diaz Pinzon, Chief of Digital Transformation (Special Projects), Banco Davivienda
We built a digital hub on Google Workspace to transform the way we connect with employees and partners across multiple locations and organizations. It allowed us to spin up major research projects in days instead of months, including delivery of major COVID-19 vaccine studies.
—Justin Riordan-Jones, Head of System and Information (Research), Department of Health & Social Care, National Institute for Health Research (UK)
As smart canvas drives the next era of collaboration in Google Workspace, we remain committed to providing a solution that’s flexible, helpful, and that fuels innovation for organizations in every industry. On the frontlines, in corporate offices, and across the countless workspaces in between, Google Workspace will continue to transform how work gets done.
Reactive Programming on Google Maps Platform: Watch Video to Learn
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The Google Maps Platform Android SDK supports extensions for reactive programming, which helps you write code to handle asynchronous operations.
Write reactive and responsive mapping applications with Google Maps Platform
In mobile apps, asynchronous events can happen at any point in time: user touch events, waiting for network calls to complete, or receiving push notifications, to name a few. As an app developer, accounting for these events and composing them with other asynchronous events can be challenging. Reactive programming is an alternative to passing callbacks for different events and helps simplify the process of working with asynchronous events. In reactive programming, events are modeled as a stream, emitting items over time.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=1TmJvOZfBVQ%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
There are two libraries you can use to write reactive code: Kotlin Flows and RxJava. The next two videos show you how to use each one.
Writing reactive and responsive mapping applications using Kotlin
If you’re a Kotlin developer looking to use Coroutines and Flows, the KTX library allows you to use Kotlin Flows to receive events. The Maps KTX library includes extension functions that return Kotlin Flow objects, so you can listen to events in a reactive manner. Unlike suspending functions, which return a single value, Kotlin Flows can return several values over time. For example, you can use a Flow to receive camera event changes over time. To get started using Kotlin Flows in your app, include the Maps KTX library in the dependencies section in your build.gradle file.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Cotx1ZmEYg8%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
Creating reactive maps on Android with RxJava
Integrate Google Maps Platform SDKs with popular Android library RxJava. RxJava is the Java implementation of Reactive Extensions, which is a library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs using observable sequences. One thing RxJava does is allows you to convert callback-based asynchronous code into a chain of transformations. Learn how this works and the other ways you can use RxJava in the third video in this series.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AgGE7fAMrdA%3Fenablejsapi%3D1%26
We hope you learn more about reactive programming concepts to help you build responsive and reactive mobile apps in this three-part YouTube series. Have ideas for helpful videos you’d like to see on our channel? Leave a comment on any of our videos. And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest updates, tutorials, customer stories, and more.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.
10 Reasons that Make Google Cloud the Champion of IaaS
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When you choose to run your business on Google Cloud you benefit from the same planet-scale infrastructure that powers Google’s products such as Maps, YouTube, and Workspace.
We have picked 10 ways in which Google Cloud Infrastructure services outshine alternatives in the market in how they simplify your operations, save money, and secure your data.
1. Custom Machine Types means no wasted resources
Compute Engine offers predefined machine types that you can use when you create a VM instance. A predefined machine type has a preset number of vCPUs and a preset amount of memory; each type is billed at a set price as described on the Compute Engine pricing page.
If predefined machine types don’t meet your needs, you can create a VM instance with a custom number of vCPUs and custom amount of memory, effectively building a custom machine type. Custom machine types are available only for general-purpose machine families. When you create a custom machine type, you are deploying a custom machine type from the E2, N2, N2D, or N1 machine family on GCP. No other leading cloud vendor offers custom machine types so extensively.
Custom machine types are a good idea for workloads that aren’t a good fit for the predefined machine types and for workloads that require more processing power or memory but don’t need all of the upgrades provided by the next machine type level. This translates into lower operating costs. They are also useful for controlling software licensing costs that are based on the number of underlying compute cores.
Jeremy Lloyd, Infrastructure and Application Modernization Lead at Appsbroker, a Google partner:
“Custom machine types coupled with Google’s StratoZone data center discovery tool provides Appsbroker with the flexibility we need to provide cost efficient virtual machines matched to a virtual machine’s actual utilization. As a result, we are able to keep our customers’ operating costs low while still providing the ability to scale as needed.”
2. Compute Engine Virtual Machines are optimized for scale-out workloads
For scale-out workloads, T2D, the first instance type in the Tau VM family, is based on 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and leapfrogs VMs for scale-out workloads of any leading public cloud provider today, both in terms of performance and price-performance. Tau VMs offer 56% higher absolute performance and 42% higher price-performance compared to general-purpose VMs from any leading public cloud vendor (source). The x86 compatibility provided by these AMD EPYC processor-based VMs gives you market-leading performance improvements and cost savings, without having to port your applications to a new processor architecture. Sign up here if you are interested in trying out T2D instances in Preview.
For SAP HANA, Google Cloud has demonstrated with SAP how we can run the world’s largest scale-out HANA system in the public cloud (96TB). With such innovation, you are covered as your business grows exponentially.
3. Largest single node GPU-enabled VM
Google is the only public cloud provider to offer up to 16 NVIDIA A100 GPUs in a single VM, making it possible to train very large AI models. Users can start with one NVIDIA A100 GPU and scale to 16 GPUs without configuring multiple VMs for single-node ML training, without crossing the VM layer.
Additionally, customers can choose smaller GPU configurations—1, 2, 4 and 8 GPUs per VM—providing the flexibility to scale their workload as needed.
The A2 VM family was designed to meet today’s most demanding applications—workloads like CUDA-enabled machine learning (ML) training and inference, for example. This family is built on the A100 GPU which offers up to 20x the compute performance compared to the previous generation GPU and comes with 40 GB of high-performance HBM2 GPU memory. To speed up multi-GPU workloads, the A2 VMs use NVIDIA’s HGX A100 systems to offer high-speed NVLink GPU-to-GPU bandwidth that delivers up to 600 GB/s. A2 VMs come with up to 96 Intel Cascade Lake vCPUs, optional Local SSD for workloads requiring faster data feeds into the GPUs and up to 100 Gbps of networking. A2 VMs provide full vNUMA transparency into the architecture of underlying GPU server platforms, enabling advanced performance tuning. Google Cloud offers these GPUs globally.
4. Non-disruptive maintenance means you worry less about planned downtime
Compute Engine offers live migration (non-disruptive maintenance) to keep your virtual machine instances running even when a host system event, such as a software or hardware update, occurs. Google’s Compute Engine live migrates your running instances to another host in the same zone without requiring your VMs to be rebooted. Live migration enables Google to perform maintenance that is integral to keeping infrastructure protected and reliable without interrupting any of your VMs. When a VM is scheduled to be live-migrated, Google provides a notification to the guest that a migration is imminent.
Live migration keeps your instances running during:
- Regular infrastructure maintenance and upgrades
- Network and power grid maintenance in the data centers
- Failed hardware such as memory, CPU, network interface cards, disks, power, and so on. This is done on a best-effort basis; if a hardware component fails completely or otherwise prevents live migration, the VM crashes and restarts automatically and a hostError is logged.
- Host OS and BIOS upgrades
- Security-related updates
- System configuration changes, including changing the size of the host root partition, for storage of the host image and packages
Live migration does not change any attributes or properties of the VM itself. The live migration process transfers a running VM from one host machine to another host machine within the same zone. All VM properties and attributes remain unchanged, including internal and external IP addresses, instance metadata, block storage data and volumes, OS and application state, network settings, network connections, and so on. This has the benefit of reducing operational and maintenance overhead, helps you build a more robust security posture where infrastructure can be consciously revamped from a known good state and minimizes risks for advanced persistent threats.
Refer to Lessons learned from a year of using live migration in production on Google Cloud from the Google engineering team.
5. Trusted Computing: Shielded VMs guard you against advanced, persistent attacks
Establishing trust in your environment is multifaceted, involving hardware and firmware, as well as host and guest operating systems. Unfortunately, threats like boot malware or firmware rootkits can stay undetected for a long time, and an infected virtual machine can continue to boot in a compromised state even after you’ve installed legitimate software.
Shielded VMs can help you protect your system from attack vectors like:
- Malicious guest OS firmware, including malicious UEFI extensions
- Boot and kernel vulnerabilities in the guest OS
- Malicious insiders within your organization
To guard against these kinds of advanced persistent attacks, Shielded VMs use:
- Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) BIOS: Helps ensure that firmware is signed and verified
- Secure and Measured Boot: Helps ensure that a VM boots an expected, healthy kernel
- Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM): Establishes root-of-trust, underpins Measured Boot, and prevents exfiltration of vTPM-sealed secrets
- Integrity Monitoring: Provides tamper-evident logging, integrated with Stackdriver, to help you quickly identify and remediate changes to a known integrity state
The Google approach allows customers to deploy Shielded VMs with only a simple click, thereby easing implementation.
6. Confidential Computing encrypts data while in use
Google Cloud was a founding member of the Confidential Computing Consortium. Along with encryption of data in transit and at rest using customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) and customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK), Confidential VM adds a “third pillar” to the end-to-end encryption story by encrypting data while in use. Confidential Computing uses processor-based technology that allows data to be encrypted in use while it is being processed in the public cloud. Confidential VM allows you to to encrypt memory in use on a Google Compute Engine VM by checking a single checkbox.
All Confidential VMs support the previously mentioned Shielded VM features under the covers—you can think of Shielded VM as helping to address VM integrity, while Confidential VM addresses the memory encryption aspect which relies on CPU features. With the confidential execution environments provided by Confidential VM and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV), Google Cloud keeps customers’ sensitive code and other data encrypted in memory during processing. Google does not have access to the encryption keys. In addition, Confidential VM can help alleviate concerns about risk related to either dependency on Google infrastructure or Google insiders’ access to customer data in the clear.
See what Google Cloud partners say about Confidential Computing here.
7. Advanced networking delivers full-stack networking and security services with fast, consistent, and scalable performance
Google Cloud’s network delivers low latency, reduces operational costs and ensures business continuity, enabling organizations to seamlessly scale up or down in any region to meet business needs. Our planet-scale network uses advanced software-defined networking and security with edge caching services to deliver fast, consistent, and scalable performance. With 28 regions, 85 zones, and 146 PoPs connected by 16 subsea fiber cables around the world, Google Cloud’s network offers a full stack of layer 1 to layer 7 services for enterprises to run their workloads anywhere. Enterprises can be assured that they have best-in-class networking and security services connecting their VMs, containers, and bare metal resources in hybrid and multi-cloud environments with simplicity, visibility, and control.
Google Cloud’s network has protected customers from one of the world’s largest DDoS attacks at 2.54 Tbps. With our multi-layer security architecture and products such as Cloud Armor, our customers ran their business with no disruptions. Furthermore, our recent integration of Cloud Armor with reCAPTCHA Enterprise adds best-in-class bot and fraud management to prevent volumetric attacks. Cloud Armor is deployed with our Cloud Load Balancer and Cloud CDN, extending the secure benefits at the network edge for traffic coming into Google Cloud so customers have security, performance, and reliability all built in. Furthermore, we are excited to offer Cloud IDS in preview, which was co-developed with security industry leader, Palo Alto Networks, to run natively in Google Cloud.
Our advanced networking capabilities also extends to GKE and Anthos networking. With the GKE Gateway controller, customers can manage internal and external HTTPS load balancing for a GKE cluster or a fleet of GKE clusters with multi-tenancy while maintaining centralized admin policy and control. Unlike other Kubernetes offerings, we offer eBPF dataplane which brings powerful tooling such as Kubernetes network policy and logging to GKE. eBPF is known to kernel engineers as a “superpower” for its unique architecture to load and unload modules in kernel space, and now this capability is built in with Google Cloud networking.
For observability and monitoring, our customers deploy Network Intelligence Center, Google Cloud’s comprehensive network monitoring, verification and optimization platform. With four key modules in Network Intelligence Center, and several more to come, we are working towards realizing our vision of proactive network operations that can predict and heal network failures, driven by AI/ML recommendations and remediation. Network Intelligence Center provides unmatched visibility into your network in the cloud along with proactive network verification. Centralized monitoring cuts down troubleshooting time and effort, increases network security and improves the overall user experience.
8. Regional Persistent Disk for High Availability
Regional Persistent Disk is a storage option that provides synchronous replication of data between two zones in a region. Regional Persistent Disks can be a great building block if you need to ensure high availability of your critical applications as they offer cost-effective durable storage and replication of data between two zones in the same region.
Regional Persistent Disks are also easy to set up within the Google Cloud Console. If you are designing robust systems or high availability services on Compute Engine, Regional Persistent Disks combined with other best practices such as backing up your data using snapshots enable you to build an infrastructure that is highly available and recoverable in a disaster. Regional Persistent Disks are also designed to work with regional managed instance groups. In the unlikely event of a zonal outage, Regional Persistent Disks allow continued I/O through failover of your workloads to another zone. Regional Persistent Disks can help meet zero RPO and near-zero RTO requirements and other stringent SLAs that your critical applications might require by maximizing application availability and protection of data during events such as host/VM failures and zonal outages.
9. Cloud Storage’s single namespace for dual-region and multi-region means managing regional replication is incredibly simple
Similar to how Persistent Disk makes data more available by replicating data across zones, Cloud Storage provides similar benefits for object storage. Cloud Storage within a region is cross-zone by definition, reducing the risk that a zonal outage would take down your application. Cloud Storage adds to this by also providing a cross-region option that can protect against a regional outage and gets your data closer to distributed users. This comes in the form of Dual-region or Multi-region settings for a bucket. These are the simplest to implement cross-region replication offerings in the industry—just a simple button or API call to enable them. In addition to being simple to implement, they offer an added advantage of using a single bucket name that spans regions.
This is unique in the industry. Competitive offerings currently require setting up and managing two distinct buckets, one in each region and they don’t offer the strong consistency properties Cloud Storage offers across regions. Operations and app development are burdened by this design. Google’s single namespace approach dramatically simplifies application development (the app runs on single region or dual/multi-region without any changes), and provides simpler application restarts and testing for DR.
10. Predictive autoscaling
Customers use predictive autoscaling to improve response times for applications with long initialization times or for applications with workloads that vary predictably with daily or weekly cycles. When you enable predictive autoscaling, Compute Engine forecasts future load based on your Managed Instance Group’s history and scales out the MIG’s in advance of predicted load, so that new instances are ready to serve when the load arrives. Without predictive autoscaling, an autoscaler can only scale a group reactively, based on observed changes in load in real time.
With predictive autoscaling enabled, the autoscaler works with real-time data as well as with historical data to cover both the current and forecasted load. Forecasts are refreshed every few minutes (faster than competing clouds) and consider daily and weekly seasonality, leading to more accurate forecasts of load patterns.
For more information, see How predictive autoscaling works and Checking if predictive autoscaling is suitable for your workload.
These are just a few examples of customer-centric innovation that set Google Cloud infrastructure apart. Bring your applications and let the platform work for you.
Get started by learning about your options for migration, or talk to our sales team to join the thousands of customers who have embarked upon this journey.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Dheeraj Konidena (Google) for contributing to this article.
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What’s new and next in Android Enterprise
Many of you know Android as a consumer platform that has provided mobile data access on smartphones and tablets to over 2 and 1/2 billion people across the world. But we see Android as an enterprise operating system that spans a variety of form factors and use cases. We work with manufacturers across the globe, who create Android devices compliant with services, like Google Play.
And that means, whether you’re trying to enable employees with smartphones, frontline workers with rugged devices, create digital kiosks for customers to interact with, or build point solutions, like point of sale systems or signage, there’s an Android device that fits your need.
And as an organization, when you know how to build Android apps on one form factor, you can tailor these applications to be redeployed onto another because Android represents a common platform, irrespective of the hardware that you choose.
Learn how Android is tackling the biggest issues facing mobility strategies today, from balancing security and privacy to providing user experience and productivity innovation at scale.
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When it comes to data analysis, it’s easy to fall into routine. But no matter how much of a whiz you are at formulas or pivot tables, superb spreadsheet skills only take you so far if you’re working with multiple versions or outdated datasets.
On average, your employees spend up to eight hours each week—an entire work day—searching for and consolidating information.
What if businesses spent their time applying data insights instead of tracking them down?
Working in the cloud means your data can easily stay up to date because information is automatically saved as it’s typed. Multiple team members can collaborate in real-time from their phone, tablet or computer (online and offline) and create a single source of truth for projects, like quarterly budgets.
Powered by Google’s machine intelligence, Sheets does a lot
of the heavy
lifting for you when it comes to data analysis. You can ask a question
about your data and Sheets will return an answer using natural language
processing. Sheets also builds
charts, suggests
formulas and creates
pivot tables for you.
Google Workspace to Extend Digital Sovereignity for EU Organizations in Later Part of 2022
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European organizations are moving their operations and data to the cloud in increasing numbers to enable collaboration, drive business value, and transition to hybrid work. However, the cloud solutions that underpin these powerful capabilities must meet an organization’s critical requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty. We often hear from European Union policymakers and business leaders that ensuring the sovereignty of their cloud data, through regionalization and additional controls over administrative access, is crucial in this evolving landscape.
Today, we’re announcing Sovereign Controls for Google Workspace, which will provide digital sovereignty capabilities for organizations, both in the public and private sector, to control, limit, and monitor transfers of data to and from the EU starting at the end of 2022, with additional capabilities delivered throughout 2023. This commitment builds on our existing Client-side encryption, Data regions, and Access Controls capabilities.
Offering enhanced customer controls, including Client-side encryption
Encryption is an important technical control that limits a cloud provider’s access to customer data. Google Workspace already uses the latest cryptographic standards to encrypt all data at rest and in transit between our facilities. The European Data Protection Board recommendations include encryption as part of the supplementary measures to protect data. Google Workspace is leading the way on such measures with our Client-side encryption feature that allows customers to continue benefiting from the powerful innovations of Google Cloud while retaining complete confidentiality and control over their data.
Google Workspace’s unique approach to client-side encryption provides our customers with authoritative privacy control over their data through encryption keys that they can hold on site, within a nation’s borders, or within any other boundary they define. Google never has access to the keys or key holders, which means the data is indecipherable to us and we have no technical ability to access it. We deliver this level of encryption without the need for legacy desktop clients, while maintaining the same high-quality experience for your users such as online co-authoring.
Organizations can choose to use Client-side encryption pervasively across all their users, or create rules that apply to specific users, organizational units, or shared drives. Client-side encryption is now generally available for Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, with plans to extend the functionality to Gmail, Google Calendar, and Meet by the end of 2022.
Expanding data location controls
Data regions already allow our customers to control the storage location of their covered data at-rest. We will enhance this capability by the end of 2023 through expanded coverage of data storage and processing in-region along with an in-country copy.
As employees and organizations adopt new ways of working in a hybrid world, they need secure access to data to drive key business outcomes. But this trend, combined with complex technical architectures, presents significant challenges to retaining control over where data resides.
Our cloud-native architecture means that Google Workspace functions fully within a browser, without requiring caches or installed software on employee devices. We adopt a zero-trust approach, with built-in security that provides controls to geo-fence devices and users through Context Aware Access. Moreover, admins can set sharing boundaries and define rules that govern user communication.
In short, we empower admins with critical capabilities that can give them granular control over the flow of their data without hindering the modern collaboration capabilities that form the foundation of Google Workspace. We are enabling organizations to strike the right balance between data location and collaboration across teams, partners, and customers.
Control and transparency for administrative access
When moving to a cloud-based service, organizations need greater visibility and control over all forms of administrative access to their systems, including who has access, the nature and circumstances of that access, and the ability to specify that only certain personnel—in designated countries or regions—have access. These capabilities are core to our approach for meeting evolving digital sovereignty standards.
Building on this approach, we will implement a series of new Access Controls by the end of 2023 that will enable customers to:
- Restrict and/or approve Google support access through Access Approvals.
- Limit customer support to EU-based support staff through Access Management.
- Ensure round-the-clock support from Google Engineering staff, when needed, with remote-in virtual desktop infrastructure .
- Generate comprehensive log reports on data access and actions through Access Transparency, which is already available in GA.
Sovereign Controls for Google Workspace will deliver digital sovereignty through a comprehensive set of capabilities for organizations working in and across EU regions. In parallel, Google Cloud will continue to provide customers with legal mechanisms for international data transfer, which will include making the protections offered by the new EU data transfer framework available once it is implemented.
We remain committed to equipping our customers in Europe and across the globe with powerful technical solutions that help them adapt to, and stay on top of, a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape. We’ve designed and built Google Workspace to operate on a secure foundation, providing capabilities to keep our users safe, their data secure, and their information private. Digital sovereignty is core to our ongoing mission in Europe and elsewhere, and a guiding principle that customers can rely on now and into the future.
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Google Cloud’s Suite of DevOps Speeds Up ForgeRock’s Development
Editor’s note: Today we hear from ForgeRock, a multinational identity and access management software company with more than 1,100 enterprise customers, including a major public broadcaster. In total, customers use the ForgeRock Identity Platform to authenticate and log in over 45 million users daily, helping them manage identity, governance, and access management across
2022’s First Cloud CISO Perspectives: Recap of the Megatrends, Releases and News
I’m excited to share our first Cloud CISO Perspectives post of 2022. It's already shaping up to be an eventful year for our industry and we’re only in month one. There’s a lot to recap in this post, including the U.S. government’s recent efforts to address critical security issues, like
