Organizations are currently modernizing their businesses in order to meet the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape. In effect, business leaders must evaluate the best way to mitigate the challenges which plague their cloud operations, all while meeting customers’ growing expectations around digital experience (DX) through agility, automation, and proactive incident avoidance. 

In this commissioned study, “Modernize With AIOps To Maximize Your Impact”, Forrester Consulting surveyed organizations worldwide to better understand how they’re approaching artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) in their cloud environments, and what kind of benefits they’re seeing. 

Within this July 2021 study, you’ll see that AIOps systems and principles are here to help. It covers how AIOps increases efficiency and productivity across day-to-day operations, and how businesses are taking note. In fact, 91% of respondents have implemented AIOps to address at least one cloud operations issue, and expansion is set to skyrocket. Those that wait to act, risk losing out on the efficacy of their cloud investment and falling behind their more efficient competitors.

As you can see in the image above, there is a plethora of great information in this complimentary study. So, if you’re looking to enhance your cloud operations and/or adopt AIOps within your organization, be sure to download this free study today.

For over a decade, we’ve been investing in Canada to become a go-to cloud partner for organizations across the country. Whether they’re in financial services, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications or the public sector, a rapidly growing number of organizations located or operating in Canada are choosing Google Cloud to help them build applications better and faster, store data, and deliver awesome experiences to their users, all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. To support this growing customer base, we’re excited to announce that the new Google Cloud region in Toronto is now open. 

As you’d expect, we’re thrilled about this news, but we aren’t the only ones that have been looking forward to this launch. We asked some of our customers operating in Canada for their take on the upcoming cloud region. Here’s what they had to say:

“Our alliance with Google is truly distinctive in the Canadian market as we are working together to co-innovate and create new services for key industries, including communications technology, healthcare, agriculture, security, and the connected home. The new cloud region in Toronto marks another key milestone that will propel TELUS’ digital leadership by further leveraging the scalability, reliability and cost effectiveness of Google Cloud to support improved customer experience and build stronger, healthier and more sustainable communities.”—Hesham Fahmy, Chief Development Officer, TELUS 

“We’re simplifying, modernizing and digitizing Scotiabank to enhance the customer experience for our 25 million customers across the globe. By leveraging powerful cloud-based services including Google Cloud, we’re able to put the most advanced software engineering, data analytics and machine learning tools in the hands of our talented employees. We welcome Google Cloud’s investment in Toronto and look forward to the opportunities the Toronto Cloud Region will present to our Technology team.”
—Michael Zerbs, Group Head Technology & Operations, Scotiabank 

“Cloud technologies—and the access to scalable compute, rich geospatial datasets and smart analytics tools—will be critical  contributors to support climate action and sustainable policy decisions. At Natural Resources Canada, scientists and researchers are applying innovative digital solutions to support Canada’s natural resource sector. The new Google Cloud region in Toronto will provide our scientists, technologists and researchers with the products and services necessary to turn Earth data into actionable insights.”
—Vik Pant, PhD, Chief Scientist and Chief Science Advisor, Natural Resources Canada 

“At Accenture, we bring together technology and human ingenuity to create and respond to change. We’re thrilled to join forces with Google Cloud and their newest region in Toronto with an important mutual goal: to accelerate cloud innovation in Canada. Our clients already know us for our deep industry intelligence, cloud-first expertise and market-renowned delivery. We’re now combining that with Google’s human-centric design to bring even more opportunities to our clients across all industries.”
—Jeffrey Russell, President of Accenture in Canada. 

“We are thrilled to see Google’s commitment to Canada. We look forward to helping our joint customers transform their operations, leveraging Google Cloud’s latest data center in Toronto. At Deloitte, we believe cloud is THE opportunity to reimagine everything.”
—Terry Stuart, Deloitte Chief Digital Officer, Canada. 

“As Canadian organizations increasingly leverage cloud to transform their businesses, we are excited about the new opportunities that the Toronto Google Cloud region brings to the market. We look forward to continuing our strong partnership with Google Cloud to bring customized and innovative solutions that help Canadian companies fully realize the value of cloud technology, so that they can compete and win on the global stage.”
—Andrew Caprara, Chief Operating Officer, Softchoice 

Toronto joins 27 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. In combination with our Montreal region, customers now benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

The new region launches with three zones, allowing organizations of all sizes and industries to distribute apps and storage to protect against service disruptions, and with our core portfolio of Google Cloud Platform products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Bigtable, Spanner, and BigQuery.

We’re working to bring you new cloud products and capabilities in Canada, and our goal is to allow you to access those services quickly and easily—wherever you might be in the country. The past year has proved how important easy access to digital infrastructure, technical education, training and support are to helping businesses respond to the pandemic. We’re particularly proud of the teams who faced the unique challenges of building a cloud region during this time to help our customers and community accelerate their digital transformation.  

To support all of our users, customers and government organizations in Canada, we’ll continue to invest in new infrastructure, engineering support and solutions. We’re currently hosting our first ever Google Cloud Accelerator Canada to bring the best of Google’s programs, products, people and technology to startups doing interesting work in the cloud. We’ve recently received Protected B accreditation with Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, which is crucial for healthcare, education, and regulated industries adopting cloud services. We’re also pleased to announce the preview of Assured Workloads for Canada—a capability which allows you to secure and configure sensitive workloads in accordance with your specific regulatory or policy requirements. 

For help migrating to Google Cloud, please contact our local partners. For additional details on Google Cloud regions, please visit our locations page, where you’ll find updates on the availability of additional services and regions. You can always contact us to help you get started or access our many educational resources. We’re excited to see what you build next with Google Cloud.

In an industry as highly regulated as healthcare, building a single secure and compliant application that tracks patient care and appointments at a clinic requires a great deal of planning from development and security teams. So, imagine what it would be like to build a solution that includes almost everything related to a patient’s healthcare, including insurance and billing. That’s what Highmark Health (Highmark)—a U.S. health and wellness organization that provides millions of customers with health insurance plans, a physician and hospital network, and a diverse portfolio of businesses–decided to do. 

Highmark is developing a solution called Living Health to re-imagine healthcare delivery, and it is using Google Cloud and the Google Cloud Professional Services Organization (PSO) to build and maintain the innovation platform supporting this forward thinking experience. Considering all the personal information that different parties like insurers, specialists, billers and coders, clinics, and hospitals share, Highmark must build security and compliance into every part of the solution. 

In this blog, we look at how Highmark Health and Google are using a technique called “secure-by-design” to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of bringing Living Health to life.

Secure-by-design: Preventive care for development

In healthcare, preventing an illness or condition is the ideal outcome. Preventive care often involves early intervention—a course of ideas and actions to ward off illness, permanent injury, and so on. Interestingly, when developing a groundbreaking delivery model like Living Health, it’s a good idea to take the same approach to security, privacy, and compliance. 

That’s why Highmark’s security and technology teams worked with their Google Cloud PSO team to implement secure-by-design for every step of design, development, and operations. Security is built into the entire development process rather than waiting until after implementation to reactively secure the platform or remediate security gaps. 

It’s analogous to choosing the right brakes for a car before it rolls off the assembly line instead of having an inspector shut down production because the car failed its safety tests. The key aspect of secure-by-design is an underlying application architecture created from foundational building blocks that sit on top of a secure cloud infrastructure. Secure-by-design works to ensure that these building blocks are secure and compliant before moving on to development.

The entire approach requires security, development, and cloud teams to work together with other stakeholders. Most importantly, it requires a cloud partner, cloud services, and a cloud infrastructure that can support it. 

Finding the right cloud and services for secure-by-design 

Highmark chose Google Cloud because of its leadership in analytics, infrastructure services, and platform as a service. In addition, Google Cloud has made strategic investments in healthcare interoperability and innovation, which was another key reason Highmark decided to work with Google. As a result, Highmark felt that Google Cloud and the Google Cloud PSO were best suited for delivering on the vision of Living Health—its security and its outcomes. 

“Google takes security more seriously than the other providers we considered, which is very important to an organization like us. Cloud applications and infrastructure for healthcare must be secure and compliant,” explains Highmark Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Omar Khawaja. 

Forming a foundation for security and compliance

How does security-by-design with services work? It starts with the creation and securing of the foundational platform, allowing teams to harden and enforce specified security controls. It’s a collaborative process that starts with input from cross-functional teams—not just technology teams—using terms they understand, so that everyone has a stake in the design. 

A strong data governance and protection program classifies and segments workloads based on risk and sensitivity. Teams build multiple layers of defense into the foundational layers to mitigate against key industry risks. Google managed services such as VPC Service Controls help prevent unauthorized access. Automated controls such as those in Data Loss Prevention help teams quickly classify data and identify and respond to potential sources of data risk. Automation capabilities help ensure that security policies are enforced.

After the foundational work is done, it’s time to assess and apply security controls to the different building blocks, which are Google Cloud services such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, and Google Cloud Storage. The goal is to make sure that these and similar building blocks, or any combination of them, do not introduce additional risks and to ensure any identified risks are remediated or mitigated. 

Enabling use cases, step by step

After the foundational security is established, the security-by-design program enables the Google Cloud services that developers then use to build use cases that form Living Health. The service enablement approach allows Highmark to address complexity by providing the controls most relevant for each individual service. 

For each service, the teams begin by determining the risks and the controls that can reduce them. The next step is enforcing preventive and detective controls across various tools. After validation, technical teams can be granted an authorization to operate, also called an ATO. An ATO authorizes the service for development in a use case.

For use cases with greater data sensitivity, the Highmark teams validate the recommended security controls with an external trust assessor, who uses the HITRUST Common Security Framework, which maps to certifications and compliance such as HIPAA, NIST, GDPR, and more. A certification process follows that can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. In addition to certification, there is ongoing monitoring of the environment for events, behavior, control effectiveness, and control lapses or any deviation from the controls.

The approach simplifies compliance for developers by abstracting compliance requirements away. The process provides developers a set of security requirements written in the language of the cloud, rather than in the language of compliance, providing more prescriptive guidance as they build solutions. Through the secure-by-design program, the Highmark technology and security teams, Google, the business, and the third-party trust assessor all contribute to a secure foundation for any architectural design with enabled Google Cloud services as building blocks. 

Beating the learning curve 

Thanks to the Living Health project, the Highmark technology and security teams are trying new methods. They are exploring new tools for building secure applications in the cloud. They are paying close attention to processes and the use case steps and, when necessary, aligning different teams to execute. Because everyone is working together collaboratively toward a shared goal, teams are delivering more things on time and with predictability, which has reduced volatility and surprises. 

The secrets to success: Bringing everyone to the table early and with humility

Together, Highmark and Google Cloud PSO have created over 24 secure-by-design building blocks by bringing everyone to the table early and relying on thoughtful, honest communication. Input for the architecture design produced for Highmark came from privacy teams, legal teams, security teams, and the teams that are building the applications. And that degree of collaboration ultimately leads to a much better product because everyone has a shared sense of responsibility and ownership of what was built. 

Delivering a highly complex solution like Living Health takes significant, more purposeful communication and execution. It is also important to be honest and humble. The security, technology, and Google teams have learned to admit when something isn’t working and to ask for help or ideas for a solution. The teams are also able to accept that they don’t have all the answers, and that they need to figure out solutions by experimenting. Khawaja puts it simply, “That level of humility has been really important and enabled us to have the successes that we’ve had. And hopefully that’ll be something that we continue to retain in our DNA.”