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 open source software security and zero trust architectures. We’ve also released new resources from our Google Cybersecurity Action Team like the Cloud Security Megatrends and the Boards of Directors whitepaper on cloud risk governance. 

Cloud Security Megatrends 

We’re often asked if the cloud is more secure than on-prem (and why) so we shared our answer in a recent blog post. At Google Cloud, security by design is our priority. We’ve long adopted zero-trust principles for our baseline security architectures and built a global network that relies on defense in depth layers to protect against configuration errors and attacks. But security is always evolving and that is why we also take advantage of the following megatrends:

1. Economy of scale: Decreasing the marginal cost of security raises the baseline level of security. 
2. Shared fate: A flywheel of increasing trust drives more transition to the cloud, which compels even higher security and even more skin-in-the-game from the cloud provider.
3. Healthy competition: The race by deep-pocketed cloud providers to create and implement leading security technologies is the tip of the spear of innovation. 
4. Cloud as the digital immune system: Every security update the cloud gives the customer is informed by some threat, vulnerability, or new attack technique often identified by someone else’s experience. Enterprise IT leaders use this accelerating feedback loop to get better protection.
5. Software-defined infrastructure: Cloud is software defined, so it can be dynamically configured without customers having to manage hardware placement or cope with administrative toil. From a security standpoint, that means specifying security policies as code, and continuously monitoring their effectiveness.
6. Increasing deployment velocity: Because of cloud’s vast scale, providers have had to automate software deployments and updates, usually with automated continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) systems. That same automation delivers security enhancements, resulting in more frequent security updates.
7. Simplicity: Cloud becomes an abstraction-generating machine for identifying, creating and deploying simpler default modes of operating securely and autonomically. 
8. Sovereignty meets sustainability: The cloud’s global scale and ability to operate in localized and distributed ways creates three pillars of sovereignty. This global scale can also be leveraged to improve energy efficiency.

If you’re an IT decision maker, pay attention to these megatrends that will continue to drive and reinforce cloud security and will outpace the security of on-prem infrastructure well into the future. 

U.S. Federal government cybersecurity momentum 

• Open source software security: Earlier this month, Google participated in the White House Summit on open source software security. The meeting came at a critical time for the industry following December’s Log4j vulnerabilities and was both a recognition of the challenge and an important first step towards addressing it. The open source software ecosystem is not homogenous, despite the fact that the industry often thinks of or treats it this way. Some of it, like Linux, is highly curated, while other critical software is supported through diffuse communities including technology companies and other stakeholders. There is also a long tail of many other critical projects driven by a dedicated community of maintainers around the world, including Googlers. In light of this reality, we welcomed the chance to share our recommendations to advance the future of open source software security. Some work we’ve done includes founding the Open Source Security Foundation, which has been instrumental already in making security improvements. We’ve also helped drive a number of key security initiatives within the open source community including security scorecards, the SLSA framework to improve the security and integrity of open source packages, and Secure Open Source Rewards to financially incentivize improvements to critical open source security projects.  
• OMB’s Federal zero trust strategy: The publication of the Office of Management and Budget’s zero trust architecture strategy marks an important step for the U.S. federal government’s efforts to modernize under Executive Order 14028. Google Cloud supports this approach, which recognizes the immense security benefits offered by modern computing architectures. For the past decade, Google has successfully applied zero trust principles through our BeyondCorp and BeyondProd frameworks for providing end-user access and securing our cloud workloads. And we’ve brought these best practices from our own journey to global governments and businesses of any size through solutions like BeyondCorp Enterprise and capabilities like Binary Authorization and Anthos Service Mesh, which are embedded in Anthos, our managed application platform. For Federal agencies embarking on this zero trust journey, the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will offer our expertise by conducting Zero Trust Foundations strategy workshops, which can help organizations in the public and private sectors develop actionable and achievable strategies and plans for zero trust implementation. 

Google Cybersecurity Action Team Highlights 

Here are the latest updates, products, services and resources across our security teams this month: 

Security

• Democratizing security operations: We recently announced that Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider, is joining Google Cloud to help companies better manage their threat response. Providing a proven SOAR capability with Chronicle’s approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision to advance invisible security and democratize security operations for every organization.
• Security by design: The Highmark Health security team is using “secure-by-design” techniques to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of its Living Health solution with Google Cloud’s Professional Services Organization (PSO). Google has long advocated for and followed security by design principles, which is why we’re continuously building enhanced security, controls, resiliency and more into our cloud products and services. 
• Secure collaboration for hybrid work environments: The Google Workspace team shared its recommendations for businesses as they prepare for the future of work,  where the hybrid/flexible work model is becoming standard practice and a new approach to security is essential.
• Anthos Policy Controller CIS Benchmark enforcement: A big part of our shared fate philosophy is to build secure products and not just security products. A recent example of this in action is embedding CIS benchmark policy conformance in the Anthos Policy Controller. We believe the more we embed approaches like this into our products, the more application and infrastructure teams can intrinsically embed security at the start and reduce toil for the security team.
• DevOps for technology-driven organizations and startups: A key success factor for many security programs is the partnership and integration with development teams, and there are some great resources and lessons in our DORA research.
• Security by design with Chrome OS: ABN AMRO’s Asia-Pacific region team recently shared how they are using Chrome OS and CloudReady to work securely in the cloud, reduce total cost of ownership, and add flexibility for employees. This is a great example of secure by design principles in the use of Chromium.

Risk & Compliance

• Boards of Directors summary guide to cloud risk governance: The latest whitepaper from the Google Cybersecurity Action Team outlines how boards of directors can prioritize safe, secure, and compliant adoption processes for cloud technologies within their organizations.  
• TruSight Risk Assessment of Google Cloud: TruSight recently released a comprehensive
  risk assessment report on Google Cloud. Our Enterprise Trust team collaborated on this robust assessment of Google Cloud services to validate the design and implementation of controls. TruSight’s risk assessment of our security controls will help customers accelerate and complete their risk management due diligence.
• Data governance: Check out this new blog series on data governance where our teams explain the role of data governance, its importance, and the necessary processes to run an effective data governance program. Implementing data governance will help maximize value derived from business data, build user trust, and ensure compliance with required security measures.

Controls and Products

• Encrypting Data Fusion: To help meet the security, privacy and compliance requirements of customers in regulated industries like finance or public sector, we announced the general availability of Customer Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) integration for Cloud Data Fusion, which enables encryption of both user data and metadata at rest with a key that customers can control through our Cloud Key Management Service (KMS). 

Don’t forget to sign-up for our newsletter if you’d like to have our Cloud CISO Perspectives post delivered every month to your inbox. We’ll be back next month with more updates and security-related news.

Google Cloud Results

• Reduced smart parking/smart city IoT installation and operational support effort by more than half
• Enabled development of a Smart Cloud IoT platform in just four months
• Democratised data access and use across the organisation
• Built core infrastructure in under 4 months

Smart Parking’s core product is a sensor-based system called SmartPark, used in environments such as shopping centres, airports, commercial parking operations, universities, and municipal streets.

Smart Parking has deployed over 50,000 sensors worldwide to support parking systems. It estimates at least 70% of production-scale and currently operating smart parking environments globally are using its technologies.

“Our products include ground sensors that use an advanced combination of infrared and magnetic technologies to reliably register a vehicle’s arrival and communicate to a gateway,” says Brian Granatir, Technical Team Lead, Smart Parking. This enables operators to gain live insights into parking environment usage and manage capacity. They can also provide automated guidance and signage to tell customers how many vacant spaces are available on each level of a parking structure or street area of a city.

Additional functionality enables parking operators to identify whether vehicles parked in limited-time spots have overstayed. The operators may notify inspectors who can undertake enforcement actions such as issuing infringement notices.

Another Smart Parking mobile product enables parking operators to photograph licence plates to identify vehicles that have overstayed. The business is also developing applications that enable users to view the number of parking spots available in nearby parking structures.

Smart Parking is extending its operations into smart city developments. The business views this as a natural progression as its parking systems establish a powerful common foundation from which to deliver many other services. “Parking is just part of a very complex ecosystem that requires sophisticated interoperability and generalised analytics,” John Heard, Chief Technology Officer, Smart Parking, explains.

“The biggest trend in the space is towards the Internet of Things (IoT)–the integration of a large number of generic and specialised devices,” Heard adds. “This has led us to shift from the idea of our devices being the centre of the universe. Instead, we put data intelligence at the core.”

In October 2016, Smart Parking decided to develop a SmartCloud platform that would enable cities to manage and react to information from a connected network of IoT devices. The business wanted to start by rolling out the platform based on an event-driven architecture that could connect any device that sends or receives a sequence of data events to existing Smart Parking customers.

The platform would enable Smart Parking to address a wide range of highly complex and interrelated interactions. “Internally, we use the example that if everyone leaves a parking structure at 3pm, what will be the impact on traffic?” Heard says. “So, how can we correlate multiple factors to answer a larger question?”

Heard’s team elected to deploy SmartCloud on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), due primarily to its support for sophisticated big data management and machine learning in a serverless architecture. Furthermore, Google technologies were proven to operate at scale and GCP had baked-in best practices that could manage internet-scale datasets in near real time.

“By running on Google, we were able to develop SmartCloud at an incredible pace,” Granatir says. “We built the core infrastructure in under four months.” Furthermore, GCP enables the SmartCloud platform to operate at metropolis scale, combining streams of distributed data to deliver an unprecedented view of the events and interactions taking place in a city.

Smart Parking now uses a wide range of GCP services to deliver SmartCloud. Google Cloud Dataflow provides processing and Google BigQuery provides management and analytics of big data. Google Cloud Pub/Sub provides real-time messaging and Google Cloud Functions enables a serverless environment to enable delivery of streaming data. Google Cloud IoT Core connects, manages, and ingests data from Smart Parking devices while Google Cloud Identity & Access Management enables Smart Parking to control access to information. Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Google Cloud Functions also support the event-driven architecture.

Installation time and operational burdens cut by at least half

Using Google Cloud IoT Core has cut Smart Parking’s parking and smart city system installation times by at least half and eliminated the need to build a registration system, a device authorisation system, and a feedback loop for each project. This delivers a streamlined and simpler methodology for site installations, which flows on to a dramatic decrease in the operational burdens involved in monitoring and maintaining deployments of all scales.

Using GCP has revolutionised Smart Parking’s software development processes. “We’re building and deploying systems at a speed I could never have imagined before Google Cloud Platform,” Granatir says. Furthermore, using GCP has made data accessible to anyone within the Smart Parking business, and this is being extended to customers via SmartCloud information services.

This democratised approach has already realised considerable benefits. “One of our project managers was experimenting with the Google Data Studio service for visualising data and was able to make a query about utilisation efficiency,” Heard adds. “We found that simply changing the maximum stay time by a small amount could hugely impact the percentage of parking utilisation and, therefore, throughput.

“This is an illustration of a significant insight by someone who simply had a hunch and quick access to mountains of live and accurate data.”

Transition to a data-intelligence company

Using GCP has enabled Smart Parking to chart a path from a sales and maintenance organisation to a smart cities data-intelligence company. “How? Simply by providing amazing services that focus on massive data volumes and sharing documentation that helps us leverage best practices,” Heard says. “Because of Google Cloud Platform and its pricing, we don’t walk in the shadow of giants, we ride on their shoulders.”

Smart Parking is now looking to further extend its use of Google services to add value to its smart parking and future smart city clients. “With Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, we could gain the ability to identify trends across every customer parking site and make recommendations to operators,” Heard says. “For example, we could provide data-driven insight and advice to operators about how to adjust their parking spot time limits and guidance about how to transform throughput and convenience while increasing revenue.”

Heard concludes, “As a result of being able to dramatically decrease our traditional development burdens by using GCP, we now have a number of exciting new capabilities we have been able to bring in to our roadmap and expand the journey we are able to open up for our customers as well.”

Getting started with Kubernetes is often harder than it needs to be. While working with a cluster “from scratch” can be a great learning exercise or a good solution for some highly specialized workloads, often the details of cluster management can be made easier by utilizing a managed service offering. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) allows for an easier end-to-end developer experience with convenient tooling and built-in integrations along with the convenience of offering Kubernetes clusters as a managed service.

GKE is the most mature container orchestration service available today, delivering a fully-managed service and hands-off experience with the GKE Autopilot mode of operation. GKE provides industry-first capabilities such as release channels, multi-cluster support, unique four-way auto scaling, node auto repair, and can support up to 15K nodes in a single cluster. 

Our modern, end-to-end platform is built on cloud-native principles you are already familiar with and prioritizes speed, security, and flexibility, in ways that are highly differentiated from other cloud platforms. 

We have put together a new reference guide for you as you begin your journey developing on GKE. It covers every step of your journey from writing, running, operating, to managing code. Even if it isn’t your first time using GKE, this e-book will be a valuable resource highlighting important considerations and best practices. By implementing the technical recommendations, following the steps, and utilizing the tools described, you can reach the following goals:

• Write, deploy, and debug code faster with Cloud Code and Cloud Shell
• Continuously integrate and deliver updates with Cloud Build
• Run easily, securly, cost effectively at scale with GKE
• Monitor and troubleshoot with Google Cloud’s operations suite 

Kick-start your journey by downloading the e-book and join us live June 22 at 9am PDT for our half-day Cloud OnBoard event: Getting Started with Google Kubernetes Engine. 

As we reflect on the past year, Heraclitus’ phrase “The only constant in life is change” has never rang more true. With the pandemic, companies had to shift operations, launch new products and adapt to extreme demand patterns, sometimes within a matter of weeks.

To respond to customer needs faster and more efficiently, many companies turned to serverless technology, designing applications with real-time signals and intelligence built in. From apps and sites for healthcare appointments and vaccinations, public-sector employment benefits, contact tracing, retail logistics, curbside delivery, hotel and travel booking—you name it, companies built it with serverless.

Redefining serverless

The world changed, the market changed, our lives changed and we here at Google Cloud also changed, introducing new products to meet our customers’ needs and grow with them.

Serverless technology, in particular, has changed a lot since it was first introduced. Google first launched serverless compute in 2008 with the launch of App Engine, helping customers scale their applications faster and seamlessly. We then added the ability to run Functions as a Service with Cloud Functions, giving customers a simple developer experience with integrated telemetry and observability. In parallel, we also introduced innovations to the container market with Kubernetes. Pretty soon, customers started asking us if we could combine the awesome serverless attributes of auto-scaling and developer experience with the flexibility of containers. 

Enter Cloud Run, the next generation of serverless. Serverless is now no longer just about event-driven programming or microservices. It’s also about running complex workloads at scale while still preserving a delightful developer experience. In fact, serverless with Cloud Run is about having a true developer platform with the flexibility to run any language, any library, any binary.

There are three capabilities that make Cloud Run the next-generation of serverless, and not the same ‘serverless’ you find elsewhere:

• A great developer-centric experience
• Versatility: expanding to a broader set of containerized apps
• Built-in DevOps and security

Let’s take a look at the attributes in greater depth.

A great developer experience

Being developer-centric comes from having fully-managed self-operating infrastructure and a great developer experience. We want everyone to be able to develop smart applications and for that we have to make it easy. We also want to be sure we are bringing your technical talent closer to where you generate your business value. 

To make things easy, last year we introduced buildpacks, which creates container images directly from source code. No need to learn Docker or containers. Although there are containers underneath, they’re transparent to the developer.

To simplify things further, we also introduced a single “gcloud run deploy” command to build and deploy code to Cloud Run. These types of features are some of the reasons why 98% of Cloud Run users deploy an application on their first try in less than 5 minutes. 

In fact, in the past year alone, we added over 25 new features and services to our serverless stack, making development of complex apps easier. One of our main launches was Workflows, which lets you combine Cloud Run with any Google Cloud product or any HTTP-based API service. As a developer, this is very useful when automating complex processes, or integrating GCP’s analytic services across a variety of systems. 

Taken together, all these new features make the Cloud Run developer experience far easier than its competitors’, according to a recent report by User Research International.

Versatility

Next-generation serverless is also about versatility. It supports a wider variety of applications and caters to enterprise requirements. Functions and web apps of course, but also heavyweight applications, and in the fullness of time, also brownfield and third-party containerized apps. This versatility is enabled by the container primitive, which removes restrictions on languages, run times, and hardware. 

Being able to run a greater variety of apps on our serverless stack means you can optimize for predictable usage. Today, we announced new spend-based committed use discounts for Cloud Run. Enterprises with stable, steady-state, and predictable usage can now purchase committed use contracts directly in the billing UI. There are no upfront payments, so these discounts are a perfect way to reduce your spend by as much as 17%. RELATED ARTICLEMaximize your Cloud Run investments with new committed use discountsCommitted use discounts in Cloud Run enable predictable costs—and a substantial discount!

Another way we provide versatility is with support for WebSockets and gRPC in Cloud Run. With these new additions, you get the benefits of serverless infrastructure to build responsive, high-performance applications. We also added the use of min instances with Cloud Run. This feature allows you to cut cold-start times and run latency-sensitive applications on Cloud Run! At the same time, you can still scale to zero, or keep a minimum amount of compute available, for example when running brownfield Java applications.

Built-in DevOps

Serverless doesn’t just make it faster for developers to set up their apps—it also helps once the application is up and running, taking a big management load off of operations teams. Notably, serverless systems take care of “scaling” an application up or down. That means that if your application suddenly starts fielding a lot of traffic, the serverless platform automatically spins up more resources to handle the load. No more dreaded timeouts, wheels or hourglasses—or work for your operations team. Likewise, as soon as demand goes down, the platform takes care of decommissioning resources, i.e., scaling down, so that you’re not paying for resources that you no longer need. Want to run your service globally with low latency, without an operations team, and zero stranded costs? Cloud Run takes care of global load balancing and autoscaling to zero for you in every Google Cloud region.

Further, features like support for gradual rollouts and rollbacks allow developers to experiment and test ideas quickly, as well as sophisticated traffic management in Cloud Run. Likewise, Cloud Run provides access to distributed tracing with no setup or configuration, allowing developers to find performance bottlenecks in production.

Next up: serverless security

As part of DevOps best practices, we build in security for your serverless applications at every layer: deployment time, runtime and networking. For example, built-in vulnerability scanning ensures you only deploy artifacts you trust. 

Today, we are announcing Cloud Run support for Google Secret Manager and customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK), making it easy to protect data at rest and store sensitive data. We’re also integrating Cloud Run with Binary Authorization, which lets you enforce specific policies to make sure only verified images make it to production. And finally, we added a new integration with Identity-Aware Proxy, support for VPC-SC, and egress controls that you can use to enforce a security perimeter, limiting both who can access specific services and what resources can be accessed when these services run in production. You can read more about these security enhancements here. RELATED ARTICLE4 new features to secure your Cloud Run servicesWe’re improving the security of your Cloud Run environment with things like support for Secret Manager and Binary Authorization.

In summary, the next generation of serverless combines the best of serverless with containers to run a broad spectrum of apps, with no language, networking or regional restrictions. The next generation of serverless will help developers build the modern applications of tomorrow—applications that adapt easily to change, scale as needed, respond to the needs of their customers faster and more efficiently, all while giving developers the best developer experience. Learn more by attending The Power of Serverless, a two-hour virtual event where we’ll lay out our vision for serverless compute, and where serverless subject matter experts will present on in-depth serverless development topics. Hope to see you there!

Want to learn even more about serverless and cloud-native application development? Check out the upcoming Modern App Dev & Delivery workshop, and our Ask the Experts roundtable.