In every industry, in every part of the world, cybersecurity concerns continue to grow in the wake of attacks on critical infrastructure and the software supply chain. Governments and businesses of all sizes recognize that they must do more to protect their employees, customers and citizens. 

But doing more of the same, like putting security band-aids on legacy infrastructure, is no longer helpful or productive. We need an enduring commitment, in products, people and monetary terms, to drive meaningful improvements in our collective security posture. Google recently announced a $10 billion investment to advance the security of governments around the world, and by extension, help enterprises and organizations to do the same. 

Over the past year, Google Cloud has been delivering on our vision of Invisible Security for our customers, where capabilities are continuously engineered into both our trusted cloud platform and market-leading products to bring the best of Google’s security to wherever your IT assets are. But being a provider of best-in-class technology is not enough. We want to share our expertise to help organizations with their security transformation and offer even more ways to accelerate these essential improvements. This week, at Google Cloud Next ‘21, we’re sharing the first of what will be many more steps in advancing these efforts.

Introducing our Cybersecurity Action Team

While access to the latest, most advanced security technology is important, the expertise of what it will take to become resilient in the face of today’s risk and threat environment is foundational.  

Today, we’re announcing the formation of the Google Cybersecurity Action Team. The Google Cybersecurity Action Team marshals experts from across Google to form what we believe will be the world’s premier security advisory team. It has a singular mission to support the security and digital transformation of governments, critical infrastructure, enterprises and small businesses.

Building on existing security solutions engineering efforts, today the Google Cybersecurity Action Team announced a security and resilience framework that delivers a roadmap for a comprehensive security management program aligned with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework using cloud technologies from Google Cloud and our partners. 

“Google Cloud has been a critical partner in the BBVA security journey, helping us protect our customers’ sensitive and proprietary data with modern frameworks like zero trust and secure-by-default products like Google Workspace,” said Alvaro Garrido, Chief Security Officer at BBVA. “We look forward to the strategic services and guidance the Google Cybersecurity Action Team will deliver as we continue on our security transformation.”

Learn more about the Cybersecurity Action Team here. 

Announcing a safer way to work

Bringing you the expertise and hands-on guidance to help with your security transformation is just one valuable step. We recognize that too many organizations can’t wait any longer to begin their modernization efforts – they need a new baseline, and they need it now. 

That’s why today, we’re announcing the launch of our Google Work Safer offering, designed to help organizations, their employees, and partners collaborate and communicate securely and privately in today’s hybrid work environment. Work Safer provides companies with access to best-in-class security for email, meetings, messages, documents, and more. It uniquely brings together the cloud-native, zero-trust solutions of Google Workspace with BeyondCorp Enterprise for secure access with integrated threat and data protection. For customers who want secure devices, Work Safer includes Pixel phones managed with Android Enterprise, Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, and HP Chromebooks. Customers can also leverage Google’s Titan Security Keys for account protection, reCAPTCHA Enterprise for website fraud prevention, Chronicle for security analytics, and a variety of migration services for a seamless transition.

The program is designed to meet the needs of all organizations, including small businesses, enterprises and public sector institutions, many of which are reliant on legacy technology and often lack expertise to fully address rising security challenges associated with hybrid work. To learn more, visit our Work Safer homepage. 

Advancing our trusted cloud with new security capabilities

Above all, security has been and continues to be the cornerstone of our product strategy. There are three critical areas where Google Cloud’s capabilities can make a meaningful difference for any business’ or government’s digital security transformation:

At Next’ 21, we’re introducing new security products and partnerships that will enable you to:

• Protect your employees with new zero trust access capabilities: We’re delivering new features that expand the surface area for our zero trust access solution, BeyondCorp Enterprise, to cover all your apps – both modern and legacy. The new client connector, now in preview, enables identity and context-aware access to non-web applications running in Google Cloud and non-Google Cloud environments. We are also making it easier for admins to diagnose access failure, triage events, and unblock users with the new Policy Troubleshooter feature. You can learn more about both of these new enhancements in the live BeyondCorp Enterprise demo on October 13.
• Improve your detection and response capabilities: We announced a new collaboration with Cybereason for Extended Detection and Response (XDR) across endpoints, networks, cloud and workspaces. The combination of these capabilities delivers a cloud-native XDR solution, Cybereason XDR powered by Chronicle, that automates prevention for common attacks, guides analysts through security operations and incident response, and enables threat hunting with precision at a pace never before achieved. We are also deepening the integration between Chronicle and Security Command Center (SCC) on GCP. New integrations in preview centralize alerts and investigative workflows across the two platforms, and enable threat-specific pivots by enriching SCC alerts with intelligence on associated threat actors and entities. 
• Automate and bolster protection of your sensitive data: Automatic DLP, now in preview, is a prime example of how we are making Invisible Security a reality. It’s a game-changing capability that discovers and classifies sensitive data for all the BigQuery projects across your entire organization without you needing to do a single thing. We’re also introducing Ubiquitous Data Encryption, a solution which combines our generally available Confidential Computing, External Key Management, and Cloud Storage products to seamlessly encrypt data as it’s sent to the cloud. Using your External Key Management solution, data can now only be decrypted and run in a confidential VM environment, greatly limiting potential exposure.
• Protect your IP and implement a zero trust software supply chain: Today, we’re building on our zero trust software supply chain with new launches. Cloud Build is SLSA Level -1 compliant by default, with scripted builds and available provenance. With the new Build Integrity feature, Cloud Build automatically generates a verifiable build manifest that includes a signed certificate describing the sources that went into the build, the hashes of artifacts used, and other parameters. Additionally, Binary Authorization’s integration with Cloud Build makes it easy to set up deploy-time constraints. You can also now easily pair Binary Authorization with Cloud Run to ensure only trusted images make it to production. These integrations are now generally available.
• Protect your users and brand: We recently announced the preview of Cloud Armor Bot Management, which integrates Cloud Armor and reCAPTCHA Enterprise. You can enable protection without any server-side changes to your applications, and because detection and enforcement happens in-line, at the edge of Google’s network, you can mitigate threats before they have a chance to impact your applications, whether they run on GCP, on premise, or in a hybrid or multicloud deployment.
• Ensure secure collaboration: Today, Google Workspace is also introducing new security features. Client-side encryption for Google Meet, in beta, gives customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service used to access keys. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) for Google Chat, in beta, helps prevent sensitive information from leaking outside of your organization. Check out the blog post from Google Workspace to learn more. 

As we head into three days of great content and engagements from our security and technology teams across Google Cloud at Next ‘21, we want to leave you with this: You are not alone on your security journey. Our goal is to ensure that every day, you are making your organization safer because you have partnered with us. Please make sure to watch our security experts, customers, and partners in our track sessions to go deep on the topics and products that matter most to you.

Did you know that by 2025, enterprise IT spending on public cloud computing will overtake traditional IT spending? In fact, 51% of IT spend in application software, infrastructure software, business process services, and system infrastructure will transition to the public cloud, compared to 41% in 20221.. As enterprises continue to rapidly shift to the cloud, government agencies must prioritize and accelerate security and compliance implementation.

In May 2021, the White House issued an Executive Order requiring US Federal agencies to accelerate cloud adoption, embrace security best practices, develop plans to implement Zero Trust architectures, and map implementation frameworks to FedRAMP. The Administration’s focus on secure cloud adoption marks a critical shift to prioritizing cybersecurity at scale. Google Cloud’s Public Sector Professional Services Organization (PSO) has committed to helping customers meet security and compliance requirements in the cloud through specialized consulting engagements.

Accelerating Authority to Operate (ATO)

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) was established in 2011 as a government-wide program that promotes the adoption of secure cloud services across the federal government. FedRAMP provides a standardized approach to security and risk assessment for cloud technologies and federal agencies. US Federal agencies are required to utilize and implement FedRAMP cloud service offerings as part of the “Cloud First” federal cloud computing strategy.

While Google Cloud provides a FedRAMP-authorized cloud services platform and a robust catalog of FedRAMP-approved products and services (92 services and counting), customers are still tasked with achieving Agency ATO for the products and services they use, and Google Cloud provides many resources to assist customers with this journey. Google Cloud’s FedRAMP package can be accessed by completing the FedRAMP Package Access Request Form and submitting it to info@fedramp.gov. Additionally, customers can use Google’s NIST 800-53 ATO Accelerator as a starting point for documenting control implementation. Finally, Google Cloud’s Public Sector PSO offers the following strategic consulting engagements to help customers streamline the Agency ATO process.

• Cloud Discover: FedRAMP is a six-week interactive workshop to support customers that are just getting started with the ATO process on Google Cloud. Customers are educated on FedRAMP fundamentals, Google’s security and compliance posture, and how to approach ATO on Google Cloud. Through deep-dive interviews and design sessions, PSO helps customers craft an actionable ATO plan, assess FedRAMP readiness, and develop a conceptual ATO boundary. This engagement helps organizations establish a clear understanding and roadmap for FedRAMP ATO on Google Cloud.
• FedRAMP Security Review is a ten to twelve week engagement that aids customers in FedRAMP operational readiness. PSO consultants perform detailed FedRAMP architecture reviews to identify potential gaps in NIST 800-53 security control implementation and Google Cloud secure architecture best practices. Findings from the security reviews are shared with the customer along with configuration guidance and recommendations. This engagement helps organizations prepare for the third-party or independent security assessment that is required for FedRAMP ATO.
• Cloud Deploy: FedRAMP is a multi-month engagement designed to help customers document the details of their FedRAMP System Security Plan (SSP) and corresponding NIST 800-53 security controls, in preparation for Agency ATO on Google Cloud at FedRAMP Low, Moderate, or High. PSO collaborates with customers to develop a detailed technical infrastructure design document and security control matrix capturing evidence of the FedRAMP system architecture, security control implementation, data flows and system components. PSO can also partner with a third-party assessment organization (3PAO) or an independent assessor (IA) to support customer efforts for FedRAMP security assessment. This engagement helps customer system owners prepare for Agency ATO assessment and package submission.

Developing a Zero Trust Strategy

In addition to providing FedRAMP enablement, Public Sector PSO has partnered with the Google Cloud Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) team to assist organizations with developing a zero trust architecture and strategy.

Zero Trust Foundations is a seven-week engagement co-delivered by Google Cloud’s CISO and PSO teams. CISO and PSO educate customers on zero trust fundamentals, Google’s journey to zero trust through BeyondCorp, and defense in depth best practices. The CISO team walks customers through a Zero Trust Assessment (ZTA) to understand the organization’s current security posture and maturity. Insights from the ZTA enable the CISO team to work with the customer to identify an ideal first-mover workload for zero trust adoption. Following the CISO ZTA, PSO facilitates a deep-dive Zero Trust Workshop (ZTW), collaborating with key customer stakeholders to develop a NIST 800-207 aligned, cloud-agnostic zero trust architecture for the identified first-mover workload. The zero trust architecture is part of a comprehensive zero trust strategy deliverable that is based on focus areas called out in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Federal Zero Trust Strategy released January 2022.

Scaling Secure Cloud Adoption with PSO

Public Sector PSO enables customer success by sharing our technical expertise, providing cloud strategy, implementation guidance, training and enablement using our proven methodology. As enterprise IT, operations, and organizational models continue to evolve, our goal is to help government agencies accelerate their security and compliance journeys in the cloud. To learn more about the work we are doing with the federal government, visit cloud.google.com/solutions/federal-government.

1 Gartner Says More Than Half of Enterprise IT Spending in Key Market Segments Will Shift to the Cloud by 2025

In the past year, Google has worked to surface timely and reliable health information, amplify public health campaigns, and help nonprofits get urgent support to Indians in need. Now, we are continuing to focus on helping India’s businesses accelerate their digital transformation, deepening our commitment to India’s digitization and economic recovery. To support customers and the public sector in India and across Asia Pacific, we’re excited to announce that our new Google Cloud region in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) is now open. 

Designed to help both Indian and global companies alike build highly available applications for their customers, the Delhi NCR region is our second Google Cloud region in India and 10th to open in Asia Pacific. 

What customers and partners are saying

Navigating this past year has been a challenge for companies as they grapple with changing customers demands and economic uncertainty. Technology has played a critical role, and we’ve been fortunate to partner with and serve people, companies, and government institutions around the world to help them adapt. The Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will help our customers adapt to new requirements, new opportunities and new ways of working, like we’ve helped so many companies do in the region: 

• InMobi scaled a personalized AI platform to support 120+ million active users. “With the arrival of the Google Cloud Delhi NCR, InMobi Group sees the opportunity to continue closing the gap between our users and products,” says Mohit Saxena, Co-founder and Group CTO of Inmobi. “Glance, especially, has been serving AI-powered personalised content to over 120 million active users. We can’t wait to continue giving them truly meaningful experiences that are speedy, scale well, and are relevant to them, by expanding the use of our current tools working on Google Cloud with the opening of a new region.”
• Groww now supports a sizable user base. “Google Cloud provides great technology that enables us to build and scale infrastructure to millions of users, and the new Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will continue to help more businesses and startups in India access powerful cloud-based infrastructure, products and services,” says Neeraj Singh, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Groww.
• HDFC Bank is positioned for the future. “At HDFC Bank, we are harnessing technology platforms to both run and build the bank. As we progress to be future ready, the objective is to invest in future technologies that give us scale, efficiency and resiliency. Towards this the Google Cloud region in Delhi NCR will enable us to enhance our resiliency and help us in building an active-active design framework for our new generation applications on cloud,” says Ramesh Lakshminarayanan, CIO, HDFC Bank.  
• Dr. Reddy’s Lab built a modern data platform with Google Cloud. “At Dr Reddy’s, we pride ourselves in helping patients regain good health, acting quickly to provide innovative solutions to address patients’ unmet needs and in accelerating access to medicines to people worldwide. Our Google Cloud-powered data platform is helping us realize these objectives and we welcome Google’s investment in the new Delhi NCR region as helping us and other businesses in India make further contributions to our social and economic future,” says Mukesh Rathi, Senior Vice President & CIO, Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories.
• “To survive the disruption caused by the pandemic and to succeed in the long term, organizations need to become digital natives, so they can be more agile, explore new business models and build new capabilities that boost resilience. A cloud-first strategy plays a key role in enabling businesses to do this,” said Piyush N. Singh, Lead – India market unit & lead – Growth and Strategic Client Relationships, Asia Pacific and Latin America, Accenture. “Harnessing the potential of cloud requires the right data infrastructure and this expansion by Google Cloud will undoubtedly help Indian enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.”

A global network of regions

Delhi NCR joins 25 existing Google Cloud regions connected via our high-performance network, helping customers better serve their users and customers throughout the globe. As the second region in India, customers benefit from improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery, while maintaining data sovereignty.

With this new region, Google Cloud customers operating in India also benefit from low latency and high performance of their cloud-based workloads and data. Designed for high availability, the region opens with three availability zones to protect against service disruptions, and offers a portfolio of key products, including Compute Engine, App Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Bigtable, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. 

Supporting India’s recovery with training and education

Google and Google Cloud will also continue to support our customers with people and education programs. We’re investing in local talent and the local developer community to help enterprises digitally transform and support economic recovery. 

Through the India Digitization Fund, we expanded our efforts to support India’s recovery from COVID-19—in particular, through programs to support education and small businesses. In addition to expanding internet access, and investments to help start-ups accelerate India’s digital transformation, we’ve grown our Grow with Google efforts. Businesses can access digital tools to maintain business continuity, find resources like quick help videos, and learn digital skills—in both English and in Hindi.

Helping customers build their transformation clouds

Google Cloud is here to support businesses, helping them get smarter with data, deploy faster, connect more easily with people and customers throughout the globe, and protect everything that matters to their businesses. The cloud region in Delhi NCR offers new technology and tools that can be a catalyst for this change. To learn more, visit the Google Cloud locations page, and be sure to watch the region launch event here.

As part of our efforts to democratize Zero Trust, Google Cloud has designed our BeyondCorp Enterprise solution to be an extensible platform where customers can choose to integrate signals from other technology vendors and incorporate these into their Zero Trust access policies. Following our integrations announcements earlier this year, we are excited to announce a new BeyondCorp Enterprise integration with Microsoft Intune, now available in Preview.

This integration allows organizations to craft Zero Trust access policies and protect private applications and SaaS applications, including Office 365, based on data collected from the Intune graph API, including device posture and other trust signals. It can also be leveraged to configure context-aware access policies for Workspace applications.

These policies can be applied across end-user devices, no matter where they are located. The ability to leverage device information to make access decisions is a critical component of a Zero Trust approach. Intune is a widely used mobile device management (MDM) tool and many of our customers will be able to benefit from this integration to help ensure that their distributed workforce can appropriately access corporate resources.

The BeyondCorp Enterprise integration with Microsoft Intune collects data from Intune using the Microsoft Graph API. End-user device information collected by the connector is then fed into Access Context Manager, a component of BeyondCorp Enterprise, to gate access to resources based on policies and access levels.

Customers are already seeing the benefits of the BeyondCorp Enterprise integration with Microsoft Intune. For example, one of our customers, a global ecommerce vendor, uses it to ensure their corporate-owned devices comply with internal policies before they are able to connect to corporate resources. With the Intune integration, they are then able to quickly and easily configure context-aware access policies with an attribute that company-owned devices must be in compliance in order to access the specific applications.

Previously, without the integration, they would need to set up a custom integration and manage both the code and the infrastructure where it was running. This integration not only alleviates the need to create custom code, but the customer has also seen a reduction in the time it takes to onboard new devices and build these policies.

If you’re interested in learning more or joining the preview, a full reference guide to the Intune integration can be found in our documentation here.

We believe that customers should be able to leverage their existing technology investments to build a more secure ecosystem. BeyondCorp Enterprise can help ensure that the right people have access to the right resources—only authorized users should be able to access only the resources that they have been approved for, based on their identity and device information. Google Workspace customers can also incorporate signal information from other vendors, including Intune, to create context-aware access policies for securing Workspace applications.

Earlier this year, we announced Netskope as a new member of the BeyondCorp Alliance to enable integration of a user’s risk score between Netskope Cloud Exchange and Google Cloud. We also announced new integrations with Jamf Pro for MacOS, which shares the Jamf-determined compliance state with BeyondCorp Enterprise so admins can incorporate this information into context-aware policies to restrict or allow access to protected applications.

You can learn more about BeyondCorp Enterprise integrations by registering for Google Cloud Next ‘22 on October 11-13, and attending the “What’s New in Zero Trust” session. Google Cloud will also be featured at the upcoming Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC), September 27-29, to discuss BeyondCorp Enterprise integrations with Jamf.

At Google Cloud, we are committed to advancing invisible security and democratizing security operations for every organization. Today, we’re proud to share the next step in this journey with the acquisition of Siemplify, a leading security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) provider. Siemplify shares our vision in this space, and will join Google Cloud’s security team to help companies better manage their threat response.

In a time when cyberattacks are rapidly growing in both frequency and sophistication, there’s never been a better time to bring these two companies together. We both share the belief that security analysts need to be able to solve more incidents with greater complexity while requiring less effort and less specialized knowledge. With Siemplify, we will change the rules on how organizations hunt, detect, and respond to threats.

Providing a proven SOAR capability unified with Chronicle’s innovative approach to security analytics is an important step forward in our vision. Building an intuitive, efficient security operations workflow around planet-scale security telemetry will further realize Google Cloud’s vision of a modern threat management stack that empowers customers to go beyond typical security event and information management (SIEM) and extended detection and response (XDR) tooling, enabling better detection and response at the speed and scale of modern environments. 

“We’re excited to join Google Cloud and build on the success we’ve had in the market helping companies address growing security threats,” said Amos Stern, CEO at Siemplify. “Together with Chronicle’s rich security analytics and threat intelligence, we can truly help security professionals transform the security operations center to defend against today’s threats.”

The Siemplify platform is an intuitive workbench that enables security teams to both manage risk better and reduce the cost of addressing threats. Siemplify allows Security Operation Center analysts to manage their operations from end-to-end, respond to cyber threats with speed and precision, and get smarter with every analyst interaction. The technology also helps improve SOC performance by reducing caseloads, raising analyst productivity, and creating better visibility across workflows.

We plan to invest in SOAR capabilities with Siemplify’s cloud services as our foundation and the team’s talent leading the way. Our intention is to integrate Siemplify’s capabilities into Chronicle in ways that help enterprises modernize and automate their security operations. 

We’re looking forward to welcoming the Siemplify team to Google Cloud and working with them to help security operations teams accomplish so much more in defense of their organizations. You can read Siemplify CEO Amos Stern’s blog for more on this exciting news.