Whether they were ready for it or not, the COVID-19 pandemic transformed many retailers into digital businesses. Retailers made huge investments into commerce technologies, customer experience tools, sales and fulfillment technology, and improving digital experiences to continue providing their goods and services to their customers. Now, more than a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, digital retail is the new normal. In fact, many retailers are planning on expanding their digital investments. However, as their digital footprint expands, so do their threats and security concerns. 

As a digital-focused retailer, your website is the most visible part of your attack surface. Your website is where your customers search for goods or services, make payments, or learn more about your brand. However, your website does not operate in isolation. There is an underlying infrastructure as well as the services that run on top of it that need protection from a wide array of attacks that may seek to compromise your data, internal employees, business, and customers. During this week’s Google Cloud Retail Summit, we’ve shared why Google Cloud is built to be the most trusted cloud for retailers. From providing you with control over your data as you move from your own data centers to the public cloud to giving you built-in technology to protect your applications all the way to your end users, Google Cloud helps you safely migrate to and operate in our Trusted Cloud.

Trusted Cloud Gives You Control, Transparency, and Sovereignty

• Access Transparency: We offer the ability to monitor and approve access to your data or configurations by Google Cloud support and engineering based on specific justifications and context, so you have visibility and control over insider access. 
• Certificate Authority Service (CAS): CAS is a highly scalable and available service that simplifies and automates the management and deployment of private CAs while meeting the needs of modern developers and applications. With CAS, you can offload to the cloud time-consuming tasks associated with operating a private CA, like hardware provisioning, infrastructure security, software deployment, high-availability configuration, disaster recovery, backups, and more, allowing you to stand up a private CA in minutes, rather than the months it might normally take to deploy.

• Confidential Computing: We already encrypt data at-rest and in-transit, but customer data needs to be decrypted for processing. Confidential Computing is a breakthrough technology which encrypts data in-use—while it’s being processed. Confidential VMs take this technology to the next level by offering memory encryption so that you can further isolate your workloads in the cloud. With the beta launch of Confidential VMs, we’re the first major cloud provider to offer this level of security and isolation while giving you a simple, easy-to-use option for your newly built and “lift and shift” applications.

• Cloud Key Management: We allow you to configure the locations where your data is stored, where your encryption keys are stored, and where your data can be accessed from. We give you the ability to manage your own encryption keys, even storing them outside Google’s infrastructure. Using our External Key Management service, you have the ability to deny any request by Google to access encryption keys necessary to decrypt customer data at rest for any reason.

Trusted cloud Helps You Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Threats

• BeyondCorp Enterprise is Google’s comprehensive zero trust product offering. Google has over a decade of experience managing and securing cloud applications at a global scale, and this offering was developed based on learnings from our experience managing our own enterprise, feedback from customers and partners, as well as informed by leading engineering and security research. We understand that most customers host resources across different cloud providers. With this in mind, BeyondCorp Enterprise was purpose-built as a multicloud solution, enabling customers to securely access resources hosted not only on Google Cloud or on-premises, but also across other clouds such as Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Cloud Armor: We’re simplifying how you can use Cloud Armor to help protect your websites and applications from exploit attempts, as well as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. With Cloud Armor Managed Protection Plus, you will get access to DDoS and WAF services, curated rule sets, and other services for a predictable monthly price.

• Chronicle: Chronicle is a threat detection solution that identifies threats, including ransomware, at unparalleled speed and scale. Google Cloud Threat Intelligence for Chronicle surfaces highly actionable threats based on Google’s collective insight and research into Internet-based threats. Threat Intel for Chronicle allows you to focus on real threats in the environment and accelerate your response time.
• Google Workspace Security: Used by more than five million organizations worldwide, from large banks and retailers with hundreds of thousands of people to fast-growing startups, Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education include the collaboration and productivity tools found here. Google Workspace and Google Workspace for Education are designed to help teams work together securely in new, more efficient ways, no matter where members are located or what device they use. For instance, Gmail scans over 300 billion attachments for malware every week and prevents more than 99.9% of spam, phishing, and malware from reaching users. We’re committed to protecting against security 1 threats of all kinds, innovating new security tools for users and admins, and providing our customers with a secure cloud service.
• Identity & Access Management IAM: Identity and Access Management (IAM) lets administrators authorize who can take action on specific resources, giving you full control and visibility to manage Google Cloud resources centrally. For enterprises with complex organizational structures, hundreds of workgroups, and many projects, IAM provides a unified view into security policy across your entire organization, with built-in auditing to ease compliance processes.
• reCAPTCHA Enterprise: reCAPTCHA has over a decade of experience defending the internet and data for its network of more than 5 million sites. reCAPTCHA Enterprise builds on this technology with capabilities, such as two-factor authentication and mobile application support, designed specifically for enterprise security concerns. With reCAPTCHA Enterprise, you can defend your website against common web-based attacks like credential stuffing, account takeovers, and scraping and help prevent costly exploits from malicious human and automated actors. And, just like reCAPTCHA v3, reCAPTCHA Enterprise will never interrupt your users with a challenge, so you can run it on all webpages where your customers interact with your services.

• Security Command Center: With Security Command Center (SCC), our native posture management platform, you can prevent and detect abuse of your cloud resources, centralize security findings from Google Cloud services and partner products, and detect common misconfigurations, all in one easy-to-use platform. We have Premium tier for Security Command Center to provide even more tools to protect your cloud resources. It adds new capabilities that let you spot threats using Google intelligence for events in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) logs and containers, surface large sets of misconfigurations, perform automated compliance scanning and reporting. These features help you understand your risks on Google Cloud, verify that you’ve configured your resources properly and safely, and document it for anyone who asks.

• VirusTotal: VirusTotal inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content. Any user can select a file from their computer using their browser and send it to VirusTotal.
• Web Risk API: With Web Risk, you can quickly identify known bad sites, warn users before they click infected links, and prevent users from posting links to known infected pages from your site. Web Risk includes data on more than a million unsafe URLs and stays up to date by examining billions of URLs each day.

Trusted cloud Plays an Active Role in Our Shared Fate 

Our trusted cloud provides a shared-fate model for risk management. We stand with retailers from day one, helping them implement best practices for safely migrating to and operating in our trusted cloud.

We hope you enjoy the sessions we’ve created for you with Google Cloud Retail Summit and that they help you understand the ways our trusted cloud can help secure retailers all over the world.

reCAPTCHA Enterprise is Google’s online fraud detection service that leverages more than a decade of experience defending the internet. reCAPTCHA Enterprise can be used to prevent fraud and attacks perpetrated by scripts, bot software, and humans. When installed inside a mobile app at the point of action, such as login, purchase, or account creation, reCAPTCHA Enterprise can block fake users and bots while allowing legitimate users to proceed.

To provide more complete coverage for native mobile iOS and Android applications, we’re announcing the general availability of the reCAPTCHA Enterprise Mobile SDK. Designed with digital-first and mobile-first organizations in mind, the new Mobile SDK fully integrates reCAPTCHA Enterprise’s frictionless experience on end-users’ mobile devices.

Why should I use the Mobile SDK?

Unlike most web applications, iOS and Android apps run on physical devices that can provide a wealth of device telemetry to help identify fraud and bot activity. By combining both device and network signals, the new mobile SDK can better protect native mobile applications from bot attacks while unlocking the full potential of reCAPTCHA Enterprise. It provides:

• Frictionless customer experience — no picking fire hydrants from a grid
• Easy integration to your native mobile app with support for popular frameworks like Cocoa Pods and Swift Package Manager
• A regularly-updated device threat model to help stay ahead of attack evolution

Protecting against fraud across all your channels

Customers will be able to leverage the new mobile SDK to implement native iOS and Android protection against the OWASP Top 10 automated attacks common on the internet, which include fraudulent account creation, financial hijacking, and credential stuffing. This is particularly important for mobile workforces and end users who use a mobile app to access products and services. Since mobile traffic surpasses web traffic in many industries, it’s even more important to implement a comprehensive mobile app protection strategy to protect against the most prevalent attacks.

Integrating the new Mobile SDK

If you’re interested in learning more about how to integrate the new Mobile SDK, check out the documentation for iOS and Android. Mobile and Web integrations leverage the same easy to understand pricing for Assessments, found here.

Backup and DR data is a valuable business asset, and ensuring that it’s safe and accessible is essential. In particular, you want to be able to monitor your backups to ensure that the data is indeed protected and that you can quickly recover it in the event of a disaster, user error, or failed upgrade.

Users of Google Cloud’s Backup and DR service often ask:

1. What are the best practices for monitoring my backup and recovery jobs?
2. How can I proactively identify issues and troubleshoot? 
3. How can I create alerts and be notified about important events? 

The good news is that Google Cloud Backup and DR now integrates with Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring tools. Now, you can monitor backup events, jobs, appliance health, resource consumption and user actions in the same way you monitor other Google Cloud workloads and services. 

With this integration, you can now:

• Monitor events related to backup and restore – With detailed Google Cloud Backup and DR service event logs in Cloud Logging, you can now use log based alerts to create a customisable notification, in near-real time. This lets you monitor important events such as  backup job failures, jobs that did not run, local backup storage saturation, and network failures.
• Configure fine grained alerting – You can write custom event queries on a wide variety of dimensions such as event severity, application type, application name, job type, job name, error message and many more. This gives a lot of flexibility to define alerts for specific events or conditions within a system, thus reducing noise and helping you identify and fix issues easily. 
• Get notified on your preferred notification channel – Google Cloud offers seven pre-built notification channels that let you receive customisable notifications directly over email, SMS, Slack or the Google Cloud mobile app. Alternatively, you can integrate with your own monitoring and event management tools using webhooks or Pub/Sub. 
• Derive useful insights to troubleshoot issues – With Log Analytics, you can use BigQuery to query your data using SQL queries and generate operational insights, which can help you reduce time spent troubleshooting. For example, you can analyze the key reasons that backup and restore jobs fail for a given application or application type. 

The integration also lets you proactively discover deeper issues related to backup and recovery, such as capacity-related issues or certain job failures that happen periodically, by monitoring recurring events in the logs over time. With log-based metrics, you can: 

• Create trend charts to track important metrics such as the number of backup or restore jobs that failed during a day/week/month 
• Receive a notification when the number of occurrences crosses a threshold, for example receive a notification if a snapshot pool saturates more than five times a week 
• Monitor trends in data, such as latency values in logs, and receive a notification if the values change in an unacceptable way.

Getting started

The time to learn that your backup failed should never be when you go to restore. By integrating our Backup and DR service with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, you can get valuable assurances about the health of your backup and business continuity processes with the same tools that you use to manage other Google Cloud workloads. To get started, check out the Backup and DR event logs page. You can also watch a video that shows you how to set up and use the service and configure some custom alerts.