Editor’s note: The post is part of a series highlighting our awesome partners, and their solutions, that are Built with BigQuery.

Exabeam, a leader in SIEM and XDR, provides security operations teams with end-to-end Threat Detection, Investigation, and Response (TDIR) by leveraging a combination of user and entity behavioral analytics (UEBA) and security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) to allow organizations to quickly resolve cybersecurity threats. As the company looked to take its cybersecurity solution to the next level, Exabeam partnered with Google Cloud to unlock its ability to scale for storage, ingestion, and analysis of security data.

Harnessing the power of Google Cloud products including BigQuery, Dataflow, Looker, Spanner and Bigtable, the company is now able to ingest data from more than 500 security vendors, convert unstructured data into security events, and create a common platform to store them in a cost-effective way. The scale and power of Google Cloud enables Exabeam customers to search multi-year data and detect threats in seconds

Google Cloud provides Exabeam with three critical benefits.

• Global scale security platform. Exabeam leveraged serverless Google Cloud data products to speed up platform development. The Exabeam platform supports horizontal scale with built-in resiliency (backed by 99.99% reliability) and data backups in three other zones per region. Also, multi-tenancy with tenant data separation, data masking, and encryption in transit and at rest are backed up in the data cloud products Exabeam uses from Google Cloud.

• Scale data ingestion and processing. By leveraging Google’s compute capabilities, Exabeam can differentiate itself from other security vendors that are still struggling to process large volumes of data. With Google Cloud, Exabeam can provide a path to scale data processing pipelines. This allows Exabeam to offer robust processing to model threat scenarios with data from more than 500 security and IT vendors in near-real time.

• Search and detection in seconds. Traditionally, security solutions break down data into silos to offer efficient and cost-effective search. Thanks to the speed and capacity of BigQuery, Security Operations teams can search across different tiers of data in near real time. The ability to search data more than a year old in seconds, for example, can help security teams hunt for threats simultaneously across recent and historical data.

Exabeam joins more than 700 tech companies powering their products and businesses using data cloud products from Google, such as BigQuery, Looker, Spanner, and Vertex AI. Google Cloud announced the Built with BigQuery initiative at the Google Data Cloud Summit in April, which helps Independent Software Vendors like Exabeam build applications using data and machine learning products. By providing dedicated access to technology, expertise, and go-to-market programs, this initiative can help tech companies accelerate, optimize, and amplify their success.

Google’s data cloud provides a complete platform for building data-driven applications like those from Exabeam — from simplified data ingestion, processing, and storage to powerful analytics, AI, ML, and data sharing capabilities — all integrated with the open, secure, and sustainable Google Cloud platform. With a diverse partner ecosystem and support for multi-cloud, open-source tools, and APIs, Google Cloud can help provide technology companies the portability and the extensibility they need to avoid data lock-in.

To learn more about Exabeam on Google Cloud, visit www.exabeam.com. Click here to learn more about Google Cloud’s Built with BigQuery initiative.

Last week, the European Commission and U.S. Government agreed on a new E.U.-U.S. data transfer framework. Earlier today, Google shared that it welcomes these efforts by the U.S. government to enhance privacy protections for E.U. data and facilitate trusted transatlantic data flows. For our Google Cloud customers, we intend to make the protections offered by this new framework available once it is implemented.

Last year, we reaffirmed our commitment to E.U. businesses after the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) issued its Recommendations on Supplementary Measures, following Europe’s top court ruling invalidating the E.U.-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework and upholding the E.U. Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs).

Since then, we’ve continued to help our customers meet stringent data protection requirements by offering industry-leading technical controls, contractual commitments, and risk assessment resources. We’ve also continued our advocacy to create more legal certainty around transatlantic data flows.

Today, we would like to provide an update to our customers on this work.

A customer-controlled cloud

Google Cloud1 continues to be a leading provider of technical and security controls to help meet customers’ data protection requirements, as well as their increasing data sovereignty expectations.

We are committed to building our Cloud on Europe’s terms, including by offering customer-managed encryption and data localization for a growing list of key products and collaborating with local partners to provide the highest levels of sovereignty, all while enabling the next wave of growth and transformation for Europe’s businesses and organizations.

Google Cloud Platform

We recently announced the general availability of Assured Workloads for the E.U. This product helps Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers protect their data by allowing them to:

• Store their data in their choice of E.U. Google Cloud region(s)
• Ensure that only E.U. persons – located in the E.U. – have access to the data and provide customer support
• Deploy cryptographic control for data access, including customer-managed encryption keys

Cloud External Key Manager (EKM) enables customers to encrypt data in a variety of services with keys that are stored and managed in a third-party key management system deployed outside of Google’s infrastructure. Google Cloud continues to be the only cloud provider to enable customers to store and manage encryption keys for cloud-resident data outside the provider’s infrastructure with customer’s control over decryption based on specific justifications, including government access requests.

Key Access Justifications greatly advances the control that GCP customers have over their data by giving customers a justification every time their externally hosted keys have to be used to decrypt data. Signed Access Approval (SAA) adds a layer of extra assurance that requires explicit customer consent for any administrative access to customer data or configurations.

Google Cloud’s Confidential Computing portfolio is a breakthrough technology that allows customers to encrypt their most sensitive data in the cloud while in-use. Ubiquitous Data Encryption further extends data protection by providing cryptographic protection for this data at-rest, in-transit, and in-use. The keys used to encrypt customer data outside of GCP using Cloud EKM are securely shared with applications operating within Confidential environments.

Google Workspace

Our Google Workspace (including Workspace for Education) customers can choose to store their covered data in Europe. Additionally, with Client-Side Encryption, we offer customers direct control of encryption keys and the identity service they choose to access those keys. With Client-Side Encryption, customer data is indecipherable to Google, while users can continue to take advantage of Google’s native web-based collaboration, access content on mobile devices, and share encrypted files externally. Client-Side Encryption is currently available in Public Beta for Google Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and we plan to extend it to Gmail, Calendar and Meet. Additionally, customers can also benefit by choosing third party solutions that offer similar encryption capabilities with select Google Workspace services.

Legal Basis for International Data Transfers

We updated our data processing terms for GCP and Google Workspace and Cloud Identity to reflect various modules of the new E.U. Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) approved by the European Commission on June 4, 2021, as well as separate U.K. SCCs.

Google Cloud plans to adopt the new E.U.-U.S. data transfer framework and offer it as a transfer solution to our cloud customers, as further detailed in our data processing terms.

Advocacy and Additional Helpful Resources

We have adopted the Trusted Cloud Principles with industry peers to demonstrate our commitments to protect the rights of our Google Cloud customers. We will continue to support the ongoing work of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on government access to data and the negotiation of CLOUD Act Agreements — including between the U.S. and E.U. — as vehicles for surveillance reform.

We will continue to publish additional materials on our Cloud Privacy Resource Center, such as our whitepaper on safeguards for international data transfers with Google Cloud.

Millions of organizations with users in Europe rely on our cloud services to run their businesses every day, and we remain steadfastly committed to helping them meet their regulatory requirements by maintaining a diverse set of compliance tools.

Not too long ago, McKinsey released a report titled “Making a secure transition to the public cloud,” the result of interviews with IT security experts at nearly 100 enterprises around the world.

Leveraging the expertise of Google Cloud and McKinsey security experts, the research presents a strategic framework for IT security in cloud and hybrid environments, and provides recommendations on how to migrate to the cloud while keeping security top of mind.

The research shows what many already know: that public cloud adoption is accelerating thanks to increased technical flexibility, simpler scaling, and lower operating costs.

What’s exciting is that the research also reveals that many Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) no longer view security as an inhibitor to adoption but instead an opportunity.

“In many cases [CISOs] acknowledge that cloud service providers’ security resources dwarf their own,” the authors write—and now these companies are focused on how to best adopt and configure cloud services for increased security.

The research identifies three common archetypes for perimeter security: backhauling, cleansheeting, and adopting cloud provider controls by default.

• Backhauling allows companies to continue managing IT security on-prem, with an external gateway connecting the data center to the public cloud. Approximately half of the companies surveyed currently use this model, but only 11% plan to continue doing so, since it can keep companies from realizing certain cloud benefits, such as agility.
• Cleansheeting requires greater investment and expertise, as it calls for redesigning IT security around a “virtual perimeter” and leveraging multiple cloud-native tools and services.
• Using cloud provider controls is the most cost-effective solution, but—depending on the cloud provider—can limit autonomy and may offer limited capabilities.

McKinsey uses these three models, along with the decision to re-architect applications for the cloud, to identify six “archetypes” for cloud security. Each archetype has its own tradeoffs.

The report also includes a tactical 10-step plan for successful cloud migration. Download it now.

In cybersecurity, speed matters. Whether a security analyst is trying to understand the details of an alert that was triggered by an indicator of compromise (IoC), or find additional context for a suspicious asset, speed is often the critical factor that will help thwart a cyberattack before threat actors are able to inflict damage.

With speed in mind, we are pleased to announce the general availability of our new investigative experience in Chronicle Security Operations. We are continuing to deliver on our mission to bring the power of Google to security operations and are raising the bar for search and the investigative experience in the SOC.

With this release, SecOps teams will be able to harness Chronicle’s lightning-fast search across any form of structured data. Additionally, the new investigation experience can provide greater flexibility to pivot and drill-down when conducting complex, open-ended threat investigations and surface insights quickly and easily.

Our Unified Data Model (UDM) schema, with its built-in flexibility that can effectively handle a wide variety of security related events, is at the heart of Chronicle’s powerful search. We have scaled this capability by optimizing query responses across structured data. Additionally, analysts can investigate large datasets and build complex queries with a new and intuitive user experience. With user personalization enhancements, analysts can quickly access saved searches and top queries in their environment to improve routine SOC workflows.

With the new investigative experience, security teams can:

• Drive faster threat understanding with an interactive event results timeline that helps eliminate unnecessary long wait times by streaming results as they are processed to quickly begin threat analysis
• Use enhanced context and operationalize relevant data for threat analysis with one-click filter-to-query conversion
• Personalize the analyst experience with saved search and search history functions for quicker analyst knowledge recall
• Power threat investigation and hunting with a new, improved, highly performant UDM search

Let’s look at an example of how to use the reimagined investigative experience and our new broader, faster search.

In our use-case, a security analyst is investigating a curated detection alert for potentially suspicious behavior on a Windows environment. Additionally, there is a low prevalence domain from host “win-dc-01” with ip “10.166.0.3”. To investigate further, let’s open the UDM Search page and construct a query containing the host and IP information along with destination information of the domain the host was contacting (edge.microsoft.com). Over 70,000 events stream into the investigation interface providing the analyst an immediate picture of data surrounding their alert.

The new interactive events timeline can provide a clear picture of event trends over time with key statistical data which can be easily filtered. Additionally, with the new quick filters, the analyst is able to easily filter out hosts that are known-good to get pertinent information about the domain.

Analyzing value aggregations present in the filter panel, automatically generated by Chronicle, enables analysts to domain values of highest interest, and quickly determine that approximately 800 events were present in the last week that related to edge.microsoft.com URL. Since Microsoft Edge is disallowed in the organization, there should not be any outbound traffic to this type of destination.

As a final step before orchestrating a response in Chronicle SOAR’s case management, the analyst can save their search to quickly recall the steps they took in the future for related investigations.

We have already seen our customers use these new capabilities in preview to build new use cases, accelerate existing threat hunting workflows, and drive faster threat response. We will continue our mission to bring Google speed, scale, and intelligence to the investigative experience, expediting “time to aha” for security analysts, and driving better, faster responses.

Ready to put Chronicle to work in your Security Operations Center? Contact Google Cloud sales or your customer success CSM team. You can also learn more about all these new capabilities in Google Chronicle in our product documentation.

State and local government (SLG) agencies are reeling from a combination of unbudgeted COVID-related expenses and reduced tax revenue caused by unemployment and business closures. Any way you look at it, the situation is challenging. To understand how SLG agencies are coping, Google Cloud collaborated with MeriTalk to survey 200 SLG IT and program managers, uncovering some revealing trends in SLG technology innovation. Unsurprisingly, approximately 84% of SLG organizations report making budgetary tradeoffs to bridge funding the gaps the ongoing pandemic has created. 

However, researchers discovered a silver lining: The pandemic has also been a catalyst to modernize the legacy infrastructure in states and cities. The majority of survey respondents (88%) reported that their agency made greater modernization progress this past year than in the prior 10 years.

Walking a tightrope between innovation and budget pressure

According to 89% of state and local leaders, now is the time to invest in technology modernization. But 80% are experiencing a funding gap due to unbudgeted expenses related to the pandemic and declining tax revenue, which makes finding that balance between innovation and budget a serious challenge.

Some agencies are achieving the impossible, though. For example, the City of Pittsburgh Department of Innovation and Performance is working with Google Cloud to migrate  and modernize its legacy IT infrastructure. By decommissioning their data center and moving to Google Cloud, the city can build new data analytics tools to drive smart city initiatives and create entirely new applications to improve digital service delivery for its residents. As a result, the city will save costs, abandon its brittle legacy IT structure, and create a cloud-based technology platform for the future—becoming the region’s leader in cloud-native software development.

Google Cloud is enabling the city’s IT team by curating and delivering our certification training at no cost. The program includes live training sessions as well as on-demand training. 

Bridging funding gaps

In their drive to modernization, many SLG leaders are turning to grants as an important source of funding. Approximately 84% of those surveyed report making tradeoffs to bridge funding gaps, such as moving resources away from operations and maintenance (37%), increasing reliance on pandemic-related funding (31%), and delaying internal modernization efforts to enable remote work for employees (29%). One way that states are dealing with this tension between budget gaps and the need for innovation is to turn to Google Cloud for cost savings and improved capabilities.

For example, Google Cloud is helping the State of West Virginia innovate and enhance IT security despite decreased state funding. The state entered a multi-year agreement to ensure full access to enterprise-level Google Workspace capabilities for 25,000 state employees, keeping the state at the forefront of technology advancements at a projected cost savings of $11.5 million.

Similarly, Google Cloud helped build the Rhode Island Virtual Career Center to help the state’s constituents get back to work. Using familiar productivity tools within Google Workspace, employees can access new career opportunities quickly, while employers can reach more candidates. Skipper, the CareerCompass RI bot, uses data and machine learning to connect Rhode Islanders with potential new career paths and reskilling opportunities.

Enhancing services

Google Cloud is also helping agencies enhance services, including working with the State of Illinois to get unemployment funding to constituents in need.The state is using Contact Center AI to rapidly deploy virtual agents that help more than 1 million out of work citizens file unemployment claims faster. Capable of engaging in human-like conversations, these intelligent agents provide constituents with 24/7 access and enable government employees to focus on more complex, mission-critical tasks—such as combating fraud. In summer 2020, the virtual agents handled more than 140,000 phone and web inquiries per day, including 40,000 after-hours calls every night. The state anticipates an estimated annual savings of $100 million from the solution, which was deployed in just two weeks.

Working with Google, Ohio also uncovered $2 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims. We will continue to partner with the state to find fraudulent claims, and prioritize the processing of legitimate claims.

 Focusing on cybersecurity

Despite expanding security threats topping NASCIO’s list of 2021 State CIO priorities, more than one in three IT managers (35%) say their organization reduces security measures to expedite timelines. Partnering with Google Cloud has enabled many agencies to enhance their security measures while modernizing and staying within budget, investing in support for remote work devices, digital services for residents, and cybersecurity.

NYC Cyber Command works with city agencies to ensure systems are designed, built, and operated in a highly secure manner. NYC3 followed a cloud-first strategy using the Google Cloud Platform. The virtual operations demanded by the pandemic have increased the importance of security and compliance in SLG. Google Cloud is committed to act as a security transformation partner and be the trusted cloud for public sector agencies. 

Finally, to strengthen public and private partnerships, SLG organizations told MeriTalk that they need vendor partners to support modernization efforts for flexibility and collaboration (46%), need innovation-focused leadership groups to help balance technology needs with budget constraints (41%), and they expect significant returns on investments in cloud computing (38%), and data management/analytics (33%).

Google Cloud is helping SLG customers across the country invest in innovation to walk the tech tightrope—balancing innovation and budgets—and helping to build a more resilient future. Visit the State and Local Government solutions page to learn more.