At Google Cloud, we’re focused on giving customers new ways to strengthen their security posture. Managing identities and authorization is a core security control that underpins interactions inside and collaboration outside the organization. To address fraud, identity theft, and other security challenges associated with the proliferation of online accounts, many organizations have opted to use centralized identity provider (IdP) products that can help secure and manage identities for their users and SaaS applications, and we want to strengthen support for these solutions and the use cases they support.

Today we’re pleased to announce Workforce Identity Federation in Preview. This new Google Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) feature can rapidly onboard workforce user identities from external IdPs and provide direct secure access to Google Cloud services and resources. Workforce Identity Federation uses a federation approach instead of Directory Synchronization, the method currently used by most organizations for onboarding Google Cloud identities. Workforce Identity Federation provides flexibility to support third-party collaboration use cases and business requirements that can be better addressed by using a localized, customer-managed IdP.

Federating existing identities eliminates the need to maintain separate identities across multiple platforms. This means that organizations using Workforce Identity Federation no longer need to synchronize workforce user identities from their existing identity management solutions to Google Cloud. IdPs can include Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) and directory products such as those from ForgeRock, Microsoft, Okta, JumpCloud, or Ping Identity.

Workforce Identity Federation is another example of how we are working to make Google Cloud’s Invisible Security vision a reality, in this case delivering secure access leveraging customers’ current identity and access management solutions without the need for redundant user administration

VMware is one of our customers using Workforce Identity Federation in Preview. Thiru Bhat, director at VMware, explained why he’s excited for the new feature.

“VMware runs its own IdP and we needed a solution to allow our developers to access their Google Cloud projects while maintaining corporate control over identities and permissions. Syncing of user identities outside of our IdP is not permitted per our InfoSec policies and we deployed Google Cloud’s Workforce Identity Federation to fulfill our identity requirements. Workforce Identity Federation feature meets our needs with a solution that is robust and straightforward to configure.”

Here’s a closer look at a few use cases and the benefits from the new Workforce Identity Federation.

Use case: Employee sign-in and authorization

Streamlined authentication experience with fine-grained access control

Workforce Identity Federation can enable your organization’s users to access Google Cloud through the same login experience they already use for their existing IdP for single sign-on. Workforce Identity Federation also can enable fine-grained access through attribute mapping and attribute conditions. Attributes — which some IdPs call claims — contain additional information about users.

Google Cloud can use these attributes to further inform authentication decisions. Attribute mapping lets your administrators map identity attributes that are defined in your IdP to those that Google Cloud can use. Your administrators can configure Google Cloud with attribute conditions to authenticate conditionally — to let only a subset of external identities authenticate to your Google Cloud project based on attributes.

For example, your administrators might want to let only those employees who are part of the accounting team sign in. To do this, your administrators can configure an IdP attribute, such as EmployeeJobFamily. Using attribute mapping, they could map this attribute to a similar attribute in Google Cloud, such as employee_job_family. Then, they could configure an attribute condition, assertion.employee_job_family=="accounting".

Use case: Secure access for partners and vendors

Restricted and secure access to Google Cloud services from a partner or vendor that has their own IdP and associated privacy and data policies

Today, the modern enterprise depends on partners and vendors more than ever. Partners and vendors can help scale enterprise workflows, but they also can introduce new complexities for IT teams, such as how to secure partner or vendor identities in addition to the rest of their enterprise users.

Workforce Identity Federation can enable enterprises to selectively federate users from partner or vendor IdPs without requiring enterprise IT teams to sync or create a separate identity store to use Google Cloud resources.

One common scenario where Workforce Identity Federation can help is when a company hires a partner or vendor to provide outsourced development services using cloud resources (such as when Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) DevOps services are outsourced to a partner.) The company creates a separate workforce pool for the partner or vendor’s administrator, who can then use their own IdP to grant access to their workforce.

This use case can also help support organizations who have requirements to store and maintain identity information locally in support of data residency or digital sovereignty initiatives. By using a local IdP, either customer-managed or partner-managed, and federating identities to Google Cloud, organizations can further strengthen control over their identity information.

Seamless experience for users, easy access management for administrators

Before Workforce Identity Federation, organizations would need to duplicate user identities from their IdP by creating user accounts in Google Cloud Identity. Workforce Identity Federation can help you access Google Cloud without having to first create Cloud Identity user accounts. It also reduces toil by eliminating the need to maintain two separate identity management systems.

Identity providers such as ForgeRock see tremendous value in the Workforce Identity Federation, and how Google Cloud can work with them to jointly help customers manage workforce identities. Peter Barker, ForgeRock’s Chief Product Officer, said that his company’s partnership with Google Cloud makes identity management easy and secure for administrators and users alike.

“Our strategic partnership with Google Cloud delivers great value to our customers and we’re excited to continue to expand our relationship. This integration with Google Cloud Workforce Identity Federation enables ForgeRock customers to leverage their current IAM investments and makes it easier for employees, contractors, and partners to securely access Google Cloud resources.”

Getting started with Workforce Identity Federation

Workforce Identity Federation is now available in Preview to customers already using Google Cloud. You can learn more about Workforce Identity Federation by visiting our webpage and watching this video.

Please contact your account manager to see if workforce identity federation is the right fit for your organization. And, you can get started with these new capabilities today using 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.

Creating a secure-by-default experience based on robust defenses has always been a core design principle for Gmail. That’s why we’ve established a strong baseline of security in Gmail, with built-in protections to help automatically filter out potentially malicious messages. While these defenses help keep Gmail users safe, email functions as part of a large, complex, interconnected ecosystem that we continually invest in and work to protect. After first announcing Gmail’s Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) pilot last year, today we’re announcing that over the coming weeks we’re rolling out Gmail’s general support of BIMI, an industry standard that aims to drive adoption of strong sender authentication for the entire email ecosystem. BIMI provides email recipients and email security systems increased confidence in the source of emails, and enables senders to provide their audience with a more immersive experience.

“Bank of America has a wide range of security measures in place to support our customers, and we constantly evolve our program to deliver best in class protection. Part of this effort is our partnership with Google on BIMI, which provides an easy way to validate if correspondence is from us.” — Bank of America

BIMI enables organizations that authenticate their emails using Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC)—a standard for providing strong sender authentication that allows security systems to perform better filtering, separating legitimate messages from potentially spoofed ones—to validate ownership of their logos and securely transmit them to Google. BIMI is designed to be easy: for organizations with DMARC in place, validated logos display on authenticated emails from their domains and subdomains.

Here’s how it works: Organizations who authenticate their emails using Sender Policy Framework (SPF) or Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) and deploy DMARC can provide their validated trademarked logos to Google via a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC). BIMI leverages Mark Verifying Authorities, like Certification Authorities, to verify logo ownership and provide proof of verification in a VMC. Once these authenticated emails pass our other anti-abuse checks, Gmail will start displaying the logo in the existing avatar slot.  

“Gmail’s support of BIMI is a win for email authentication, brand trust, and consumers alike. BIMI gives organizations the opportunity to provide their customers with a more immersive email experience, strengthening email sender authentication across the entire email ecosystem.” — Seth Blank, Chair of the AuthIndicators Working Group

This is just the start for BIMI. The standard expects to expand support across logo types and validators. For logo validation, BIMI is starting by supporting the validation of trademarked logos, since they are a common target of impersonation. Today, Entrust and DigiCert support BIMI as Certification Authorities, and in the future the BIMI working group expects this list of supporting validation authorities to expand further. To learn more about BIMI and see the latest news, visit the working group’s website.

To take advantage of BIMI, ensure that your organization has adopted DMARC, and that you have validated your logo with a VMC. For Gmail users, no action is required. We’re proud to be one of the leading members in both establishing and supporting the BIMI standard and will continue to support efforts that contribute to security for the entire email ecosystem.

Last July, Google Cloud launched our ambassador partnership with the Health Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Health-ISAC) and committed to working with industry leaders to better protect our healthcare ecosystem. Securing healthcare technology and data is a global challenge, and to meet it security professionals need to have better channels for sharing information and effective security practices. 

To that end, we’re pleased to announce that our relationship with Health-ISAC is now expanding to include CISOs and security leaders in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA).  

On May 23, 2023, we’ll join the Health-ISAC on a 17-city tour across the region, starting in Zurich, Switzerland, as part of its European Healthcare Threat Landscape Tour. In each session, we will bring together experts from across the region with cybersecurity practitioners from the Health-ISAC, Google Cloud, law enforcement, and regulatory bodies.  

Our goals is to focus the discussions on several topics:

• How the threat landscape is unique to each country we visit;
• How we can better share threat intelligence; 
• What are the emerging European laws and regulations  that can affect healthcare and cybersecurity;
• How ransomware continues to evolve and the threat that poses to healthcare; organizations;
• What we can do to improve cyber incident response;
• What impact digital sovereignty can have on European healthcare;
• And which initiatives Health-ISAC and Google Cloud are launching to better protect Europe’s healthcare system.

The timing for the tour could not come at a more critical time. Ransomware and digital extortion threatens healthcare and its subsectors, with national health systems in Ireland, UK, Germany, and Spain all recently experiencing extended outages because of ransomware. Threat actors continue to target proprietary data at biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms. Meanwhile, existing regulations such as the Digital Markets Act and GDPR, and new regulations such as the NIS2 Directive (Directive (EU) 2022/2555), which seek to protect EU citizens and businesses from risks posed by the digital world, are raising the bar that CISOs and security leaders must surpass to ensure their businesses can stay compliant and able compete in the global digital economy.

“The European Healthcare Threat Landscape Tour is one of many efforts we have undertaken to build a closer community of trust around threats and cybersecurity practices that keep health organization’s safe,” said Denise Anderson, executive director, Health-ISAC.

“We all rely on these organizations to take care of us and produce therapies that keep us healthy. Delivering these engagements alongside Google Cloud helps us achieve global scale and shows off both organizations’ commitments to building a sustainable, resilient healthcare ecosystem for entire societies.” 

Each stop in the tour will provide opportunities to dive deep into these topics, grow an understanding of these challenges, create a space for collaboration, and build closer, trusted partnerships. The meetings are open to member and non-member organizations working in healthcare. Interested participants can contact the Health-ISAC through their contact form or register on their website for the nearest event.

“The Google Cybersecurity Action Team’s mission is to secure customers, secure the cloud, and secure the planet (and beyond). Working with industry groups like Health-ISAC helps us achieve this mission while respecting each other and the unique challenges European health systems face. Myself and our EMEA-based Google Cloud and Mandiant security teams are looking forward to another great collaboration,” said Phil Venables, chief information security officer, Google Cloud.

At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping build a secure and resilient healthcare ecosystem for everyone. As we hit the road with the Health-ISAC this summer, we’ll be sure to send updates on what we learn through this collaboration and how we can all work together to secure smarter in 2023 and beyond.

Cloud computing is globally recognized as the single most effective, agile and scalable path to digitally transform and drive value creation. It has been a critical catalyst for growth, allowing private organizations and governments to support consumers and citizens alike, delivering services quickly without prohibitive capital investment. European organizations—in both the public and private sectors—want a provider to deliver a cloud on their terms, one that meets their requirements for security, privacy, and digital sovereignty, without compromising on functionality or innovation.

Last year, we set out an ambitious vision of sovereignty along three distinct pillars: data sovereignty (including control over encryption and data access), operational sovereignty (visibility and control over provider operations), and software sovereignty (providing the ability to run and move cloud workloads without being locked-in to a particular provider, including in extraordinary situations such as stressed exits). After extensive dialogue with customers and policymakers, we are today unveiling ‘Cloud. On Europe’s Terms’. As part of  this initiative, we will continue to demonstrate our commitment to deliver cloud services that provide the highest levels of digital sovereignty, all while enabling the next wave of growth and transformation for Europe’s businesses and organizations.

Google Cloud’s baseline controls and security features offer strong protections, meet current robust security and privacy requirements, and address many customer needs. Yet each country in Europe has its own characteristics and expectations. Certain customers in Europe may require more flexibility than current public and private cloud offerings may provide. We want to deliver a platform that allows customers to deploy workloads with the desired local control, without losing the transformational benefits of the public cloud.

We are now delivering on this new vision collaboratively with trusted local technology providers in Europe, starting with T-Systems in Germany. Today, together with T-Systems, we announced a partnership to build a Sovereign Cloud offering in Germany for private and public sector organizations. The offering will become available in mid 2022 with additional features being added over time.  

In this new joint offering, T-Systems will manage sovereignty controls and measures, including encryption and identity management of the Google Cloud Platform. In addition, as part of their offering, T-Systems will operate and independently control key parts of the Google Cloud infrastructure for T-Systems Sovereign Cloud customers in Germany.

We are committed to building trust with European governments and enterprises with a cloud that meets their digital sovereignty, sustainability and economic objectives. We are starting with T-Systems today and will continue by partnering with trusted technology providers in selected markets across the region. 

Customers in other markets across Europe will be able to use these trusted partner offerings or use Google Cloud’s controls to exercise autonomous control over data access and use; exercise choice over the infrastructure that is used to process that data; and avoid cloud vendor lock-in. 

With Google Cloud, our customers also automatically benefit from sustainable business transformation on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Today, we are the largest annual corporate purchaser of renewable energy globally, and by 2030, we aim to operate entirely on 24/7 carbon-free energy in all of our cloud regions worldwide. 

We’ll continue to listen to our customers and key stakeholders across Europe who are setting policy and helping shape requirements for customer control of data. Our goal is to make Google Cloud the best possible place for sustainable, digital transformation for European organizations on their terms—and there is much more to come.