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.

Headless Ecommerce

In the last couple of years there has been a shift in the way retailers approach ecommerce: where in the past development efforts were prioritized around building a solid foundation for backend transactions and operations now it is clear that companies in this space are focusing on differentiating themselves by creating unique shopping experiences that increase engagement and reduce friction. 

But how can development teams spend the necessary time designing and writing code for this kind of interactions while also having to seamlessly maintain ecommerce vital components like online catalogs, shopping carts and checkout payment processes? Enter headless commerce.  

Headless commerce (HC) helps companies of all sizes to innovate, develop and launch in less time and using fewer resources by decoupling backend and frontend. Headless solution providers empower online retailers by offering a balance between flexibility and optimization through pre-built api-accessible modules and components that can be easily plugged into their frontend architecture. This translates into rapid development while keeping desired levels of security, compliance, integration and responsiveness. 

This composable approach enables dev teams not only to create new features but also connect other ecommerce components with less effort which is critical when responding to business trends. But above all, the main benefit retailers receive from HC, is owning and controlling the frontend for an engaging customer journey as well as quickly launching new experiences.  

Google Cloud + commercetools

commercetools, a leader in the headless commerce space, has partnered with Google Cloud to make their cloud-native SaaS platform available in the Google Cloud Marketplace. With a flexible API system (REST API and GraphQL), commercetools’ architecture has been designed to meet the needs of demanding omnichannel ecommerce projects while offering real flexibility to modify or extend its features. It supports a variety of storefront providers like Vue Storefront, offers a large set of integrations and supports microservice-based architectures. All this while providing access to multiple programming languages (PHP, JS, Java) via its SDK tools. 

commercetools and Google Cloud provide development teams with all the tools to build high-quality digital commerce systems. Google Cloud’s scalability, AI/ML components, API management capabilities and CI/CD tools are a perfect fit to build frontend shopping experiences that easily integrate with the commercetools stack. Developers can take advantage of this compatibility by:

• Integrating systems with Google’s Retail Search, Recommendations AI and Vision Product Search
• Injecting serverless functions into commercetools using Google Cloud Functions
• Extending and integrating commercetools via Events handled by Pub/Sub
• Managing 3rd party, legacy, microservices and commercetools APIs with Apigee
• Selecting the Google Cloud region commercetools uses for zero latency for custom apps
• Expanding their microservice ecosystem with components like Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Firestore and BigQuery

Additionally, commercetools allows ecommerce solutions to tap into the wider Google Ecosystem by providing authoritative data via Merchant Center, advertising via product listing ads and selling via Google Shopping. 

Architecture Overview

As mentioned previously, headless commerce is increasingly preferred by retailers who want to own and control the ‘front-end’ for providing and enabling an engaging and differentiated user and shopping experiences. 

The approach involves a loosely coupled architecture that separates ‘front end’ from the ‘back end’ of a digital commerce application. The front end is typically built and managed by the retailer. They want to leverage an independent software vendor (ISV) offered, ready-to-use ‘back-end’ commerce building blocks for capabilities, such as product catalog, pricing, promotions, cart, shipping, account and others.

Most retailers want to invest their time and resources in building a front end that requires an agile development model to introduce new and tweaking existing user experiences to acquire and retain customers. A few retailers that do not have an in-house web development team may choose an ISV that offers ready to use front end. The front end is a web app and designed as a progressive web application (PWA) on Google Cloud. The backend is a headless commerce offered by an ISV, such as commercetools. The backend commerce capabilities are built as a set of microservices, exposed as APIs, run cloud-native and implemented as headless. It is commonly referred to as the  “MACH” solution. The API-first approach of the architecture allows easily integrating ‘best of breed’ capabilities built internally and/or offered by 3rd party ISVs.

Leveraging Google Cloud Components

The architecture of the front end will be implemented on Google Cloud and will integrate with the ISV’s headless commerce back end that runs natively in Google Cloud. 

The front end will be designed using cloud-native services for 

• PWA web app development (Google Kubernetes Engine, CI/CD services), 
• Google Product Discovery solution that includes Retail Search and Vision API Product Search for serving product search (text and image) and Recommendations AI for serving recommendations.
• Storage (Cloud Storage), Database (Cloud SQL, Cloud Firestore), and edge caching for content delivery (Cloud CDN) 
• Networking (Cloud DNS,  Global Load Balancing), and 
• Security (Cloud Armor for DDoS, API Defense for API protection) 

Additionally, API management (Apigee on Google Cloud) can be used to orchestrate interactions of the front end with the APIs of the backend commerce services. The API management’s capability will be used for accessing the services of on-premises systems, such as ERP, order management system (OMS), warehouse management system (WMS) as needed to support the functioning of digital commerce application.  Alternatively, depending on the frontend capabilities, developers can use middleware to build custom services and route requests. 

What’s next?

A considerable number of retailers have adopted headless commerce and are now focusing on adopting best practices and leveraging the agility that comes with this approach. Just like commercetools offers robust components that meet the retailer’s backend operational needs (Product Catalog, Order Management, Carts, Payments, etc), Google Cloud’s Compute, Networking, Severless and AI/ML services  provide the agility and flexibility required by development teams to quickly and easily extend their frontend capabilities. 

commercetools and Google Cloud work seamlessly together because they both prioritize ease of integration, scalability, security and iterability while providing ready-to-use building blocks. It also helps that commercetools backend runs on Google Cloud. Once an initial foundation of Google Cloud and commercetools has been established, adding new commerce modules and extending functionally of the current ones becomes a straightforward process that allows to route efforts to innovation initiatives. In the end, the main beneficiaries of this technical synergy are the shoppers that enjoy experiences which increase engagement and minimize friction. 

Alternatively, retailers can also save time and resources by relying on frontend integrations. commercetools offers a variety of third-party solutions that can effortlessly be added to a headless commerce architecture. These integrations as well as other important headless commerce extensions will be explored in future blog entries.  In the meantime, all the necessary tools to leverage headless commerce can be found in just one place: 

Get started with commercetools on the Google Cloud Marketplace today!

In an industry as highly regulated as healthcare, building a single secure and compliant application that tracks patient care and appointments at a clinic requires a great deal of planning from development and security teams. So, imagine what it would be like to build a solution that includes almost everything related to a patient’s healthcare, including insurance and billing. That’s what Highmark Health (Highmark)—a U.S. health and wellness organization that provides millions of customers with health insurance plans, a physician and hospital network, and a diverse portfolio of businesses–decided to do. 

Highmark is developing a solution called Living Health to re-imagine healthcare delivery, and it is using Google Cloud and the Google Cloud Professional Services Organization (PSO) to build and maintain the innovation platform supporting this forward thinking experience. Considering all the personal information that different parties like insurers, specialists, billers and coders, clinics, and hospitals share, Highmark must build security and compliance into every part of the solution. 

In this blog, we look at how Highmark Health and Google are using a technique called “secure-by-design” to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of bringing Living Health to life.

Secure-by-design: Preventive care for development

In healthcare, preventing an illness or condition is the ideal outcome. Preventive care often involves early intervention—a course of ideas and actions to ward off illness, permanent injury, and so on. Interestingly, when developing a groundbreaking delivery model like Living Health, it’s a good idea to take the same approach to security, privacy, and compliance. 

That’s why Highmark’s security and technology teams worked with their Google Cloud PSO team to implement secure-by-design for every step of design, development, and operations. Security is built into the entire development process rather than waiting until after implementation to reactively secure the platform or remediate security gaps. 

It’s analogous to choosing the right brakes for a car before it rolls off the assembly line instead of having an inspector shut down production because the car failed its safety tests. The key aspect of secure-by-design is an underlying application architecture created from foundational building blocks that sit on top of a secure cloud infrastructure. Secure-by-design works to ensure that these building blocks are secure and compliant before moving on to development.

The entire approach requires security, development, and cloud teams to work together with other stakeholders. Most importantly, it requires a cloud partner, cloud services, and a cloud infrastructure that can support it. 

Finding the right cloud and services for secure-by-design 

Highmark chose Google Cloud because of its leadership in analytics, infrastructure services, and platform as a service. In addition, Google Cloud has made strategic investments in healthcare interoperability and innovation, which was another key reason Highmark decided to work with Google. As a result, Highmark felt that Google Cloud and the Google Cloud PSO were best suited for delivering on the vision of Living Health—its security and its outcomes. 

“Google takes security more seriously than the other providers we considered, which is very important to an organization like us. Cloud applications and infrastructure for healthcare must be secure and compliant,” explains Highmark Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Omar Khawaja. 

Forming a foundation for security and compliance

How does security-by-design with services work? It starts with the creation and securing of the foundational platform, allowing teams to harden and enforce specified security controls. It’s a collaborative process that starts with input from cross-functional teams—not just technology teams—using terms they understand, so that everyone has a stake in the design. 

A strong data governance and protection program classifies and segments workloads based on risk and sensitivity. Teams build multiple layers of defense into the foundational layers to mitigate against key industry risks. Google managed services such as VPC Service Controls help prevent unauthorized access. Automated controls such as those in Data Loss Prevention help teams quickly classify data and identify and respond to potential sources of data risk. Automation capabilities help ensure that security policies are enforced.

After the foundational work is done, it’s time to assess and apply security controls to the different building blocks, which are Google Cloud services such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, and Google Cloud Storage. The goal is to make sure that these and similar building blocks, or any combination of them, do not introduce additional risks and to ensure any identified risks are remediated or mitigated. 

Enabling use cases, step by step

After the foundational security is established, the security-by-design program enables the Google Cloud services that developers then use to build use cases that form Living Health. The service enablement approach allows Highmark to address complexity by providing the controls most relevant for each individual service. 

For each service, the teams begin by determining the risks and the controls that can reduce them. The next step is enforcing preventive and detective controls across various tools. After validation, technical teams can be granted an authorization to operate, also called an ATO. An ATO authorizes the service for development in a use case.

For use cases with greater data sensitivity, the Highmark teams validate the recommended security controls with an external trust assessor, who uses the HITRUST Common Security Framework, which maps to certifications and compliance such as HIPAA, NIST, GDPR, and more. A certification process follows that can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. In addition to certification, there is ongoing monitoring of the environment for events, behavior, control effectiveness, and control lapses or any deviation from the controls.

The approach simplifies compliance for developers by abstracting compliance requirements away. The process provides developers a set of security requirements written in the language of the cloud, rather than in the language of compliance, providing more prescriptive guidance as they build solutions. Through the secure-by-design program, the Highmark technology and security teams, Google, the business, and the third-party trust assessor all contribute to a secure foundation for any architectural design with enabled Google Cloud services as building blocks. 

Beating the learning curve 

Thanks to the Living Health project, the Highmark technology and security teams are trying new methods. They are exploring new tools for building secure applications in the cloud. They are paying close attention to processes and the use case steps and, when necessary, aligning different teams to execute. Because everyone is working together collaboratively toward a shared goal, teams are delivering more things on time and with predictability, which has reduced volatility and surprises. 

The secrets to success: Bringing everyone to the table early and with humility

Together, Highmark and Google Cloud PSO have created over 24 secure-by-design building blocks by bringing everyone to the table early and relying on thoughtful, honest communication. Input for the architecture design produced for Highmark came from privacy teams, legal teams, security teams, and the teams that are building the applications. And that degree of collaboration ultimately leads to a much better product because everyone has a shared sense of responsibility and ownership of what was built. 

Delivering a highly complex solution like Living Health takes significant, more purposeful communication and execution. It is also important to be honest and humble. The security, technology, and Google teams have learned to admit when something isn’t working and to ask for help or ideas for a solution. The teams are also able to accept that they don’t have all the answers, and that they need to figure out solutions by experimenting. Khawaja puts it simply, “That level of humility has been really important and enabled us to have the successes that we’ve had. And hopefully that’ll be something that we continue to retain in our DNA.”

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.