With insights directing the bulk of today’s marketing decisions, leading marketers are driving growth by embracing three core mindset shifts. Marketing leaders are working toward a holistic view of consumers; they are investing in machine learning to support their activities; and they believe how they apply their data is crucial to success. Google partnered with MIT Sloan Management Review and MIT Technology Review for a deeper dive into the mindsets around these beliefs. Here’s what we found.

1. Leading marketers are working toward a holistic view of consumers.

• 63% of leading marketers agree they are using KPIs to develop a single integrated view of the customer.

• 66% of leading marketers agree they should build teams for end-to-end customer experiences and journeys, across channels and devices.

• Marketing leaders are 60% more likely than laggards to believe that marketing teams should own a data-driven customer strategy that supports all organizational stakeholders.

2.  Leading marketers are investing in machine learning to support their activities.

• Measurement-leaders are more than 2X as likely as their measurement-challenged counterparts to agree that their organization is already investing in automation and machine learning technologies to drive marketing activities.

• 75% of marketers who use machine learning to drive marketing activities said they were satisfied with how their KPIs inform and influence decision-making across their enterprise.

• 73% of marketing leaders who have invested in machine learning have shifted more than 10% of their time from manual activation to strategic insight generation.

3. Leading marketers believe how they apply their data is crucial to success.

• 66% of marketing leaders believe how companies apply their data will play a key role in their ability to thrive.

• 60% of leading marketers believe data-driven attribution is essential to understanding journeys of high-value customers.

• Marketing leaders are 53% more likely than laggards to say machine learning processes data signals to help marketers better understand consumer intent.

There are a number of terms and concepts in cloud computing, and not everyone is familiar with all of them. To help, we’ve put together a list of common questions, and the meanings of a few of those acronyms. You can find all these, and many more, in our learning resources.

What are containers?

Containers are packages of software that contain all of the necessary elements to run in any environment. In this way, containers virtualize the operating system and run anywhere, from a private data center to the public cloud or even on a developer’s personal laptop. Containerization allows development teams to move fast, deploy software efficiently, and operate at an unprecedented scale. Read more.

Containers vs. VMs: What’s the difference?

You might already be familiar with VMs: a guest operating system such as Linux or Windows runs on top of a host operating system with access to the underlying hardware. Containers are often compared to virtual machines (VMs). Like virtual machines, containers allow you to package your application together with libraries and other dependencies, providing isolated environments for running your software services. However, the similarities end here as containers offer a far more lightweight unit for developers and IT Ops teams to work with, carrying a myriad of benefits. Containers are much more lightweight than VMs, virtualize at the OS level while VMs virtualize at the hardware level, and share the OS kernel and use a fraction of the memory VMs require. Read more.

What is Kubernetes?

With the widespread adoption of containers among organizations, Kubernetes, the container-centric management software, has become the de facto standard to deploy and operate containerized applications. Google Cloud is the birthplace of Kubernetes—originally developed at Google and released as open source in 2014. Kubernetes builds on 15 years of running Google’s containerized workloads and the valuable contributions from the open source community. Inspired by Google’s internal cluster management system, Borg, Kubernetes makes everything associated with deploying and managing your application easier. Providing automated container orchestration, Kubernetes improves your reliability and reduces the time and resources attributed to daily operations. Read more.

What is microservices architecture?

Microservices architecture (often shortened to microservices) refers to an architectural style for developing applications. Microservices allow a large application to be separated into smaller independent parts, with each part having its own realm of responsibility. To serve a single user request, a microservices-based application can call on many internal microservices to compose its response. Containers are a well-suited microservices architecture example, since they let you focus on developing the services without worrying about the dependencies. Modern cloud-native applications are usually built as microservices using containers. Read more.

What is ETL?

ETL stands for extract, transform, and load and is a traditionally accepted way for organizations to combine data from multiple systems into a single database, data store, data warehouse, or data lake. ETL can be used to store legacy data, or—as is more typical today—aggregate data to analyze and drive business decisions. Organizations have been using ETL for decades. But what’s new is that both the sources of data, as well as the target databases, are now moving to the cloud. Additionally, we’re seeing the emergence of streaming ETL pipelines, which are now unified alongside batch pipelines—that is, pipelines handling continuous streams of data in real time versus data handled in aggregate batches. Some enterprises run continuous streaming processes with batch backfill or reprocessing pipelines woven into the mix. Read more.

What is a data lake?

A data lake is a centralized repository designed to store, process, and secure large amounts of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data. It can store data in its native format and process any variety of it, ignoring size limits. Read more.

What is a data warehouse?

Data-driven companies require robust solutions for managing and analyzing large quantities of data across their organizations. These systems must be scalable, reliable, and secure enough for regulated industries, as well as flexible enough to support a wide variety of data types and use cases. The requirements go way beyond the capabilities of any traditional database. That’s where the data warehouse comes in. A data warehouse is an enterprise system used for the analysis and reporting of structured and semi-structured data from multiple sources, such as point-of-sale transactions, marketing automation, customer relationship management, and more. A data warehouse is suited for ad hoc analysis as well custom reporting and can store both current and historical data in one place. It is designed to give a long-range view of data over time, making it a primary component of business intelligence. Read more.

What is streaming analytics?

Streaming analytics is the processing and analyzing of data records continuously rather than in batches. Generally, streaming analytics is useful for the types of data sources that send data in small sizes (often in kilobytes) in a continuous flow as the data is generated. Read more.

What is machine learning (ML)?

Today’s enterprises are bombarded with data. To drive better business decisions, they have to make sense of it. But the sheer volume coupled with complexity makes data difficult to analyze using traditional tools. Building, testing, iterating, and deploying analytical models for identifying patterns and insights in data eats up employees’ time. Then after being deployed, such models also have to be monitored and continually adjusted as the market situation or the data itself changes. Machine learning is the solution. Machine learning allows businesses to enable the data to teach the system how to solve the problem at hand with machine learning algorithms—and how to get better over time. Read more.

What is natural language processing (NLP)?

Natural language processing (NLP) uses machine learning to reveal the structure and meaning of text. With natural language processing applications, organizations can analyze text and extract information about people, places, and events to better understand social media sentiment and customer conversations. Read more.

Learn more

This is just a sampling of frequently asked questions about cloud computing. To learn more, visit our resources page at cloud.google.com/learn.

At Google Cloud, we continue to invest in key technologies to progress towards our true north star on invisible security: making strong security pervasive and simple for everyone. Our investments are based on insights from our world-class threat intelligence teams and experience helping customers respond to the most sophisticated cyberattacks. Customers can tap into these capabilities to gain perspective and visibility on the most dangerous threat actors that no one else has. 

Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), accelerate our ability to help the people who are responsible for keeping their organizations safe. These new models not only give people a more natural and creative way to understand and manage security, they give people access to AI-powered expertise to go beyond what they could do alone. 

At the RSA Conference 2023, we are excited to announce Google Cloud Security AI Workbench, an industry-first extensible platform powered by a specialized, security LLM, Sec-PaLM. This new security model is fine-tuned for security use cases, incorporating our unsurpassed security intelligence such as Google’s visibility into the threat landscape and Mandiant’s frontline intelligence on vulnerabilities, malware, threat indicators, and behavioral threat actor profiles. 

Google Cloud Security AI Workbench powers new offerings that can now uniquely address three top security challenges: threat overload, toilsome tools, and the talent gap. It will also feature partner plug-in integrations to bring threat intelligence, workflow, and other critical security functionality to customers, with Accenture being the first partner to utilize Security AI Workbench. 

The platform will also let customers make their private data available to the platform at inference time; ensuring we honor all our data privacy commitments to customers. Because Security AI Workbench is built on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI infrastructure, customers control their data with enterprise-grade capabilities such as data isolation, data protection, sovereignty, and compliance support. 

Preventing threats from spreading beyond the first infection

We already provide best-in-class capabilities to help organizations immediately respond to threats. But what if we could not just identify and contain initial infections, but also help prevent them from happening anywhere else? With our AI advances, we can now combine world class threat intelligence with point-in-time incident analysis and novel AI-based detections and analytics to help prevent new infections. These advances are critical to help counter a potential surge in adversarial attacks that use machine learning and generative AI systems. That’s why we’re excited to introduce:  

• VirusTotal Code Insight uses Sec-PaLM to help analyze and explain the behavior of potentially malicious scripts, and will be able to better detect which scripts are actually threats. 
• Mandiant Breach Analytics for Chronicle leverages Google Cloud and Mandiant Threat Intelligence to automatically alert you to active breaches in your environment. It will use Sec-PaLM to help contextualize and respond instantly to these critical findings.

These new updates build on the existing AI in Google’s industry-leading solutions. For example, Chronicle Security Operations already uses frontline intelligence, integrated reasoning, and machine learning to identify initial infections, prioritize impact, and contain threats. Another example is reCAPTCHA Enterprise, which uses image noising capabilities to help protect your site from adversaries that leverage novel AI advances, greatly enhancing our defenses against bots. 

Adding intelligence to reduce toil

At Google Cloud, we help organizations modernize security wherever they are, in part by simplifying their security tools and controls whenever possible. Advances in generative AI can help reduce the number of tools organizations need to secure their vast attack surface areas and ultimately, empower systems to secure themselves. This will minimize the toil it takes to manage multiple environments, to generate security design and capabilities, and to generate security controls. Today, we’re announcing: 

• Assured OSS will use LLMs to help us add even more open-source software (OSS) packages to our OSS vulnerability management solution, which offers the same curated and vulnerability-tested packages that we use at Google.
• Mandiant Threat Intelligence AI, built on top of Mandiant’s massive threat graph, will leverage Sec-PaLM to quickly find, summarize, and act on threats relevant to your organization. 

These announcements build on existing capabilities that help customers centralize visibility and control, detect targets, and improve security across their platform. For example, Security Command Center (SCC) uses always-on machine learning to detect malicious scripts executing in the customer container environment and immediately alert the customer. In addition, Cloud Data Loss Prevention leverages machine learning to find and classify data, and with Confidential Computing you can collaborate on, train, and deploy sensitive and regulated AI models in the cloud, all while preserving confidentiality. 

Evolving how practitioners do security to close the talent gap 

At Google, we believe that to truly democratize security, we need to first acknowledge that AI will soon usher in a new era for security expertise that will profoundly impact how practitioners “do” security. Most people who are responsible for security — developers, system administrators, SRE, even junior analysts — are not security specialists by training. 

Imagine a world where novices and security experts are paired with AI expertise to free themselves from repetition and burnout, and accomplish tasks that seem impossible to us today. To help power this evolution, we’re embedding Sec-PaLM-based features that can make security more understandable while helping to improve effectiveness with exciting new capabilities in two of our solutions: 

• Chronicle AI: Chronicle customers will be able to search billions of security events and interact conversationally with the results, ask follow-up questions, and quickly generate detections, all without learning a new syntax or schema.
• Security Command Center AI: Security Command Center will translate complex attack graphs to human-readable explanations of attack exposure, including impacted assets and recommended mitigations. It will also provide AI-powered risk summaries for security, compliance, and privacy findings for Google Cloud.

These new releases bolster our existing efforts to tackle these issues through capabilities like IAM Recommender, which suggests permissions better suited to actual usage patterns. We will soon be augmenting this capability to cover organizational policies, further enabling the administrator to help improve the security posture of their organization. In addition, Mandiant Automated Defense applies machine learning to help reduce the repetitive Tier 1 alert triage problem and address alert fatigue. 

Offering availability 

VirusTotal Code Insight, available now in Preview, is our first example of putting Security AI Workbench to work for our customers. We will be rolling out other offerings to trusted testers in coming months, and they will be available in Preview more broadly this summer. Click here for the demo. 

Security AI Workbench, including Sec-PaLM and partner integrations, in addition to the product innovations described in our demo, are all building blocks for a larger effort to elevate security across the ecosystem. So far, that effort: 

• Provides assistive functions to rapidly develop IT generalist talent to Tier 1 security operator status in a way that wasn’t previously feasible. Security Command Center now can summarize threat intelligence insights and findings for Google Cloud, and Chronicle can quickly generate YARA-L rules or other detections. 
• Provides advanced functions such as iterative query and multivariate detection generation, conversational filtering and interaction with results, and smart case awareness to empower advanced Tier 2 and 3 security operators to focus on threat analysis instead of struggling with process and toil. Mandiant Threat Intelligence users now can elevate their core competencies to hunt, investigate, and remediate threats — using the same tools our own Mandiant experts use. 
• Fuses threat intelligence and AI-based analytic capabilities, which are unsurpassed in the market. VirusTotal Code Insight enables security teams to help gain insights and identify threats in suspicious code. This can significantly enhance their ability to detect and mitigate potential attacks.

However, this is just an initial step. We’ll continue to iterate and innovate, and we encourage customers and partners to leverage Security AI Workbench in new and exciting ways. Moving forward, we anticipate many new use cases to emerge over time. 

Building a safer future

While generative AI has recently captured the imagination, Sec-PaLM is based on years of foundational AI research by Google and DeepMind, and the deep expertise of our security teams. This work includes new efforts to expand our partner ecosystem to provide businesses with security capabilities at every layer of the cybersecurity stack. We have only just begun to realize the power of applying generative AI to security, and we look forward to continuing to leverage this expertise for our customers and drive advancements across the security community.

Without AI, you’re not getting the most out of your data.
Without data, you risk stale, out-of-date, suboptimal models.

But most companies are still struggling with how to keep these highly interdependent technologies in sync and operationalize AI to take meaningful action from data.

We’ve learned from Google’s years of experience in AI development how to make data-to-AI workflows as cohesive as possible and as a result our data cloud is the most complete and unified data and AI solution provider in the market. By bridging data and AI, data analysts can take advantage of user-friendly, accessible ML tools, and data scientists can get the most out of their organization’s data. All of this comes together with built-in MLOps to ensure all AI work — across teams — is ready for production use.

In this blog we’ll show you how all of this works, including exciting announcements from the Data Cloud Summit:

Vertex AI Workbench is now GA bringing together Google Cloud’s data and ML systems into a single interface so that teams have a common toolset across data analytics, data science, and machine learning. With native integrations across BigQuery, Spark, Dataproc, and Dataplex data scientists can build, train and deploy ML models 5X faster than traditional notebooks.

Introducing Vertex AI Model Registry, a central repository to manage and govern the lifecycle of your ML models. Designed to work with any type of model and deployment target, including BigQuery ML, Vertex AI Model Registry makes it easy to manage and deploy models.

Use ML to get the most out of your data, no matter the format
Analyzing structured data in a data warehouse, like using SQL in BigQuery, is the bread and butter for many data analysts. Once you have data in a database, you can see trends, generate reports, and get a better sense of your business. Unfortunately, a lot of useful business data isn’t in the tidy tabular format of rows and columns. It’s often spread out over multiple locations and in different formats, frequently as so-called “unstructured data” — images, videos, audio transcripts, PDFs — can be cumbersome and difficult to work with.

Here, AI can help. ML models can be used to transcribe audio and videos, analyze language, and extract text from images—that is, to translate elements of unstructured data into a form that can be stored and queried in a database like BigQuery. Google Cloud’s Document AI platform, for example, uses ML to understand documents like forms and contracts. Below, you can see how this platform is able to intelligently extract structured text data from an unstructured document like a resume. Once this data is extracted, it can be stored in a data warehouse like BigQuery.

Bring machine learning to data analysts via familiar tools

Today, one of the biggest barriers to ML is that the tools and frameworks needed to do ML are new and unfamiliar. But this doesn’t have to be the case. BigQuery ML, for example, allows you to train sophisticated ML models at scale using SQL code, directly from within BigQuery. Bringing ML to your data warehouse alleviates the complexities of setting up additional infrastructure and writing model code. Anyone who can write SQL code can train a ML model quickly and easily.

Easily access data with a unified notebook interface

One of the most popular ML interfaces today are notebooks: interactive environments that allow you to write code, visualize and pre-process data, train models, and a whole lot more. Data scientists often spend most of their day building models within notebook environments. It’s crucial, then, that notebook environments have access to all of the data that makes your organization run, including tools that make that data easy to work with.

Vertex AI Workbench, now generally available, is the single development environment for the entire data science workflow. Integrations across Google Cloud’s data portfolio allow you to natively analyze your data without switching between services:

Cloud Storage: access unstructured data

BigQuery: access data with SQL, take advantage of models trained with BigQuery ML

Dataproc: execute your notebook using your Dataproc cluster for control

Spark: transform and prepare data with autoscaling serverless Spark

Below, you’ll see how you can easily run a SQL query on BigQuery data with Vertex AI Workbench.

But what happens after you’ve trained the model? How can both data analysts and data scientists make sure their models can be utilized by application developers and maintained over time?

Go from prototyping to production with MLOps

While training accurate models is important, getting those models to be scalable, resilient, and accurate in production is its own art, known as MLOps. MLOps allow you to:

• Know what data your models are trained on
• Monitor models in production
• Make training process repeatable
• Serve and scale model predictions
• A whole lot more! (See the “Practitioners Guide to MLOps” whitepaper for a full and detailed overview of MLOps)

Built-in MLOps tools within Vertex AI’s unified platform remove the complexity of model maintenance. Practical tools can help with everything from training and hosting ML models, managing model metadata, governance, model monitoring, and running pipelines – all critical aspects of running ML in production and at scale.

And now, we’re extending our capabilities to make MLOps accessible to anyone working with ML in your organization.

Easy handoff to MLOps with Vertex AI Model Registry

Today, we’re announcing Vertex AI Model Registry, a central repository that allows you to register, organize, track, and version trained ML models and is designed to work with any type of model and deployment target, whether that’s through BigQuery, Vertex AI, AutoML, custom deployments on GCP or even out of the cloud.

Vertex AI Model Registry is particularly beneficial for BigQuery ML. While BigQuery ML brings the powerful scalability of BigQuery for batch predictions, using a data warehouse engine for real-time predictions just isn’t practical. Furthermore, you might start to wonder how to orchestrate your ML workflows based in BigQuery. You can now discover and manage BigQuery ML models and easily deploy those models to Vertex AI for real-time predictions and MLOps tools.

End-to-End MLOps with pipelines

One of the most popular approaches to MLOps is the concept of ML pipelines: where each distinct step in your ML workflow from data preparation to model training and deployment are automated for sharing and reliably reproducing.

Vertex AI Pipelines is a serverless tool for orchestrating ML tasks using pre-built components or your own custom code. Now, you can easily process data and train models with BigQuery, BigQuery ML, and Dataproc directly within a pipeline. With this capability, you can combine familiar ML development within BigQuery and Dataproc into reproducible, resilient pipelines and orchestrate your ML workflows faster than ever.

See an example of how this works with the new BigQuery and BigQuery ML components.

Learn more and get started

We’re excited to share more about our unified data and AI offering today at the Data Cloud Summit. Please join us for the spotlight session on our “AI/ML strategy and product roadmap” or the “AI/ML notebooks ‘how to’ session.”

And if you’re ready to get hands on with Vertex AI, check out these resources:

Codelab: Training an AutoML model in Vertex AI

Codelab: Intro to Vertex AI Workbench

Video Series: AI Simplified: Vertex AI

GitHub: Example Notebooks

Training: Vertex AI: Qwik Start