Digital transformation is now a strategic imperative for organizations across every industry. For governments and regulated businesses, moving services to the cloud poses a unique set of challenges.

As a vital enabler of transformation, the cloud can unlock innovation and help keep pace with the accelerating pace of digital business. Unfortunately, many government agencies and firms in regulated industries don’t have the luxury of adopting new systems at will. They must deal with issues such as limited resources, lack of digital skills, and siloed operations. However, they also face cloud-specific challenges, including: 

• Data sovereignty: Regulated industries and the public sector often have concerns about the location of data, how it is protected, who else can access it, and whether it is stored in a secure location.
• Compliance: Government agencies and regulated businesses must ensure that their data and cloud use are compliant with all applicable government requirements, privacy and data protection laws, and other regulations.
• Security: Compliance is a natural component of any strong approach to security. As a result, government regulations and industry standards mandate a responsibility to secure and protect data from unauthorized access or use. 
• Cost: Every organization wants to ensure it’s getting good value for their money when using cloud computing, but especially government agencies that are more likely to be working with fixed budgets and fewer resources. 

To address the unique requirements of governments and other highly regulated organizations, some cloud providers have built separate government clouds (“GovClouds”) that run in specialized, stand-alone data centers that make it easier to meet specific requirements around data residency, personnel controls, and other government standards. However, isolated GovCloud environments come with limitations: They can restrict the ability to integrate regulated data with data from other sources, they create siloed infrastructure that can slow down access to new features and technologies, and they usually require more resources to manage and maintain, which translates into higher costs for end-users of GovCloud services.

But what if you could get the features of a government cloud — the certifications and strict controls on data residency and personnel access — on a commercial cloud? 

This is where Assured Workloads comes in. Assured Workloads is a unique Google Cloud service that allows governments and organizations from regulated industries to meet stringent compliance requirements at scale on commercial cloud infrastructure. 

What is Assured Workloads?

Assured Workloads provides a set of security controls and guardrails you can apply to your cloud environments, making it easier to achieve compliance while maintaining the advantages of a full commercial cloud. It includes features like data residency controls for specific compliance types, data and personnel access controls, and real-time monitoring for compliance violations to ensure you implement and maintain the cloud controls required by your compliance regimes. 

Check out our Best Kept Security Secrets series

• Tap into the power of Organization Policy Service
• How VPC Service Controls can help build defense in depth
• How Cloud EKM can help resolve the cloud trust paradox

Assured Workloads can make it easier for agencies and businesses in regulated sectors to meet compliance requirements by providing: 

• A secure and compliant environment: With Assured Workloads, you can create controlled environments for your regulated workloads and automatically enforce data location and resource deployment. It’s designed for customers that need to meet strict security and compliance requirements, such as the government, healthcare, and financial services sectors. 
• Broad security capabilities: Assured Workloads provides comprehensive security for your regulated workloads. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit by default and includes additional features, such as encryption key management according to your compliance regime and Identity and Access Management (IAM) for authentication, authorization, and user access management. 
• Support for multiple compliance frameworks: Assured Workloads is designed to create regulated boundaries on public cloud infrastructure that support multiple compliance frameworks across sectors, including FedRAMP, IL5, PCI DSS, SOC 2, HIPAA, and HITRUST, allowing customers to segment and label their regulated data.
• Control data residency: Assured Workloads gives you the ability to control the regions where data at rest is stored. 
• Assured support: Assured Workloads’ approach ensures only Google Cloud support personnel meeting specific geographical locations and personnel conditions support customers’ workloads.

Instead of having to configure, manage, and maintain the right controls and guardrails yourself, you select the regulatory framework you need to follow. Assured Workloads automatically configures and deploys the controls needed to help meet your requirements. 

With these specific capabilities, governments can simplify compliance configurations and monitor for violations without missing out on Google Cloud’s innovative technologies, scalability, performance, reliability, and cost savings that are hallmarks of our commercial Cloud offering. 

How it works

When you use Assured Workloads to create controlled environments in Google Cloud, you will be required to set up an Assured Workloads folder. This folder acts as the regulatory boundary to help enforce your chosen compliance framework. They are created with preconfigured platform controls, which are packaged based on the specified regulated data type, personnel controls, and data location. 

Assured Workloads automatically restricts developers to using products and services that are in-scope for your selected compliance framework. Security controls are mapped to Assured Workloads folders, so any Google Cloud resources you deploy in an Assured Workloads folder inherit the same controls. This also helps ensure that only Google Cloud personnel who meet your compliance requirements have the ability to support your resources and prevents resources from being deployed outside of compliant regions. 

Depending on your compliance regime, Assured Workloads supports several different options for encryption. You can use any Google key management service unless your compliance requirements mandate otherwise, including Cloud Key Management Service, Cloud External Key Manager, or customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK). You can also choose Google-managed keys, which provide on-by-default FIPS-validated encryption. 

Here are a few common use cases that companies are already accomplishing with Assured Workloads:

• Iron Mountain uses Assured Workloads to serve our customers’ compliance needs
• Implementing EU Data Sovereignty
• Running CJIS workloads 

However, Assured Workloads is more than a better government cloud or a tool for highly regulated businesses. Assured Workloads is a packaged solution that provides security by default and removes toil and complexity for users. Users can reduce the time and effort required to meet their compliance requirements and also improve the security of their data.

Do I need Assured Workloads? 

We believe that cloud adoption for governments, government suppliers and contractors, and other strictly regulated businesses shouldn’t have to happen in a separate, isolated cloud environment that forces tradeoffs in terms of service availability, scale, and cost. Assured Workloads is a new approach to running regulated workloads that transforms the “govcloud” into a capability that cuts down on the friction of compliance without sacrificing any of the cloud-y goodness. 

To learn more about Assured Workloads, please review these resources: 

• Getting started with Assured Workloads
• Overview of Assured Workloads

Request a free trial today and experience how Aside Assured Workloads helps you achieve compliance-based outcomes.

As sophisticated cyberattack campaigns increasingly target the U.S. public and private sectors during the COVID era, the White House and federal agencies have taken steps to protect critical infrastructure and remote-work infrastructure. These include Executive Order 14028 and the Office of Management and Budget’s Memorandum M-21-31, which recommend adopting Zero Trust policies, and span software supply chain security, cybersecurity threat management, and strengthening cyberattack detection and response.

However, implementation can be a challenge for many agencies due to cost, scalability, engineering, and a lack of resources. Meeting the requirements of the EO and OMB guidance may require technology modernization and transformational changes around workforce and business processes.

Today we are announcing Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) for the U.S. public sector, a solution framework to modernize cybersecurity analytics and threat management that’s aligned with the objectives of EO 14028 and OMB M-21-31. Powered by Google’s Chronicle and Siemplify, ASO helps agencies to comprehensively manage cybersecurity telemetry across an organization, meet the Event Logging Tier requirements of the White House guidance, and transform the scale and speed of threat detection and response. ASO can support government agencies in achieving continuous detection and continuous response so that security teams can increase their productivity, reduce detection and response time, and keep pace with – or ideally, stay ahead of – attackers.

While the focus of OMB M-21-31 is on the implementation of technical capabilities, transforming security operations will require more than just technology. Transforming processes and people in the security organization is also important for long-term success. ASO provides a more comprehensive lens through which to view the OMB event logging capability tiers, which can help drive a parallel transformation of security-operations processes and personnel.

Modern Cybersecurity Threat Detection and Response

Google provides powerful technical capabilities to help your organization achieve the requirements of M-21-31 and EO 14028:

Security Information & Event Management (SIEM) – Chronicle provides high-speed petabyte-scale analysis, and is capable of consuming log types outlined in the Event Logging (EL) tiers in a highly cost-effective manner.

Security Orchestration, Analytics, and Response (SOAR) – Siemplify offers dozens of out-of-box playbooks to deliver agile cybersecurity response and drive mission impact, including instances of automating 98% of Tier-1 alerts and driving an 80% reduction in caseload.

User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) – For agencies that want to develop their own behavioral analytics, agencies can use BigQuery, Google’s petabyte scale data lake, to store, manage, and analyze diverse data types from many sources. Telemetry can be exported out of Chronicle, and custom data pipelines can be built to import other relevant data from disparate tools and systems, such as IT Ops, HR and personnel data, and physical security data. From there, users can leverage BQML to readily generate machine learning models without needing to move the data out of BigQuery. For Google Cloud workloads, our Security Command Center Premium product offers native, turnkey UEBA across GCP workloads.

Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) – For most agencies, EDR is a heavily adopted technology that has broad applicability in Security Operations. We offer integrations to many EDR vendors. Take a look at our broad list of Chronicle integrations here.

Threat intelligence – Our solution offers a native integration with VirusTotal, has the ability to operationalize threat intelligence feeds natively in Chronicle, and integrates with various TI and TIP solutions.

Community Security Analytics

To increase collaboration across public-sector and private-sector organizations, we recently launched our Community Security Analytics (CSA) repository, where we’ve partnered with the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense, CYDERES, and others to develop open-source queries and rules that support self-service security analytics for detecting common cloud-based security threats. CSA queries are mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK® framework of tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) to help you evaluate their applicability in your environment and include them in your threat model coverage.

“Deloitte is excited to collaborate with Google Cloud on their transformational public sector Autonomic Security Operations (ASO) solution offering. Deloitte has been recognized as Google Cloud’s Global Services Partner of the Year for four consecutive years, and also as their inaugural Public Sector Partner of the Year in 2020,” said Chris Weggeman, managing director of GPS Cyber and Strategic Risk, Google Cloud Cyber Alliance Leader, Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Our deep bench of more than 1,000 Google Cloud certifications, capabilities spanning the Google Cloud security portfolio, and decades of delivery experience in the government and public sector makes us well-positioned to help our clients undertake critical Security Operations Center transformation efforts with Google Cloud ASO.”

Cost-effective for government agencies

To help Federal Agencies meet the requirements of M-21-31 and the broader EO, Google’s ASO solutions can drive efficiencies and help manage the overall costs of the transformation. ASO can make petabyte-scale data ingestion and management more viable and cost-effective. This is critical at a time when M-21-31 is requiring many agencies to ingest and manage dramatically higher volumes of data that had not been previously budgeted for.

Partners

We’re investing in key partners who can help support U.S. government agencies on this journey. Deloitte and CYDERES both have deep expertise to help transform agencies’ Security Operations capabilities, and we continue to expand our partners to support the needs of our clients. A prototypical journey can be seen below.

“Cyderes shares Google Cloud’s mission to transform security operations, and we are honored to deliver the Autonomic Security Operations solution to the U.S. public sector. As the number one MSSP in the world (according to Cyber Defense Magazine’s 2021 Top MSSPs List) with decades of advisory and technology experience detecting and responding to the world’s biggest cybersecurity threats, Cyderes is uniquely positioned to equip federal agencies and departments to go far beyond the requirements of the executive order to transform their security programs entirely via Google’s unique ASO approach,” said Robert Herjavec, CEO of CYDERES. “As an original launch partner of Google Cloud’s Chronicle, our deep expertise will propel our joint offering to modernize security operations in the public sector, all with significant cost efficiency compared to competing solutions.” said Eric Foster, President of CYDERES.

Embracing ASO

Autonomic Security Operations can help U.S. government agencies advance their event logging capabilities in alignment with OMB maturity tiers. More broadly, ASO can help the U.S. government undertake a larger transformation of technology, process, and people, toward a model of continuous threat detection and response. As such, we believe that ASO can help address a number of challenges presently facing cybersecurity teams, from the global shortage of skilled workers, to the overproliferation of security tools, to poor cybersecurity situational awareness and analyst burnout caused by an increase of data without sufficient context or tools to automate and scale detection and response.

We believe that by embracing ASO, agencies can help agencies achieve:

10x technology, through the use of cloud-native tools that help agencies meet event logging requirements in the near term, while powering a longer-term transformation in threat management;

10x process, by redesigning workflows and using automation to achieve Continuous Detection and Continuous Response in security operations;

10x people, by transforming the productivity and effectiveness of security teams and expanding their diversity; and

10x influence across the enterprise through a more collaborative and data-driven approach to solving security problems between security teams and non-security stakeholders.

To learn more about Google’s Autonomic Security Operations solution for the U.S. public sector, please read our whitepaper. More broadly, Google Cloud continues to provide leadership and support for a wide range of critical public-sector initiatives, including our work with the MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense, the membership of Google executives on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the newly established Cyber Safety Review Board; Google’s White House commitment to invest $10 billion in Zero Trust and software supply chain security, and Google Cloud’s introduction of a framework for software supply chain integrity. We look forward to working with the U.S. government to make the nation more secure.

Visit our Google Cloud for U.S. federal cybersecurity webpage.

Related posts:

Autonomic Security Operations for the U.S. Public Sector Whitepaper

“Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Reducing toil”

“Achieving Autonomic Security Operations: Automation as a Force Multiplier”

“Advancing Autonomic Security Operations: New resources for your modernization journey”

Google has long looked to Israel for globally impactful technologies including popular Search features, Waze, Live Caption, Duplex and flood forecasting. At our Decode with Google 15RAEL event last week, we celebrated 15 years of Google innovation in Israel and our longstanding support of the country’s vibrant startup ecosystem. 

Over the years, we’ve expanded our enterprise investments in the country, too. In addition to our over a decade long investment in the space, Google has acquired Israeli-based companies like Alooma, Elastifile and Velostrata, and Uri Frank joined Google Cloud last month to lead our server chip design team from our offices in Tel Aviv and Haifa. 

As we continue to meet growing demand for cloud services in Israel, we’re excited to announce that a new Google Cloud region is coming to Israel to make it easier for customers to serve their own users faster, more reliably and securely.

Our global network of Google Cloud regions are the foundation of the cloud infrastructure we’re building to support our customers. With cloud’s 25 regions and 76 zones around the world, we deliver high-performance, low-latency services and products for Google Cloud’s enterprise and public sector customers. With each new Google Cloud region, customers get access to secure infrastructure, smarter analytics tools, an open platform and the cleanest cloud in the industry. 

Having a region in Israel will help accelerate innovation for customers of all sizes, including PayBox, a digital wallet application owned by Discount Bank, one of Israel’s largest banks. “When we acquired PayBox, our goal was to improve the security and the user experience for its products, but we also wanted to keep the startup’s agility and innovation. Google Cloud has enabled us to do just that,” said Sarit Beck-Barkai, Managing Director of PayBox at Discount Bank.

“We are very excited that leading vendors like Google are investing and launching a local cloud region in Israel. This will make a significant change in the technology landscape of the public-sector, enterprise and SMB markets in Israel. Matrix is proud to be a major part of the transition to the cloud,” said Moti Gutman, CEO at Matrix, technology services company and Google Cloud partner. 

“In the last year, Panorays more than tripled its customer base and scaled its infrastructure, practically at the click of a button. Google Cloud made it easy for us to scale without worrying about DevOps, which meant that our engineers could focus on developing new and better features for our customers. The new region launching in Israel will allow us to serve our local customer base even better, as we’ll be able to experience higher availability and deploy resources in specific regions, thus reducing latency.” said Demi Ben-Ari, Co-founder and CTO, Panorays, a third-party security platform and Google Cloud customer.

“This new cloud region will provide even better access and growth potential for our mutual customers with tech hubs in the region. We are serving hyper growth companies who need Google Cloud’s services and will benefit greatly from this regional presence,” said Yoav Toussia-Cohen, CEO of DoiT International.

When it launches, the Israel region will deliver a comprehensive portfolio of Google Cloud products to private and public sector organizations locally. We look forward to welcoming you to the Israel region, and we’re excited to support your growing business on our platform. 

Learn more about our global cloud infrastructure, including new and upcoming regions, here.