IT Leaders are Prioritizing Organizations’ Sustainability Goals: Study Finds
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The global-wide interruptions of the coronavirus pandemic provided the opportunity for businesses to take a closer look at how we work, learn, live, and consume. With work stoppages and quarantine orders in place, carbon emissions and pollution levels saw significant reductions, highlighting how business and environmental sustainability are linked. As the world returns to work, businesses need to adjust to the new reality and make decisions that will ensure the continuing sustainability of our planet.
Understanding the need for sustainability
A recent Google-commissioned study by IDG, based on a global survey of more than 2,000 IT decision-makers, illustrated the importance of sustainability for organizations’ IT departments while also revealing that significant work is needed before businesses meet their sustainability goals. The good news is that ninety percent say that sustainability is a priority of their IT department and as more organizations consider the benefits of digital transformation and cloud migration, 75% report that sustainability is a “must-have” or “major consideration” when evaluating cloud providers.LEARN MOREIT Leaders Research ReportWhat are the biggest IT priorities in 2021? Explore insights from a survey of 2,000 Senior IT leaders conducted by IDG, in collaboration with Google Cloud.
Businesses face both internal and external pressures to reform their practices and processes to meet new targets around sustainability, and IT leaders have an important role to play in that effort. Specifically, 54% said sustainability initiatives were important to their companies because of corporate social responsibility, 46% said it was because of environmental regulations and mandates, and 40% said it was due to the climate change impacts.
The research also examined the areas where IT leaders are looking to make positive changes for sustainability in their organizations. Not surprisingly, 62% said in their IT infrastructure and data centers, 53% their supply chain, and 46% in their facilities and building operations.
Facing the obstacles to progress
However, for many organizations, behaviors lag intent. Only 67% actually have environmental sustainability targets in place. The gap between behavior and intent widens when looking at digitally forward vs. digitally conservative organizations. For the purposes of the study, digitally forward companies were defined as either digital natives or those with a digital strategy and implementation in place. Digitally conservative organizations either have no strategy in place, or are in the process of considering or planning digital transformations, but haven’t reached the stage of implementation.
The study revealed that digital natives embracing cloud solutions were more likely than more conservative organizations to demonstrate a commitment to sustainability. Twenty percent of digital natives are implementing IT initiatives to reduce emissions to become more environmentally sustainable, while only 10% of digitally conservative organizations have done so.
When considering the effects of the COVID-10 pandemic, 20% of respondents from digital conservative organizations delayed or cancelled initiatives around reducing emissions to become more environmentally sustainable compared to only 12% for digitally forward respondents.
Sustainability is in our DNA
Sustainability has been a core value for Google since our inception. We were the first major company to become carbon neutral in 2007 and we were the first major company to match our energy use with 100 percent renewable energy in 2017 — and have continued to do so every year since. We are proud to operate the cleanest global cloud in the industry, and we’re the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy. It is this commitment that makes Google the leading choice for organizations with sustainability initiatives.
To learn more about the IDG findings and how IT leaders are implementing sustainable solutions, download the full report.
Interested in how Google Cloud’s commitment to providing sustainable solutions can help IT leaders and their organizations meet their own sustainability targets?
Google is focused on enhancing our products to help billions of people take action to reduce their environmental footprint.
- Google creates tools and invests in technology that will foster a carbon-free future for everyone and reduce carbon footprints.
- Google Cloud is the only major cloud provider to purchase enough renewable energy to cover our entire operations, enabling us to operate the cleanest cloud in the industry.
- When running on Google Cloud, an organization’s usage is net carbon neutral, and the electricity used to power workloads is matched 100% with renewable energy.
Looking for more? Check out our blog that introduces the Google Cloud Region Picker, which helps organizations choose a Google Cloud region based on carbon footprint, price, and latency.
Latest Update: Keep Your Accounts Secure with Sensitive Actions
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At Google Cloud, we operate in a shared fate model, working in concert with our customers to help achieve stronger security outcomes. One of the ways we do this is to identify potentially risky behavior to help customers determine if action is appropriate. To this end, we now provide insights on what we are calling Sensitive Actions.
Sensitive Actions, now available in Preview, are focused on understanding IAM account, or user account, behavior. They are changes made in a Google Cloud environment that are security relevant — and therefore important to be aware of and evaluate — because they may be precursors to an attack, an effort to make other attacks possible, or part of an effort to monetize a compromised account. They can quickly highlight potentially malicious activities that are facilitated by authentication cookie theft, and are another defense-in-depth mechanism that Google Cloud offers to help address this attack vector.
The Sensitive Actions that are detected today will appear in two places. They are available in Security Command Center Premium, the primary source for security and risk alerts in Google Cloud, as Observations from the Sensitive Actions Service. They are also available in Cloud Logging, where we recommend that customers integrate them into their monitoring workflows.
Sensitive Actions include the following list of action names (mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK tactics that these actions may correspond to) and descriptions:
To ensure that adversaries do not have mechanisms to disable this protection or hide logs from users, Sensitive Actions is an on-by-default service now enabled for Cloud customers. In cases where customers have certain privacy controls or policy restrictions applied to their logging pipeline, their logs will not be analyzed by this service.
You can learn more about Sensitive Actions and our overall recommendations for keeping your account secure by visiting our documentation here.
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Three Lesser-Known Ways to Protect Your Customers and Business From Phishing and Fraud
Your users are critical to your business, and you need security controls to keep them — and your business — safe. Built from years of Google Cloud technology and experience, these security features focus on keeping users safe on the web.
You can reduce online fraud (chargebacks, hijackings, and abuse) with reCAPTCHA Enterprise, help protect your customers from phishing sites with Phishing Protection, and detect malicious links with the Web Risk API.
Fight Fraud: Fraudulent web activities cost enterprises billions of dollars each year. Security teams need to keep the bad actors out of their websites and ensure that their customers can always get in. reCAPTCHA has been defending millions of sites for almost a decade, and the reCAPTCHA Enterprise service builds on this technology with capabilities designed specifically for enterprise security concerns.
Combat Phishing: The majority of cyber attacks begin with phishing emails and websites. Attackers use many tricks, including by leveraging enterprise brand assets, such as company names and logos, to develop phishing websites that appear authentic and lure internet users to enter valuable information such as user names and passwords. Phishing Protection helps prevent users from accessing phishing sites by identifying various signals associated with malicious content.
Watch the video to find out how the third method and what impact it can create on your organization.
Google Announces New Cloud Region in Israel to Meet Growing Customer Demands
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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.
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A Security Practitioners Guide to Best Practice GCP Security
Building secure services using GCP is easy, when you know all the tools available to you. Selecting the right services and configurations to meet your security needs requires you to know your tools.
In this practical session, you will go beyond the theory, and will go through best practices for securing GCP using examples, real-world customer scenarios and practical tips and advice.
The video covers the breadth of offerings available to you, and recommend how you can use them to meet your security needs. We aim for you to leave with new ideas for securing your GCP environment that you can put into practice immediately.
DueDil Chooses Apigee to Leverage APIs for Customers’ Risk Monitoring with Better Insights
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As their name reflects, DueDil provides due diligence services ranging from customer-specific risk evaluations and selections to customer onboarding and real-time risk monitoring for leading financial services, high-growth tech and insurance companies. Founded in 2009, the company helps more than 3,000 enterprise users from over 400 clients to not only understand with whom they’re doing business, but to do so with increased efficiency and in compliance with regulatory requirements.
Due diligence services have evolved in recent years, both because of new regulations and new technologies supplanting legacy systems and processes, many of which relied until recently on pen-and-paper workflows or exhaustive spreadsheet work. DueDil knew this technology transformation represented an opportunity to replace manual processes with automation–but it also recognized a second opportunity: to not merely process data but also activate it by connecting information in disparate IT systems and generating data-driven insights delivered at scale.
To capitalize on this opportunity, the company built its Business Information Graph, or B.I.G., a platform that maps approximately 300 million connections among companies. B.I.G. ingests billions of data points, and is refreshed multiple times per day, to surface unique insights about business’s relationships, such as fraud risks. The results that B.I.G. drives often speak for themselves: some DueDil customers onboard partners up to 80% faster, perform risk verification up to 18 times faster, and reduce time spent on manual portfolio checks by up to 80%.
What powers all of this transformation? Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
“From a go-to-market standpoint, our product is an API,” said Denis Dorval, DueDil COO, in a recent webcast, explaining that customers can directly tap B.I.G.’s resources for themselves, and build atop them for their own needs, via DueDil’s API.
Choosing an API management platform to deliver fast, secure, and scalable APIs
To execute on their vision of connecting B2B ecosystems for better insights and efficiency, DueDil looked for a cloud provider that could fulfill several specific criteria. They needed robust management for the APIs with which their internal developers leverage different systems for new use cases and process automations, as well as for the productized API they offer to customers. They needed sophisticated analytics and abundant processing power to crunch through billions of data points. And, they needed enterprise-grade security, scalability, and agility to underpin it all. Last but not least, the company prioritized a smooth transition; DueDil did not want the user experience to suffer as it switched providers.
“The stability of Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and the strength of its services stood out”, said DueDil’s Engineering Manager, Robert Cicero.
“Apigee is a resilient and agile platform, fulfilling our need to build APIs quickly, safely, and at scale,” he remarked, noting that he appreciated that many of Apigee’s API security defense tools and policies work out-of-the-box. For instance, Apigee’s JSON threat detection policies, custom policies, and authentication and authorization processes can be deployed instantly and add minimal latency, meaning DueDil can stop security threats before they enter its network while still avoiding the risk of service lags.
Today, DueDil has five internal services that facilitate business due diligence, all exposed via Apigee. They also use Apigee’s monetization feature to drive API consumption. This said, because DueDil’s go-to-market strategy is fast-paced and client-oriented, they most often use Apigee to rapidly prototype APIs for their clients, so they can understand what a specific API would look like and how it would behave. This allows DueDil, its partners, and its customers to spend more time delivering value from insights rather than getting bogged down in building backend systems.
Moreover, Apigee made it simpler to also connect to other Google Cloud services, such as BigQuery, Google Data Studio, and Google Cloud Storage. Apigee acts as a central nervous system among systems, giving DueDil not only the ability to connect systems and automate processes but also insight and visibility into how its B.I.G. services are being used by partners and customers.
Plus, added Cicero, “the migration to Apigee was seamless, with arguably our biggest win being that no one knew that we had switched API management providers to Apigee.”
Leveraging APIs to provide self-service while enforcing security and governance policies
Moving forward, DueDil plans to leverage Apigee to give staff members and clients more privileges, visibility, and opportunity to create and edit apps in a self-service manner, without needing to rely on an IT department or endure long approvals processes. Harnessing APIs to open up B.I.G. and other capabilities to more teams across the company will also allow DueDil to move faster and include more people in the innovation process. Leveraging Apigee API management capabilities, DueDil also intends to dive deeper and experiment with other Google Cloud products and services, including Cloud Function, Cloud Pub/Sub, and more.
“At the end of the day, every company goes about due diligence a little differently. The only way that we at DueDil are able to provide something that is configurable and dynamic to diverse businesses is if we use platforms that can adapt, too,” said Cicero. “Apigee gives us the agility required to create and deliver for a wide variety of businesses.”
Google Cloud, today, works across banking, capitalmarkets, insurance, and payments worldwide to solve their most challenging problems. Click here to learn more about how Google Cloud Apigee API management can help you design, secure, analyze, and scale APIs anywhere with visibility and control. To try Apigee API management for free, click here.
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