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.

The success of the modern security operations center, despite the infusion of automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, remains heavily dependent on people. This is largely due to the vast amounts of data a security operations center must ingest—a product of an ever-expanding attack surface and the borderless enterprise brought on by the rapid rise of cloud adoption.

All those alerts coming in mean proactive and reactive human decision making remains critical.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the information security analyst now ranks as No. 1 News’ 100 Best Jobs Rankings, “determined by identifying careers with the largest projected number and percentage of openings through 2030, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Security, and specifically detection and response, is not only a business imperative—it is arguably the top worry on the minds of CEOs.

However, the security analyst is also one of the most likely professionals to want to leave their jobs, according to a newly released “Voice of the SOC Analyst” study conducted by Tines.

What gives? Turnover woes are attributable to several key SecOps challenges that never seem to budge.

1) Alert fatigue and false positives: Have you ever received so much spam or junk mail that you end up ignoring your new messages entirely, leading you to miss an important one? The same can happen for alerts. Too much noise is unsustainable and can lead to the real threats being missed, especially as perimeters expand and cloud adoption increases.

2) Disparate tools: Already in the company of too many point-detection tools, security operations professionals are saying hello to a few more in the era of remote work and increased cloud demands. The latest count is north of 75 security tools that need to be managed by the average enterprise.

3) Manual processes: Use case procedures that result in inconsistent, unrepeatable processes can bottleneck response times and frustrate SecOps teams. Not everything in the SOC needs to—or should be—automated, but much can be, which then frees up analysts and engineers to concentrate on higher-order tasks and be able to more easily train new employees.

4) Talent shortage: Death, taxes, and the cybersecurity skills shortage. As sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, so will the need for skilled individuals to wage the cybersecurity fight. But what happens when not enough talent is filling the seats? Teams must compensate to fill the gap.

5) Lack of visibility: Security operations metrics are critical for improving productivity and attracting executive buy-in and support, but SecOps success can be difficult to track, as reports can require a significant amount of work to pull together.

The caveat of course is that it would be rare to find a SecOps team working without the above challenges. As such, some of the immediate steps you can take to push back against these constraints focus on people-powered processes and technologies to remedy the issues.

According to a recent paper co-authored by Google Cloud and Deloitte:

Humans are—and will be—needed to both perform final triage on the most obtuse security signals (similar to conventional SOC Level 3+) and to conduct a form of threat hunting (i.e. looking for what didn’t trigger that alert).

Machines will be needed to deliver better data to humans, both in a more organized form (stories made of alerts) and in improved quality detections using rules and algorithms— all while covering more emerging IT environments.

Both humans and machines will need to work together on mixed manual and automated workflows.

So, what does this ultimately mean you must do to improve your security operations? Here are five practical suggestions:

Detect Threats More Efficiently

Efficiencies within the SOC can be realized from a SIEM solution that automatically detects threats in real-time and at scale. The right platform will support massive data ingestion and storage, relieve traditional cost and scaling limitations, and broaden the lens for anomaly and machine learning/AI-based detection. With data stored and analyzed in one place, security teams can investigate and detect threats more effectively.

Respond to Threats Automatically

SOAR can be a game-changer in terms of caseload reduction and faster (and smarter, especially when integrated with threat intelligence) response times. But before rushing headfirst into automation, you should consider your processes, review outcomes you are trying to achieve (such as reduced MTTD)–and then decide exactly what you want to automate (which can be a lot with SOAR). Once clear processes are determined where automation can contribute, SOC personnel are freed up to be more creative in their work.

Prioritize Logs

Many teams lack a strategy for collecting, analyzing and prioritizing logs, despite the fact that these sources of insight often hold the clues of an ongoing attack. To help, here are two cheat sheets featuring essential logs to monitor.

Outsource What You Can’t Do Yourself

Process improvements may help you compensate for perceived personnel shortages (for example, perhaps fixing a misconfigured monitoring tool will reduce alert noise). Of course, many organizations need additional human hands to help them perform tasks like round-the-clock monitoring and more specialized functions like threat hunting. Here is where a managed security services provider or managed detection provider can be helpful. Be realistic about your budget, however, as you may be able to introduce some solutions in-house.

Institute Career Models

Lack of management support is cited as the fourth-biggest obstacle to a fully functioning SOC model, according to the 2022 SANS Security Operations Center Survey. To overcome this, SecOps leaders must help improve workflow processes, protect innovation, keep teams absorbed in inspiring and impactful work versus mundane tasks, remain flexible with staff, and endorse training and career development. Because at the end of the day, the SOC is still distinctly human–and that is who will be the difference maker between success and failure.

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.